If writing things down is something that appeals to you as a way to process your inner experience alongside your therapy sessions, then the potential benefits are:
- Increased awareness of
- your inner landscape within the context of your daily life
- your own perceptions of how you are progressing
- particularly meaningful or valuable insights, thoughts and feelings.
- The act of writing can also develop a shift in perspective from being stuck in an experience towards being able to pull back and observe it. This is called building the observing ego.
- Writing can “anchor” you in your recollecting making it potentially easier to talk honestly about experiences without being so concerned about the reaction of others
- It can help to become aware of what it is that we are not sharing in therapy and to be curious about this
How to Start
First and foremost the writing down of your innermost thoughts and feelings needs to be safe. If there is any concern others might find and read what you have written, or that doing this could compromise your safety, then the advice would be too not do this. It is possible there may be alternative ways for self expression that we can discuss.
