Sharing photographs with your therapist

Have you brought in photos of any kind to show your therapist? Were they from childhood or some other period in your life? What kind of response did you get? What kind of response did you want?

I voted no. But my therapist has showed me his photos from photoshoot. Lol. I was glad to see them, but it was a little bit weird.
"Hi capt, how are you? Would you like to see ~100 photos of me?"

It was 2 years ago, but I can forget one of the photos, it was super nice. I would like to get a copy, but I never told him of course

My T has actually asked me to do this. I haven't done it yet. I don't have a whole lot of current pictures, and I'm not sure my T would care about seeing my childhood pictures. She said she likes seeing pictures to connect people to faces.

Maybe I will bring them on Friday...

I brought in my wedding pictures to show my T. She liked seeing my different family members. She thought it was interesting that my sister and I are biological sisters, but look very different. One day I'm going to show her childhood pictures of my sister and I so she can see how similar we looked when we the same age.

I really don't have any other reason to show my T pictures.

When I was working through trauma with my former T, I brought in childhood family photos. It wasn't about him wanting to put faces to names, but about the emotions the photos evoked in me. They were a narrative tool. An unexpected benefit was the deepened bond created between us and how the photos provided a means to subtly shift the dynamic between us to one of more active caring. In a way, it was as though it allowed him to be present in the life of that child, as well as in the life of me as an adult.

I've sent her a few photos. She sends me one during every break. We both appreciate photography and its a safe way for me to connect.
I don't send her photos often. Maybe 2 in a yr. She always, recieves anything I share with her as a gift and says "thank you for this"

Yes but only of my dogs.... it was part of how we worked through my grief of losing one of them.

I have taken in photos. It has been really helpful. Different parts of us have shown pictures of themselves. How did t react? She got a bit emotional to see pictures of me and my siblings with our childhood rapists.

No. I can’t imagine any therapist being interested in my pictures. Why would they be?
For instance, for two and a half years I talked to my ex therapist about some of my friends, about my parents, about my ex. Not once did she ask me about their names.
So the idea of bringing pictures completely baffles me.
Personally I don’t like being shown pictures by random people I don’t care about, such as mothers who insist on showing me the picture of their newborn.
So I’m forced to care about something that I don’t actually care about.

My answer was ‘no.’

I’m not clear why anyone would want or need to share photographs?

Yes quite a few. We look thru them and he asks questions... Mainly about how I feel looking at them now. I showed them to t because I wanted him to see me as a little girl. Because sometimes I still feel like that

I can't vote in the poll as I use tapatalk and not a computer, but the answer is yes. I've showed he childhood photos to show the change in mood. Around the age of 3 or 4, I went from happy go lucky to somber or sullen, and it shows in photos. Showed her thru my phone from photos that I scanned in.

Yeah, I do it all the time. It's really no big deal.

I just show her important life events and stuff. For example, she asked about my new apartment recently and I showed her some pictures. Then we talked about how I felt about moving out for the first time. Then she gave me some suggestions for therapuetic stuff I can put in my apartment.

I've shared many, many photographs with my T. I wanted her to see what my children looked like, and especially liked to show her cute pictures of my grandchildren. I've seen T for 8 years so she's seen the kids growing up.

T has been a photographer so I also share scenic photos I have taken. This all started when I got my smartphone and realized I loved taking photos and sharing many of them with her.

I also showed my T old family photos of when I was a baby and child, as well as photos of my mother when she had me make a collage about her.

I did bring a few old fashioned (paper) photos from my childhood and earlier life once, including a few about my parents alone and a magazine article about my dad that had pictures. It was my idea and ended up one of my best sessions, also unusual in a sense that I was sitting next to T's chair on the floor while showing and discussing them. I never felt inclined to do anything similar again though. Once I emailed a few pics about my dad's funeral.

I did not have expectations for response really other than expecting to reflect on what the pictures showed and discuss impressions. That's exactly what we did. It wasn't anything too deep. I also selected some of the photos to show T my weight issue that caused a lot of bullying in my childhood - before and after losing a lot of weight around age 10. That was related to my only real childhood trauma (the bullying) and the eating disorder following it, so quite relevant to therapy. My T commented how he thought I wasn't obese at all before the weight loss, more just generally premature-looking - also quite tall for my age and he said I seemed quite developed and older than an average 10 yo, including a seductive kind of look in the photo that is not usually a characteristic of girls of that age. Later on I was wondering why I picked two photos that showed me in a swim suit before/after the weight loss, if I had some kind of unconscious motive to show him my body... maybe, we never talked about it and no idea if he thought about the same or not.

