Have you tried to get your therapy notes?

Did you fail or succeed?

If you failed, what was the reason?

If you succeeded, did it take a lot of convincing? How did that play out? Were you ultimately hurt or helped by reading your notes?

Bonus question:
What type of therapist did you see credentials wise?

My T gave me the notes I asked for when I asked for them. In the UK he has a legal obligation to do so. I only asked for a particular session, and it was very helpful and interesting to read. They were a lot more detailed than I expected and included some of his own hypotheses and thoughts.
My T has been a therapist for 40 years.

i requested my notes from my T after ending six years of therapy with him. he had no issues giving them to me and he even offered to meet with me after i had reviewed them so we could discuss any concerns or issues i may have had.

i found it helpful to read his notes. many of the session notes were quite detailed and some where short and simple. while i was in therapy, i kept my own detailed notes of my sessions in my personal journals and i referred to them often to compare to his notes. there were occasions where he had completely misanalysed me or issues i was trying to communicate to him or his interpretations of what was going on were way out and incorrect, but there were times he was spot on and seemed very attuned to me. i found some of his misinterpretations of me a bit hurtful or even sometimes comical because they were so far off from the truth. but reading these misinterpretations in his notes completely validated an overall 'gut' feeling i had often been struggling with when i was in therapy and confirmed my belief that he did not truly understand or 'see' me for who i was.

we met casually, on two separate occasions, after i completed reviewing his notes and we openly discussed them. personally, i found it incredibly beneficial to do so. it provided us both an opportunity to discuss and revisit some aspects of those six years. i also found it quite healing post therapy, not only to have the chance to share my feelings about some of his misinterpretations, especially about feeling not being 'seen' and understood by him, but i also received an apology from him. in the time since finishing therapy and after our conversations, he has come to recognise and acknowledge some of the unhelpful and hurtful mistakes he made along the way. he sincerely apologised for those errors and i was deeply touched by his gesture.

I asked him and he emailed including his clinical log which was a spreadsheet with the dates I'd seen him, if I'd skipped and short one sentences. It was interesting to see what stood out for him.

I don't have copies for everything, though as I've been seeing him for 2 years and 3 months at the moment, most of that at twice a week so that's a lot of sessions.

I think I might ask again.

I asked to see my notes spontaneously during a session and my T opened up the file on the computer and I read them until I didn't want to read them anymore, maybe 10 minutes. Maybe it was helpful in the sense that I realized I was not so clever at avoiding things, he just never let on to me that he knew I was avoiding, except it was in his notes. The other thing that maybe helped me was realizing that he was very good at describing the content of my therapy without providing any details of my life experience or precisely detailing the issues.

My T has a PhD.

I’ve never asked to see his notes (I honestly don’t even know that he has any), but if/when we end I will ask for them at that time. He is legally obligated to provide them within 30 days.

I have a feeling that if I asked to see them now it would do far more harm than good.

In the US they have to give them to you. I have found though that good T’s keep crappy files as a way of protecting your confidentiality should they ever be court ordered to provide a copy to someone. I never found them to be of much use.

I can't read my T handwriting. I'm pretty sure she writes her notes in Sanskrit. You'd laugh if you saw them.

I was never interested in reading them, and definitely not it actually acquiring them. My T is a PhD. I've seen my notes because there were a few times over the years he actually handed them to me when we were trying to remember something we had talked about previously.

He wasn't one to put much detail in them, so they were basically a rather objective, brief set of phrases stating what we discussed (in broad terms). No detail. No deep, dark insights or even much opinion actually. Nothing I didn't already know.

Never asked. Well I did ask her what she wrote about a particular session (the one where she said I was 'possessed' - whatever, t) and it was so dry and barely anything. I just know she must keep secret notes that are just for her own use, those are the ones I would want to see but that she denies existence of. I just don't see how anyone could remember as much as she does without writing it down. Although she does have copies of many many of of my dreams...

