Notebook, or journal for therapy what's inside?

Yes, she wants me to keep journal on my feelings, I have a couple, one is for the weeks activities, stressors, and self care, the other journal is all about my past, which we have approach a bit of.

If I go to therapy after work I don't have time to go home. Could leave it n my car by I'm likely to forget it

Oh, I see. Do your desk/filing cabinet drawers lock?

I guess I don't use my journal to write about therapy. There are a few mentions of No. 3, No. 2, and the psychiatrist, usually irritated, but everything else is my personal/work life.

I keep a notebook and now on my 3rd one .. I take notes during therapy as my T is sharing thoughts, analogies. ways to process that are healthy , new ways to do things .. It helps me to remember my session and I love going back and looking over my "tool chest" and ways I've grown in therapy. I also make notes of books i've read that have helped . or ideas or thoughts in processing during the week. It super helps !!

with my first t, i journaled a LOT. obsessively.
then she dumped me. i refused to journal any more, because it reminded me of her.
i still dont journal.

Right now, they're all just in a box. I like the idea of re-reading them and keeping some kind of master journal or something. I don't re-read my journals now, so I'm not sure why I keep them...except that I just don't know what else to do with them. If I dispose of them, my shredder is going to be kept very busy!

i have all my old journals. i dont know why i keep them. they are all super depressing and most of them are filled with teen angst and chronicles of drug use and eating disorder stuff. i should get rid of them

I had reached a point where I realized I wouldn't want anyone else reading my old journals (yikes!) and that rereading was not beneficial to me either, so the master journal works for me. There is nothing in there that I would feel too anxious about someone reading down the road. I don't think I put my old ones to the shredder -- just tore them up a bit and trashed them. A bonfire might have worked.

I am kind of undecided about journaling.

So yeah, I write a LOT and it's one of the primary ways I process stuff and deal with my emotions (to the extent I do, anyways!).

While in therapy with former T, I'd write a serious ton -- it was basically a whole lot of insights, connections, memories, questions etc that came up while in therapy. I'd go in to each session (with former T) then and talk about all this stuff that came up through the process of writing. As former T (with more than her usual level of irritation) later put it, my sessions then were always "very full" and I "clearly processed a lot" outside of session.

Here's the thing though -- had I not done the writing (which was basically emotional processing), I'd have had little to say in session and the absolute, painful lack of connection between us would've come to the fore a long, long time ago. I think then that I *knew* that to keep therapy going with her (I didn't think I had the energy to switch Ts until recently and I knew I needed to be in therapy), this sort of processing on my end was necessary.

So, towards the end (last few weeks), as things really deteriorated with her, I quit journaling because every session seemed to be a series of overt or subtle hostile confrontations between us -- I just couldn't be vulnerable about the rest of my life any more (everything became about the relationship or the lack of it between us).

With current (new) T, it's been interesting -- unlike all the other Ts I've seen, I can't seem / don't want to talk about the cognitive / insights stuff (which is all the stuff from my writing). For whatever the reason -- and, I have a vague idea that it's likely coz she's really into the whole attunement thing and works on that a lot (definitely unlike former T but also a lot different from other Ts I interviewed) -- I've just gone into some intense emotional states and so, talking about the stuff that's come up through writing etc (of which I still have a ton to work through) seems impossible / pointless.

I figure at some point, when the emotionally intense stuff dies down and I feel like I'm stuck, I could always turn back to the stuff I can get through writing etc.

So, that's a long answer to say that yes, writing / journaling etc while super helpful has seemed to be a bit of a mixed bag for me.

Btw, I'm absolutely terrible at keeping track of the stuff I've written (I write on loose leaf paper and with a pencil) and so, if it doesn't float away into the ether or something, I occasionally re-read it and wonder who in the world wrote that!

I write a synopsis of what happened in therapy. Mostly, though, I use my journal to write about the things I can't yet say in therapy. I frequently ask myself questions, too. Unless your T gave you guidelines for your journal, write, draw, do whatever makes your journal personal for you.