Your Experiences

I know I have been talking a lot about this, but it is pretty all-consuming for me right now.

I gave my T my journal at my last appointment, and she has been slowly reading it, sending me texts with thoughts and observations. It's been a little bit calming to hear her responses in "real time" as she responds because I know when I show up next week what she thinks already without having to fear.

My question to you: Have you ever given your T some journal writings or other writings that you didn't expect to ever show him/her (or anyone) ever? How did it go? What happened? Did it help your therapy? What did your T think?

Well, not a journal or anything - but I totally hear ya on the 'real time' responses when I email a slice of my history or other difficult stuff. It definitely bolsters comfort to be able to go into the session having a sense of what they think about the things you have told them. I was mulling that over yesterday.

Yes, actually. I write, so, I've given her hundreds of pages of content at this point, but much of it was intended directly for her. It was still nerve-wracking sharing it, even just waiting a day to hear back sometimes.

But recently, about a month ago, I gave her something no one's ever seen before, that I hadn't even looked at myself really in about twenty years: a few direct excerpts my teenage journals. They date from the most intense period of my adolescence/early adulthood when I was still entrenched in therapy, dealing with the fallout of disclosing abuse and processing all the traumatic memories and sexual issues that came with them.

This is raw, awkward, incredibly painful stuff. It caught me unawares when I first decided to open it back up. Dissociation and extreme distress followed. For a while, I'd tell her I'd read them, but not what. Then I'd allude to very general issues, such as bad dreams I'd had then and such. Finally, just about 30 days ago, in a fit of courage or desperation or idiocy, I typed up, verbatim (oh how I hated that!!!) three entries from my journals, so she could see, first hand, how terrible they were. Shocking, disturbing, very earnest writings of my experiences at 15-17.

I had to back away from the material after that. Pushing to share them was incredibly taxing and upsetting and I really needed some time to recover afterward, so we've backed away from that material for a bit. I've come to peace with it a bit better since then. Mainly now, I'm needing my present day life to stabilize a bit, and then I want to cover that material again, it's just w/so much on my plate right now, I don't have extra energy or equanamity to process it all.

I actually like your idea of handing it over for reassuring comments though. My T tried to reassure me but she kind of made incorrect inferences, not awful but off-target a bit, so I think some basic reassurance along the "oh my I felt so sorry for you reading that" would be pretty nice.

If I wanted her to see something, I would write it for her. Most of my diaries are private.

Not a journal, but with t1 the only way I communicated 75 percent of the time was through letters. I would write them, and leave them with the receptionist weekly.

It was nerve wrecking, I was hoping she hadn't read it,

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i have given my T many of my journals. he says he feels sad for me, he says there is so much pain expressed in them, so much suffering. journaling was a big part of our therapy at first because i found it hard to say things to him. it was easier to write it in a journal and just hand it to him. most of the time i didnt like it when he read it in front of me. idk why but i felt very exposed. but when he did that i can also see his reactions. sometimes he makes little noises and i wonder what hes reading then that made him do that.

i dont journal that much anymore, but i do email him journal-like things sometimes. i text him pretty much every day and just check in. sometimes i email him things that i am too scared to talk about in person. so i say, T, i dont want to talk about this yet. i guess i feel like there are things he needs to know but they are too scary to talk about then. so i just let him know these things and then avoid talking about it, lol. he doesnt push me to talk about anything that is traumatic. he waits for me to bring it up on my own

I could barely speak when I started with current t...it was never more than a whisper and mostly nodding or shaking my head. I brought in my sketch books and journals and we went though them in session. It was incredibly painful and I felt exposed and vulnerable. Looking back at it, it was what I needed to do until I found my voice. I can speak about trauma now...it is definitely difficult and I feel very ashamed, but I also have been able to tell him things I never told anyone. It has taken years for me to get to this point...if I hadn't shared my journals/sketchbooks, I think I would have quit therapy early on. He couldn't help me if he didn't know exactly what I was struggling with. He has seen the best and worst of me and his thoughts about who I am or what I have done have never changed...

this is just how it worked for me.....

wanted to add...my journals and sketchbooks were the containers for my darkest secrets...

This won't apply to your situation but...