My T recently read me her notes outloud during a session because I was feeling paranoid by her taking notes. I found them dry, just a recounting of the session. Funnily enough the next session she didn't take any notes. Maybe because we weren't getting anywhere that session. When I asked my former T about what she was writing, she wouldn't tell me directly. She just said, in general my notes say x, y, z. I never asked for copies. HUGS Kit

It couldn't hurt to ask.

My therapist photocopies the relevant portions for me.

This thread inspired me to try and get my notes from my former T. I stopped seeing him a few years ago. I called my current T and she gave me support to do this and suggested a way to do it because she is familiar with my former T. So I sent him a detailed text and told him to give me a call. We shall see.....I hope my records were not destroyed. My current T said the former one used to purge records after 7 years. But it hasnt been 7 years, more like 3.

I haven't asked. I did demand to know what she was writing last session, but that was because I was being paranoid that maybe she had detected my evasion of a question she had just asked. She told me she was writing the date. It was a bit anti-climactic.

In the US HIPAA makes an exception for therapy notes. They have to give you process notes (when your sessions are, progress notes and so on), but it's up to them whether to give you the notes they make for themselves during sessions.

My T doesn't take notes or keep a file on me. I'm very happy with his record keeping style.

I have never seen him write any notes. Do have have to keep notes? I would think they would want to write something to review prior to your next session to refresh their memory. They can't remember everything at everyones session.

My T never takes notes during session, but remembers everything. When I first started going I thought I’d be desperate to see the case notes. But now I just don’t feel like whichever version I’d be shown would be all that interesting.

Although now that I’m thinking of it, maybe. My T has never used any kind of clinical language with me — not even for psychoeducation purposes. I dissociate in session quite a bit but T had never labeled it dissociation. Things like that. I wonder if the notes would contain more clinical language.

Now I’m tempted ...

my T would write his notes after my session. he usually had 15 mins between clients to give him time to do that.

I haven't - my current counsellor doesn't take any, as far as I am aware. I would be interested in my previous counsellor's impression of things, as she said:

'You have an interesting turn of phrase, and it's important to get everything down.'

I wonder whether that was more important than listening to what I was actually saying, but I digress. She is not one of my favourite people, but if not for her, it's highly unlikely I would have come into contact with R.

I glanced at my T’s notes on me yesterday. He has a little chart in his file with the date of the session and then there are three blank bullet points. Not enough room for a complete sentence, just enough to jot an idea. Last session was the only session on this sheet and he only used the first bullet point and it was 4-5 words. His handwriting is a bit tough to read and I am not concerned about what he is writing so I didn’t stare.

I tried to get the notes of my first T more than a year after terminating and he just deflected and pretty much refused but failed to tell me directly. I stopped pursuing it as it just made me frustrated unnecessarily. I do suspect that he is not on top of note keeping though as being incompetent with even simple administrative things such as preparing properly done invoices for insurance submission and keeping track of appointment cancellations were recurring issues with him in the past.

I do think that for some disorganized people that refusing or delaying providing requested notes may be because they are in poor shape or missing or both. When I requested to see mine, my T opened the computer file and let me look at them for as long as they wanted. They were current, concise, and decidedly not interesting to me. But he is always on time, always reliable, so I'm not surprised his notes were consistent with his other professional skills (which should be the norm for Ts as well as all professions, but sadly are not). Over the years, my work has been made more difficult by the disorganization of files as kept by other attorneys. I've received some client files that look like a kid who's just shoved papers into the bottom of his backpack for years, then thrown them into a box and mailed them to me.

Just wondering, is a T supposed to takes notes after each and every session? What is the expectation / requirement?

I don't think there is a requirement with perhaps the exception of clients who file with insurance. I would hope if your therapist is under contract with insurance providers and/or you are filing with insurance, that there is some paperwork involved since diagnostic codes, billing codes, etc. must be verifiable.