Schedule a Therapy Session with Yourself

You can try this even if you’ve never been to therapy…

I typically give this tip to clients when they move from weekly appointments* to less frequent appointments:

Keep your therapy appointment time but schedule your session with yourself.

Prior to the alloted time, ask yourself…

“If I was going to therapy today, what topic would I want to discuss?”

If you have more than 1 topic, what’s your order of priority? Pick 1 or at most 2 things.

How would you describe your problem to your therapist?

Write down some notes for yourself in an exercise book or other notebook.

Write the kind of notes you’d write to take to therapy so you’d remember what you wanted to say, and some examples of the problem.

What would your therapist be likely to say to you?

Consider the basics first.

Examples.

1. How is your self care currently? Are you getting enough rest? Are you taking personal time for yourself?

2. Are there any other ways of looking at the situation other than the way you’re mainly looking at it now?

3. If your mood is low or your anxiety is high, are you overlooking any of the things that might’ve triggered this? e.g.
- avoidant coping
- you experienced something during the week that brought up a difficult memory
- physical factors – a cold, your period, disrupted sleep, skipping exercise, the after effects of drug or alcohol use

Look back over your notes and homework from therapy and see if there is a skill you practiced during your time in therapy that you could use now? For example, you could try a dysfunctional thought record.

Set yourself some therapy homework. Pick one small manageable thing you can do that is likely to help your problem (it does not need to completely fix your problem).

* Quite a few clients never have weekly therapy sessions, they start with fortnightly or monthly appointments, usually due to cost.