I think that looking at photographs is probably a good thing in therapy if the client feels interested and comfortable - it is a bit more than just formulating stories in thought and speech and can provide direct topics to discuss. I think it's also easy to control how light or deep such a discussion would be.

I think showing photographs of yourself as a child is a very intimate experience with a T. I did it with my first T, and probably most of the photos did show me in a swimsuit, because I spent most of my childhood in year round competitive swimming and that's mostly how my mother documented my childhood. I was very much in the depths of some hard CSA work and it was interesting to see myself at the ages where certain things happened.

Many years later and a 15 break from therapy, and with my new T I've had similar kinds of experiences (maybe 3 or 4) like the photos, except with a few sand trays and once with some kind of psychology game (I can't remember the name) that kids play where you spin something and then you pull a card and you describe something you've experienced or a feeling or the like. The sand trays were always fun (he featured as a minor figure in them, sometimes with his head buried in the sand, a safe kind of passive aggressive action on my part). The game was fun and it was a chance to reveal some things about my past that I would have never talked about (like the naked hippy house I lived in during college)-- because of the lack of relevancy to anything, not out of shame. I felt with everything, including the photos, that it felt like I was offering up a part of myself T hadn't experienced, and in return I felt better seen and understood. I think it brought me closer to myself, and more self empathy for the child I was.

I teach art and my work brings me a lot of joy, so I'm in the habit of sharing a few of my favorite student artworks with my T each week. He seems to respond positively.

I shared two photos yesterday. We had been discussing an incident that happened when I was 10 recently, so I decided to look through my photo album for a picture of me at that age. I also found a photo of myself at my high school graduation which was about 3 months before I met my abusive husband. I had a moment with that photo trying to imagine what I would tell the 17 year old me. So I took both of those photos in. His response to the 10 year old photo surprised me. He said it made him feel sad. He knows I was kind of lonely as a kid and in the photo I was hugging a life-sized doll and he said I was hugging it like I would a best friend. It was a lovely moment.

For a while I would set up for session with a picture of my (departed) best friend on the table next to my tissues...but I no longer have the photo in session with me, as I think it's easier for me to talk without it.

I just did this the first time last week. Mine were from my childhood, ages 1-4. I brought them in to show her that i had SO much evidence in pictures that i was a happy kid, so even though i don’t remember my childhood, it clearly was good.

She was THRILLED i brought in photos. I told her on Monday how I was looking through them in the past week, and we were talking about my mom being 17 when she got pregnant, that I don’t think itv makes such a huge difference than if she was 27. I have a picture of me at that age, holding my baby cousin, and I am so content with this sweet baby in my arms. I have always lovvveedddd babies, and being the second oldest cousin in a large family, I got my fair share of baby holding growing up.

woops, tangent. it was actually much harder showing them to her than i had anticipated. i have looked at all of my family photos about one million times over my lifetime, but when i got to a picture of my mom and dad holding me when i was baby made me inexplicably sad. it really threw me.

Sometimes when I’m talking about certain people I want to rip out my phone to show her a picture of them but I never have. Sometimes I’ll think of funny pictures I found on Instagram or pictures of my dogs that I want to show her but then I think that it would probably be a waste of our time together

I've thought about showing my childhood photos in therapy (the couple that exist of me) but I can't bring myself to -- I have a great deal of shame (general crap) around what my family said about my appearance as a child.

I rationally know my therapist will be fine (she sees me now, after all) but I fear that even the slightest mis-step on her part in how she responds to the photos will devastate me and I don't think I'll be able to do the usual thing and talk about it -- so, I'd rather wait until all of it feels a lot less charged.

Yes, I brought childhood photos to art t and I used them in a trauma related art project.

I showed my T a pic of my two kids once to show him my newborn baby and he spent far too much time looking at the picture for my liking. I mean I didn't think he would be that interested but just wanted to show him for point of reference really. I expected him to make some general polite comment about the picture and then hand it back. He held it and looked at it for what seemed like forever but was possibly 3-5 minutes. Whilst I appreciated the gesture (caring about the picture) It felt almost forced as if he was trying to show how much he was interested. I mean the picture wasn't THAT interesting like he was staring at it as if he was trying to memorize it.. I haven't shown another one since.

One day I brought in some pictures of different times or people in my life, not too many, and he seemed to enjoy them. I like looking at people's pictures unless there's a million of them and they're all on a phone. "Here's my daughter when she was two and here she is in 2nd grade'. works well.