I especially encourage students to take personalized notes while they read useful psychology books. A journal is an excellent place to figure out how to improve yourself and your life. Daily diaries can serve you in many other ways, most of these ways are quite conscious but by thinking and writing in a diary we gain new ideas and a different perspective. Certainly intimate diaries provide fascinating insight-laden reading weeks, months, and years later. Journals can involve in-depth probing, as you will soon see.
Therapists frequently take a careful social history, like a biography, before undertaking therapy.
Books, such as John Bradshaw's Family Secrets , can guide your exploration for two or three generations back. It is amazing how often our problems are rooted in the problems and traumas of our parents' and grandparents' childhood. We can only know ourselves by knowing our family history. Writing an autobiography, incorporating your family history, greatly increases your awareness of the events underlying today's events and feelings. It can be fascinating and healing.