Those of you who have read and/or contributed to the therapy diary, how has it impacted your own therapy experience and your feelings about it, positively or negatively?

Reading and contributing to the therapy diary has definitely had a positive impact on my therapy experience. First, along with all the other Quora material I’ve read, it has served to educate me as a client as to what the therapy process is actually supposed to be like. I realized that the therapeutic relationship is fair game to talk about and so is every feeling I’ve ever felt, even the embarrassing ones. The most immediate impact I noticed was that I felt I was able to use my sessions more efficiently and get more work done during that time.

The therapy diary has been a wonderful place for me to give and receive support. I really enjoy helping others and posting encouraging comments when they share their therapy experiences. It’s meant the world to me to have my input so well received. The support I have received has been invaluable. I remember a few weeks when my sessions were especially rough. It was amazing to know that when I posted about how rough they were on the diary, I would receive so much empathy and support. Sometimes people would even point out that rough or not, lots of good work was accomplished and that would help me to notice and celebrate the positive.

It’s also been educational in a different sense. Because I make an effort to read every single entry that means I’m reading about a lot of therapy sessions. My mind is naturally analytical and tends to aggregate all that “data” and make me aware of the patterns. I’ve noticed that a lot of us struggle with very similar challenging feelings. For example, pretty much all of us really hate it when our therapists go on vacation. Many of us struggle with pretty hard core fears of abandonment and rejection, and a number of us struggle with an overdeveloped sense of independence, like thinking it’s somehow weak to ask for help or depend on others, just to list a few. Seeing these patterns has helped me tremendously with overcoming my sense of isolation, like I’m the only crazy person who feels this way. Now I know that I’m not alone in any of the challenging feelings I’ve felt. I can’t think of a single feeling I’ve had that I didn’t read about at least several others also experiencing. So, pretty much every feeling in my brain has been normalized. And once normalized, that means I can talk about it and process through it in therapy. So in the past few months I’ve talked about thoughts and feelings that six months ago I would have been far too embarrassed to have even mentioned. Now I just bring it up and my therapist and I talk about it. Sometimes our conversations seem very intellectual, more like geeking out. But other times we’ll really explore how I’m feeling about it all in the moment and I’ll even let myself feel those challenging feelings right there in front of him. I figure after all, he’s probably worked with those feelings before.

Another way in which I’ve been educated is that I’ve been exposed to all kinds of different therapists and modalities and approaches through reading everyone’s experiences. This part has been a bit of a double edged sword for me. It’s made me really appreciate and respect my therapist even more because when stacked up with lots of other therapists I read about, he seems to rise to the top. He’s very, very good. He’s also just about a perfect fit for me. So I’ve realized just how fortunate I am to be able to work with him. The downside is that sometimes I feel a little bad that I have it so good, especially when I read about someone who is really struggling with their therapeutic relationship and it’s clear the therapist has made some mistakes, or maybe many mistakes. That tends to trigger lots of challenging feelings for me. I feel angry and maybe overreact to what turns out to simply be a different method. I can at times express myself in more judgmental terms, so I have to watch for that. This isn’t a contest. I think also, some of my own issues from my tragic backstory get triggered, like trust issues, expecting people to lie to me, things like that. It can be challenging to me when I find out that wow, somebody’s former therapist actually did lie to them, etc. So I just have to watch for those inner movements and notice what’s happening to me, and remind myself that my role here is to be supportive and encouraging and not a referee or anything like that.

One thing that I’ve also noticed is that with us all being able to speak openly about our therapy experiences and get feedback from others, it seems that we are all making more rapid progress. This is making me realize that while our sessions are of course always just between us and our therapists, our healing journeys are more of a community affair. We are all helping each other. I’ve seen people talk about things on the therapy diary that just months ago they would have felt too much shame to admit like that. Lots of dark secrets have been brought into the light that way, and the result has been that those dark secrets are no longer so powerful. I’ve witnessed people having incredible breakthroughs, like huge mental shifts and transformations. Whenever that happens it honestly makes my day and I wish we could all get together physically and have a celebration, and just really all honor the one who had the breakthrough. Perhaps we’ll figure out a way to do that on Zoom.

At this point I think the therapy diary is one of the best things to have happened on Quora. It’s been such a blessing to me.