Sharing your journal in therapy

June 9, 2015 5:59 AM

About a month ago, I started therapy (for anxiety, possible depression, and relationship issues), and so far I've been frustrated with my inability to express myself to my therapist. Would it be OK to have her read my journal?

I'm finding I'm not good at talk therapy. I get nervous, I spend inordinate amounts of time trying to remember details, and I'm usually not in whatever headspace I'm trying to describe, so either I struggle to force myself back into it during the session or I describe it poorly. It's just nerve-wracking and inefficient. But, I have kept a journal for the past four years. And while the self-important angsty teenager tone is cringey, I have expressed my feelings better in there than I have ever been able to in speech. I'm thinking about editing out all the sexually explicit parts and one instance of bad poetry, cutting for length favoring recency, and just giving my laptop to my therapist to read from during session. I'm sure it won't 'look' like therapy considering that we wouldn't be talking (aside from questions), but I feel like she could potentially understand me better after four or five sessions half-spent on the journal than she could in a year of pure conversational format.

So... would this be OK? I've never heard of anyone doing this. I Googled, and only found a poll-style message thread in which someone said you should read parts of it aloud to your therapist instead (which frankly sounds awful). And then there were a bunch of respondents saying their journal was too personal and they'd be too embarrassed. I'm sure I'd be embarrassed, but I don't see the point of therapy if I can't express deeply personal things, and so far my mouth just won't do it right.

posted by anonymous to Human Relations (11 answers total)

My therapist was happy to hear stuff from my journal, so yes! I spent most of my therapy time choking out stuff through tears, and I think it was sometimes easier to read what I thought from paper than to talk it through off the cuff.

S/he might rather you read it to her/him though.
posted by RedEmma at 6:07 AM on June 9, 2015

Sure. Although I would also submit, as a therapist, that part of the value of therapy is figuring out and working through how to express yourself as you would like to do. That can take time, and there is no reason at all not to share parts of your journal as well.
posted by OmieWise at 6:53 AM on June 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yep. This is not a novel idea. I think a common form of it is for the client to write something specifically for therapy. You should definitely discuss it with your therapist.
posted by zennie at 7:00 AM on June 9, 2015

I am therapist. This is perfectly acceptable, I have clients bring me journals, notebooks, poetry, e/mails, texts, and misc. writings all the time. Some folks just find it easier to communicate in that manner. I also have worksheets designed for clients to take notes and process through events, thoughts, etc.

Also, I do agree with OmieWise that your difficulty in expressing yourself could be on the list of items to address in therapy...

Good luck...
posted by HuronBob at 7:10 AM on June 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

I do this all the time, even to the extent of actually writing stuff out, outside an actual journal, that I would find it hard to say to my therapist. I then just hand it to him and let him read it and we talk about it. Just another data point.
posted by holborne at 7:15 AM on June 9, 2015

in which someone said you should read parts of it aloud to your therapist instead (which frankly sounds awful)

I have done this - I knew when I wrote it I would be doing this - and it wasn't awful. It was sort of like giving a presentation with notes. So I might look through my week and say, "Oh, yeah, here on Tuesday I was in a meeting with my boss and she said something that really upset me, and I wrote 'I'm so angry that I couldn't stand up for myself' and I'm still angry about that. At the time I felt X and now I think Y and [blah blah]." It made for excellent jumping-off points, but it was always meant to be only that.

You should absolutely talk to your therapist about how to make use of that work.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:16 AM on June 9, 2015

I did this with a therapist once. Personally, I didn't find it that much more helpful than the talking portions of our meetings, but he definitely seemed to treat it is a "normal" therapy thing and it wasn't any more awkward than any other part of therapy. (Honestly, I did not click with this particular therapist, but I do not think the journal part had anything to do with that!)
posted by rainbowbrite at 7:22 AM on June 9, 2015

I do it all the time, especially if I write something that expresses my thoughts particularly well.
posted by Sophie1 at 7:32 AM on June 9, 2015

When clients have done this with me, I'm grateful that they have come up with creative ways to tell me about the struggles they are having.

I *do* ask people to read from the journal or, if that's too hard, I'll read it aloud. The intent about this reading aloud part is that therapy isn't only about the contents of your life - it's not "just the facts." It's also about the ongoing process of the conversation. How does it feel to have had an experience? How does it feel to talk about it? It's about developing skills and flexibility in the face of difficult struggles.

One way you can do this is to go to your next appointment and start by saying "I don't know if you realize this, but I've been struggling with how to explain myself in therapy. I thought about it and realized I express myself really well in my journal, so I brought it in and I'd like to share some of it with you. Are you OK with that?"
posted by jasper411 at 8:23 AM on June 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

My opinion as someone who has been in therapy for a while and has seen some benefit from it is that it is a very free-form genre of personal interaction and really takes off when you realize that you can do in it and make of it whatever you like, within the basic premise of two people sitting and talking. I have done various kinds of show-and-tell in sessions -- and that's maybe a good way to approach bringing a journal. Not that the journal will speak for you, but that: here's something -- some writing -- meaningful to me, or that I feel says something well and I have brought it to show you so we can talk about it; so we can have it as a topic of discussion.

However, I wonder why you want to censor and expurgate the journal before showing it. If there is something too personal in the journal to share with your therapist, maybe you don't really want to be bringing the journal --as such -- into therapy and should instead devote some energy towards trying to translate what is in there you do want to share into a separate therapeutic communication or statement. For example, I went through a period where I more or less composed speeches ahead of time that I then recited in session. Which was pretty helpful actually. You might, in such a spirit, use the material from the journal for a prepared speech., or for 'talking points'.
posted by bertran at 1:28 PM on June 9, 2015

I drew (I use the term loosely) comic strip type pictures of the traumatic experience I went to therapy about. Some of them had captions.

Going through the pictures with my therapist was super helpful to me. I kind of told her what the pictures were and she asked me gentle questions. It was much easier to talk about things with the pictures, for some reason.

I've never drawn cartoons or whatever before or since.
posted by mgrrl at 3:12 PM on June 10, 2015