I have shared journal entries and other writing with my therapist, who has a nice soothing voice so I ask him to read it aloud in session. That way I have a sense that he has absorbed it and I also have another experience of what it may sound like to another person. I've also used visual material to convey not just mood states, but specific events.

Since you said that some of what you have shared is about trauma that you are approaching but haven't yet jumped into, I wanted to say that in my opinion that might be a good way to test the ground, your own feelings and the solidity of the relationship. Plus just feeling a sense of acceptance that it is okay to go forward. Seems not only a nice thing to have, but healthy and careful and wise.

Trauma is so tricky. I thought that I had gone through and processed things that after I changed shrinks I found out that there was another way to do it and that there were different aspects that I hadn't touched on.

In my process, I was pretty far along with the current shrink when an unexpected flooding experience happened. I felt that I had to make a choice and chose to head directly into it so there was a deliberate quality to it.

What I did was related to what you are talking about. We had in a session counted off all my years on the planet and he asked me to note what came up each time. At the end I had a huge number. We temporarily put them safely away, but I decided I just wanted to get through them. I thought I would just sit down and write them all out and go through them each session. That is not how it turned out.

Instead, I started with 3 that were in the same time frame and the same type of trauma. I wrote out the intro, but stopped when the events started. I brought them in, he read one aloud, I began where he left off, narrated the rest, with full details, sometimes taking more than a session or two.

At the end of this experience, although we had covered only 3 out of something like 30, the flooding stopped. I felt at peace. I was able to shift toward some health oriented issues. And to this day it is still not common for me to become triggered. It is like the in depth work on trauma carried over to the others and so it didn't seem like it would be needed to go over anything else.

I still have some anxiety and hyperarousal left from long term PTSD, but I no longer have intrusive memories or dreams. And don't get easily triggered even when faced directly with reminders. I go get upset at times, but not exactly symptomatic.

I attribute this to using the writing to get us literally on the same page so that we could launch into this difficult terrain knowing things in advance.

Good luck