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 own inner landscape within the context of your daily life
- Increased awareness of your own perceptions of how you are progressing
- Potentially meaningful or valuable insights, thoughts and feelings.
- The act of writing can also develop a shift in perspective from being “stuck” within an experience not able to see the wood from the trees, towards being more detached from events and so better able to observe. This bird’s eye view can be useful when considering alterative response options.
- Writing can “anchor” you in the validity of your own recollecting, making it potentially easier to later talk honestly about experiences without being so concerned about the opinion of others
- It can help to become aware of what it is that we are not sharing in therapy. Then we might 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.
