Personal therapy for therapists: how to keep notes between sessions when your training gets in the way

At the start: a contract with yourself

Before you note a single session, one page with two answers to the same question: why I am here - the official version (training hours, knowing the other side) and the real one. Both can be true at once. Plus one sentence: how I will know this therapy is working. Without that sentence, six months later there is no way to tell whether something shifted or just passed.

Separately, a page about safety: what I need from my therapist to speak openly; what makes it hard to say things directly. This page is there to show your therapist if you choose to, or to read on your own in the week you want to cancel.

Between sessions: how it felt

The week between sessions is where most of the therapy happens and the part that is usually in no notes at all. Four fields are enough: what was good, what was hard, which feelings keep coming back, what I want to bring to the next session. Plus free space for a drawing or a few unstructured words. Not to bring the therapist a report, but so a week does not vanish from memory between two hours.

Before the session: five minutes in the waiting room

A short page filled in just before: what I notice in my body right now, what I am bringing (from the week's notes), what I feel like skipping, whether I will say it today - yes, no, we'll see. Plus the topic I keep putting off, and a counter: how many times is this now. That counter is the most uncomfortable field in the whole journal, which is why it works.

Two scales, tension and energy, 0 to 10, marked with a line. Not to compute anything, but so that after twenty sessions you can see that you arrive at 8 and leave at 4 - or the other way round.

After the session: before the professional knowledge comes back

The most important page and the shortest window for it: on the way home, before the brain switches back to clinician mode. What stayed with me. One sentence from the session I want to remember. What I did not say today. What my inner supervisor wanted to say - this is the parking lot for every technical remark ("I would have done that differently", "that interpretation came too early") that would otherwise take up the whole session. Did a thread come back - if so, add it to the map. And separately, clearly set apart: what this session teaches me about my own practice. That field exists so the professional lesson has its place and does not eat the rest.

The thread map

One page for the whole therapy: topics that keep coming back, and next to each the numbers of the sessions where they appeared. After ten sessions it shows things no single note can: the thread that returns every third session and never gets finished; the thread that has gone quiet; the thread you should really start with. The map is also the best material for a conversation about whether the therapy is going where it was meant to.

Every six sessions: a review and the body

Once every six sessions, two pages. The first is body and emotions: the feeling that keeps coming back, what it looks like from the outside, what I actually need when it comes, plus a body map on a neutral figure and four boxes - colour, shape, temperature, weight - to describe it without words. The second is a review: what has shifted, what is not moving, what I am still not talking about, what I want to renegotiate with my therapist (goals, frequency, approach, something else) and how I want to say it.

Tools for hard weeks, and the hours log

At the back, three things worth having to hand: a glossary of easily confused feelings (for someone who names feelings for others professionally, their own can be the hardest), a short protocol for moments when nothing can be named, and ready sentences for when therapy stalls ("for a few sessions now I have had the impression that..."). For trainees, an hours log of personal therapy, because at the end of the year someone will ask for it.

A notebook or a ready-made journal

All of these pages can be drawn in a plain notebook. A ready-made journal saves the decision "what do I write today" in the week when there is no energy for it. "The Other Side of the Couch" by Wren Marlow (Parkova) has exactly this layout: a contract with yourself and a safety page, a thread map, 24 sessions with four pages each (between sessions, before, after), body and emotions plus a review every six sessions, and at the back the glossary, the protocol, the ready sentences and the hours log. 144 pages, 6 x 9 in, undated, in a Classic edition and a Color edition with painted page edges; a Polish edition is on Amazon.pl. The journal does not replace supervision or therapy; it is there to help you use them.