Yes, I used to write a lot. I would give the writings or letters to the different T's I was seeing at the time. That stopped during the malpractice case when AbusiveT used them against me out of context and copy/pasted with pages missing during the lawsuit. All his lawyers read them. My lawyers read them.

I will never do that again.

Now, if I have something for present T, I write on my iPad and take it with me to therapy. I read it to her or have her read it. We don't email, she doesn't have any writings from me.

If I didn't have an iPad, I would write things down but they would leave the session with me.

Just recently did this with my T. It wasn't a full journal, just a few pages, though. I was in a very difficult place, emotionally, all through July and August. I started writing down just brief daily observations of mood, thoughts, self care stuff in August. It wasn't more than a short paragraph each day. I had intended to show T at each week's session, but I couldn't do it at the time. I was too paranoid and anxious and too scared of making myself that vulnerable. After the med change and my mood leveling out, I felt like it was something I wanted to show with my T. I felt like maybe it would help her understand what I was going through and help her to help me spot when my mood started spiraling toward an extreme.

I was really terrified of her reading what I'd written, because I had some very personal stuff in there that I wouldn't normally share. In one section, I'd written about sui feelings, and how I reached out to T, but then told her I was fine and I really, really wasn't.

T read it, and we spent some time last session on it. After giving it to her, I really didn't feel the need to dissect it. I asked her what she thought, and if it was helpful. T gave me her observations, which were that she felt such compassion for me reading it, and that while none of it was exactly a surprise, the depth of my experience was striking. She said it helped her to understand my experience a bit more. And, she also said that she found it impressive that I was able to function as well as I did while experiencing all that.

At that point, I just didn't want to talk about it more and I didn't even know what to say, so we moved on to another topic.

I think what might be helpful is to ask yourself what you want to get out of having T read your journal, and then when you go to your next session, maybe start with that. It helped me to narrow the conversation by determining that I mostly just wanted to share what I'd written.

With my first T she wanted me to journal every day about what is going on that day. She wanted me to just write with no editing or proof reading. I was suppose to write whatever came out. She said some days would be boring others not so much and she wanted both. Every week I would give her the journal from the previous week and she would give me back the one she had. So I always had 2 journals going. It was very nerve racking for me but therapeutic. With current T, she doesn't do that however, I am welcome to email her anytime. She will email me back.

my T and i did the journal swapping thing. he bought me 2 journals and we would swap them out. he said his T did that with him before. i filled both of them up. but i still have them

Thank you all for your experiences. Those are really helpful!

What do I want to get out of it? I don't really know
I guess I want her to see all the things I've written down. It's a trauma journal, so it has my memories and traumatic experiences in it. I guess I want to know that she knows about all that junk and that I am no longer the only person on earth who knows. And it will give her a window into how I think and experience the world. It's terrifying, but I want to be more open and trusting with her, so I want to share this type of thing.

That's a good start. It was a similar impetus that made me share my writing with my T. Next questions - and ones I wish I'd asked myself and had some idea of an answer to - How do you want T to respond to what you've written? And how do you want to address it in session?

Having even a vague idea of how you want to answer those two will, I think, help guide you in session a bit. I didn't ask those of myself and found myself stumbling over my thoughts and trying to figure out what I really needed to talk about. For me, in the end, all I really needed was to know that T had read what I'd written, and get her feedback. I know that if I want to discuss anything in greater detail, it will be easier now that she's read what I wrote, but there is no obligation to do so.

I guess I want her to tell me that things will be okay, that she doesn't think I'm awful or disgusting, that she is still on my side and still safe for me. I want to be able to talk about the things I wrote down eventually, but I don't think I'm ready for that yet. And I want to know that I am not alone, that she will be with me as I walk through all that junk, and that I can tell her anything and don't have to be afraid.

I don't have anything helpful to post, but I did want to thank you for posing these questions. I'm going through a similar thing in showing my T and my art journal right now. I don't let her to hang on to it, but there's a lot fo the same anxieties around even just showing her all of it.

I always write to t but t never writes back unless it's urgent. Sometimes he brings up my writings in session sometimes he doesn't. I think it's unrealistic of me to expect him to respond every time. He also never shared his thoughts. They're kind of out of the picture.

