How to use the ABCs Connection journal

"Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

The ABCs journal is a tool you can use when your desire is for a connected new relationship or a relationship makeover. It's your chisel as you approach your block of marble or ice to sculpt, day after day, until you like what you see or your die trying. It's a sculpting tool for a new construction or renovation, not a demolition.

If you are using the ABCs Connection Journal to help you work through your fight or flight reactions, you might want to focus on one attitude at a time and consider what thoughts, words, and actions or activities might flow from that attitude. This abecedarian (alphabetically arranged) journal is designed with attitudes and activities on facing pages for each letter of the alphabet with blank facing pages in between with a few lines in the center. You can get an idea of what this looks like from the example pages at the bottom of the anticipated, new, old, broken, bruised, and grateful relationship challenges pages.

You can explore each letter page and consider each attitude in order, or you can flip through the pages and focus on an attitude that resonates with you. The flexible structure allows for you to be as systematic or spontaneous as you want. There are 12 attitude and activity pages and 12 blank pages each featuring the letter "I" as examples. Two of each type are illustrated uniquely for anticipated, new, old, broken, bruised, and grateful relationship challenges and can be found at the bottom of those pages.

The blank spaces between each letter page invite you to be thoughtfully creative in the way you choose as a springboard for research and growth in anticipated and new relationships, and when changes are needed in old, broken, bruised, and grateful relationships. As a dynamic process, you are continually training your feelings, thoughts, prayers, words, and actions in and about your relationships.

You can:

• write
• draw
• paint
• paste and collage photos, stickers, news clippings . . .

It can also be:

• an art journal keepsake
• an art therapy journal
• a diary
• a fathering journal
• a gratitude journal
• a memoir template
• a mothering journal
• a scrapbook
• a blank, personalized or fully completed gift for any day, including anniversaries, baby showers, birthdays, graduations, weddings, Father's Day, Mother's Day, Valentine’s Day . . .

Designed to last a lifetime, the hardcover book is easy to open and keep open without concern for wear and tear. It is a hard-covered, semi-concealed, metal wire spiral bound book, and the paper is acid-free, making it both durable for daily use and well-preserved through the years.