What do you do to augment your therapy?

Things that have helped me:
Talking to friends - I have 1 who knows EVERYTHING and 2 who know a step below
Staying busy with work, home, husband
Writing in my journal, writing therapy notes
Massage once a month when I know there might be a longer break or a difficult subject
Walking/running
Trying to open up to my H about therapy

Things that haven't helped:
Listening to music - it makes the tears flow. My T. would disagree and say it IS helping
Reading - Like someone else said, I think I got too much into how therapy works and not feeling the emotions. So, I pretty much stopped except for on here and random articles
Talking to friends. Ironically this is in both categories. I worry that I talk too much to them and then things are diffused when I see T. Good for making it between sessions but not good for getting deep with T.

Live in the moment. Focus on my kids and doing fun things with them. I don't do things to focus on the pain or the past. I don't write about it or read self help books anymore. I love photography and reading. I have pets and play with them. I just really try, like I said, to live in the here and now.

I've been using an app to track my moods. I think it is helping in that I am being more aware of how I'm feeling. It asks me every 3 hours how I'm feeling. You can adjust the frequency. Anyway, here's one of the charts that it makes. As you can see, I'm quite the roller-coaster. If you click on it you can see the whole thing. The lowest line is the most depressed while the top is ecstatic.

What is the name of the app?

Sorry.

Moodimodo...

Revisiting this thread because I thought of something else that may not be a commonly known tactic.

DONE lists. These are not the same as a "to do" list. A DONE list is a small list of what you've accomplished in a day. It doesn't have to be anything monumental. It can be anything from "Bought groceries" to "finished that book..." or even "Finished a chapter in that book."

This is a good habit for me because of my extreme self-efficacy issues. I have bad habit of feeling 'unaccomplished' in life. I came across an article about the "art of the done list". When we focus to much on "to dos" we often ignore our actual accomplishments that may or may not have been on that list. A to do list tells us what we want to accomplish, but it gives us no credit for what we DO get done, despite other difficulties. A DONE list is our own pat-on-the back. It makes us recognize that we did get a lot more done that we thought.

One big pro tip was to write down ANY and ALL work accomplished on a task- even if you didn't finish the task itself.

For example, a "To do" list might read,

- Get groceries
- Clean house
- Talk to Mom about that thing.
(etc.)


At the end of the day, let's say you don't get everything done. instead of bemoaning what didn't get checked off, write down what you DID get done.

-A "Done" list reads,

- Got groceries.
- Ran into a friend at the store, had coffee and caught up.
- picked up the front room.
- made lunch
-called Mom and left a messsage.
-went to appt.
-did dishes
- took a bath.
*etc.)

Half of those items were not on my 'to do' but they're still accomplishments. They also might help me understand why I didn't get something done and why that's okay (I didn't clean the house because I spent time with a friend. I didn't talk to Mom, but I did leave message, etc.)

The end feeling is much better and it makes me take notice of things instead of disparaging myself.