5 Thing To Do Between Your Therapy Sessions
Therapy usually takes place once a week for 50 to 60 min. It can be an intense hour, but it’s still only 1 out of 168 hours that are in a week. Some people might find it difficult to cope between the sessions and may feel like they need an extra layer of support. Others might feel the need to do more inner work or self-development between the appointments. Then there are those who are satisfied with simply showing up to their sessions. None of these attitudes are wrong or right.
Whether you just want to show up to your sessions or feel the need to do some more inner work in between the appointments, what’s important to remember is that (whether you know it or not) therapy doesn’t happen only in your therapist’s office.
Your therapist is your facilitator, but you’re the one doing the work. You may spend an hour a week exploring some aspects of your life or developing new ways of perceiving past experiences, but when your session is over you begin to incorporate this new awareness into your everyday life.
One way to look at it is that therapy is a little bit like planting a seed. The time between your sessions (and everything that happens in that time) allows the seed to start growing roots.
If you feel drawn to doing a little bit of self-healing or self-development work between your appointments, below are some things you can try. Pick and choose practices that work for you.
5 things you can do between your therapy sessions to support your self-healing and self-development process
1. Journal
Journal about your learnings from your therapy sessions. Write down thoughts and feelings that come to you between or after appointments. Try stream of consciousness writing (a technique where you simply put pain to paper and write whatever words come to your mind; they don’t have to be logical or grammatically correct). Finally, if you’re stuck for ideas, use journaling prompts.
2. Practice new skills or new ways of looking at life
Whether you decide to keep a journal or not, it can be beneficial to reflect over what happened during your therapy session, and how you felt with that. Consider the lessons you learned, realisations that you had, feelings that moved through you, skills and techniques you might have picked up.
Reflect over how to incorporate the new skills and realisations into your life, whether it’s a matter of practicing a new grounding technique, trying out a different way of relating to other people or to yourself, or anything else you’d like to experiment with. Take your time, and move slowly.
3. Grounding techniques
If at any point between your therapy sessions you feel overwhelmed or triggered, take a moment to practice grounding techniques such as: feeling your body (eg.: body-scan meditation), breathing practice, naming objects you see around you). Your therapist might be able to teach you simple methods that you can try to support yourself during difficult moments.
Bonus tip: if you feel triggered quite often, consider incorporating short but daily, guided meditation practice into your routine.
4. Yoga classes
It is a well-researched fact that yoga supports our mental and emotional healing processes. If you’re familiar with yoga poses, it’s perfectly fine to roll out your mat and practice on your own. However, the beauty of a group or a private yoga session is that you’re being held and guided throughout the experience.
Yoga helps us work on the level of the body and energy while therapy is often (not always) focused more on mental and cognitive processes. The two can be complementary tools.
5. Self-compassion
Those who never tried therapy themselves often imagine that the therapeutic process is simply talking about your childhood or about what’s happening in your life. When you’re finished, you get up, leave the office and go back to your usual routine. Despite this common belief, therapy is not a cake walk! It takes work, and courage. Often it can feel worse before it feels better.
If things are getting hard, remember to be gentle with yourself:
- Let go of expectations that you should be somewhere else in your process or that you should be getting better.
- Get plenty of rest and allow yourself to feel super tired – therapy can leave us feeling exhausted.
Final words
Your healing and self-development journey does not happen only in your therapist’s office. There is a lot of healing and so much learning that takes place both in and out of a therapist’s office.