I gave my T two art journals I'd done in previous years. After giving them to her, I felt like "omg, what have I done?" The week in between was torturous and I felt very vulnerable but also like it was the right thing to do.
We discussed the journals over a couple of weeks, and the journal we discussed last was the more honest of the two, I just let rip on those pages and poured out my pain and self-loathing. When we discussed that one I hadn't been prepared for how difficult is was to re-witness these page WITH someone. I was seeing them with fresh eyes. And it was horrible and intense. Before when I'd flipped thru the pages I felt nothing about them, but making sense with them slowly, page by page with my Therapist, well.. she asked questions, took time with every single page, and I felt how powerful the pages were. I didn't even get thru the whole journal, after the 6th page I couldn't take anymore of it and we took a break from it. Some days after that I disclosed some stuff to her and I just couldn't face going back to the journal, so they've stayed with her but we've never returned to them.

I gave her a letter that I had written to the dean of my college to get me back into school. It was an honest account of what went wrong in the 90's for me.

She said she read it but we really didn't talk about it beyond that.

I know for a fact my T will want to discuss it, and probably in a lot of detail like you're describing. It's long, so it will take her several weeks to read.

T scans my blog.....not really the same as personally writings but some posts have a mental health side.

HazelGirl, you and I seem to be in a similar boat right now. I have a deep need to hear the same things you do.

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

Archipelago, interesting.

I don't get triggered often, but when I do, it's really bad. The worst of my trauma is emotional abuse and neglect, and so certain phrases, words, or attitudes towards me are very triggering. Also, if I feel rejected or criticized by someone, it might cause me to spiral into an emotional flashback. I have some mild physical triggers, but it isn't often that someone swings at another person's face or something like that, so they're not a big problem.

My biggest problems are the hopelessness, hyperarousal, paranoia, and extremely low self-worth all caused by the PTSD. Those are the big things we're working on, and my T often likes tracing my current mindset back to my past, so I am hoping the journal with all those stories will help her do that a little better. She is very careful about asking me directly to tell her stories because I can sometimes have panic attacks and paranoia that last for days afterwards and we still haven't worked out a way to bring me down from that state successfully. I have a million coping mechanisms, but the only thing that really seems to work is medication once I hit that highly triggered state.

We are different of course, but I think I understand. First of all I do get that medications are particularly helpful at times when your best efforts just don't seem to work out the way you had hoped. I've been doing meditation and other things for a long time, but when I am overwhelmed, these things do not always work. I still use anti-anxiety medication. I don't believe that people should suffer if there is a medicine designed to relieve the pain.

I also relate to the issues of emotional abuse and neglect. I had a lot of that very early on. Though I have focused more on event-based trauma when doing what people would call "trauma work," my entire relationship with my shrink is really addressing the profound emotional and neglectful abuse that occurred almost at birth. And though this may sound like a downer, actually it is healing in the end. I found that the more I explored these "non-event specific" traumatic experiences, the more deeply I saw their long term effects on me and the course of my life. It is very difficult work; there should be another category of PTSD that accounts for this kind of problem and not the traditional life-threatening event type of trauma. It is so impactful yet so hard to deal with since there are often only certain things that point to what was an ongoing pattern.

So you are brave to take on this work. I believe that writing helps in many ways. I believe in its power for oneself to release and organize experience. I believe that it is a way to convey experiences to others. And finally it becomes a shared experience that is in some way different from the face to face interaction. Some things can be said in writing that are not readily available with talking. I believe therapists are sensitive to language, word choice, and sentence structure, both in speech which they have to catch on the fly, and also with written language, which they can stop and ponder. You are helping her help you. That helps her. And it shows you want to help you as well. All are great things. Feel proud that you are taking very strong and brave steps toward something that is naturally aversive.

Yeah, it's the non event-specific events that I think more profoundly shape our sense of self and our self-worth. I do agree that there should be a separate PTSD sub-category for that, or at least a different anxiety disorder that covers it. The traditional PTSD understanding doesn't at all. It seems that most trauma T's understand this, even though it doesn't fit into the traditional understanding of the DSM.