Writing Between Sessions: Journaling Can Support the Work Your Body Is Doing

Between sessions, there is a particular kind of quiet. The conversation we had last Tuesday is still moving through you. Something you said, or something you almost said, is still with your body. Another week has to pass before we meet again, and you are not sure what to do with what is here.

A lot of people, at some point in therapy, reach for writing. A notebook. A document. A voice memo they will later transcribe. Words on a page can hold the overflow of what a session opened. They can also be a quiet companion to the work when there is no session that week, when something arrives at 11pm on a Sunday, when you want to remember the thread before next Tuesday. I am a Vancouver-based therapist working online across Canada, and this post is for clients who are already writing or considering it, and for people curious about what journaling can do alongside therapy.

Writing as part of the work

Writing is already a bodily act

We talk about writing as a cerebral thing, but it is also physical. Your body holds a pen or types on a keyboard. Your shoulders are doing something. Your breath is doing something. There is a quality of light in the room you are writing in. The somatic writer and trauma practitioner Laura Khoudari makes this case directly in her essay on embodied journaling: writing is not only what the mind produces, it is what the whole person is doing when the mind is producing.

That matters for therapy. A lot of what the work is about, especially the relational and somatic work I practise, is noticing what the body knows before the words arrive. If the only part of you that shows up to the page is the thinking part, the writing will drift toward analysis. It can get tidy. It can get a little false. Not because you are being dishonest, but because the part of you that filters for what other people might think has been given the whole desk.

Writing from a body that stays with itself tends to produce something different. It produces sentences that surprise you. It produces half-thoughts you would not have landed on if you had been writing from the neck up. It produces information that is actually useful to bring back into the next session, because it is closer to the source.

How to start, without a method

Most posts about journaling give you a technique list. I am going to do less of that, because in my experience the technique is not what matters. What matters is whether you are actually in contact with yourself while you write.

A few things that tend to help.

• Before you write, let your body settle. A few breaths where your exhale is longer than your inhale. Feet on the ground. A minute is plenty.
• Start with what is present in the body right now, not with what you think you should be writing about. My chest is tight. My jaw is tired. I can feel the weight of my shoulders. Those sentences can lead somewhere.
• Let it be rough. Spelling, grammar, sentence shape, none of it matters. The writing is not the product. The noticing is.
• If you find yourself performing for an audience, even an imagined one, pause. Come back to your body. Start again when you have permission to be unwitnessed.
• If you start to feel flooded, slow down or stop. Khoudari names this clearly too. Staying connected to your body while writing means you can notice the moment the material is getting too big, before it tips over. A few sentences stopped in the right place are worth more than a page of overwhelm.

None of this is a prescription. It is an orientation.

What can happen after a hard session

Sessions often bring things up that keep moving for the next few days. Writing can be one way to stay with what got stirred without needing to resolve it.

What I sometimes suggest to clients who want to write after a session: put a few sentences down about what landed, not what we talked about. The part where we slowed down on the body scan is still with me. I noticed something I am not ready to name yet. There is something about my mother that I am carrying differently than I was this morning. That kind of writing does not try to tie the session into a conclusion. It simply marks where you are, so that the thread is findable when we meet again.

For clients who are doing parts work, writing can also be a way to hear from parts that were present in session but did not get much time. A part can finish a sentence on the page that it did not get to finish out loud. That is often useful.

What it can look like when nothing in particular is happening

Therapy has active weeks and quieter ones. Writing works in both.

On quieter weeks, the writing is often noticing. A short entry at the end of the day. Here is what my body felt like at 2pm. Here is what the commute home was like. Here is a small thing that made me feel more myself today. Over weeks, this kind of writing builds a record of your regulated baseline, which becomes a reference point during harder stretches. You can look back and remember that you were once steady, which your nervous system sometimes forgets.

For clients who are in longer-arc work, a journaling practice can also track slow changes that happen below the surface of any single session. Something you struggled with in April reads as less charged in August, and neither of us would have noticed if you had not written it down in April.

A few cautions

Writing is not always the right tool in the moment. Some conditions where I suggest pausing or changing the approach:

• You have been writing for an hour and you are more activated than when you started. Your nervous system is telling you this is not integration, it is rumination. Close the notebook.
• You are writing a story you have already told yourself many times. Sometimes this is useful. Sometimes it is a loop. If it is a loop, the writing is less useful than a conversation or a walk.
• You are writing toward producing insight rather than staying with what is. This is a common slip. Gently redirect to the body if you notice it.
• You are writing about someone else more than yourself. There is a place for this. It is also worth asking whether the writing has drifted away from you.

Writing is a tool, not a requirement. If it does not serve you, or if it serves you for a while and then stops, both are fine. Some clients I work with have never journaled. Some have done it for years. Some write in bursts during particular chapters of their lives. None of those patterns are better than the others.

What I offer

In the kind of somatic therapy online I practise, writing often comes up as a between-session companion. Sometimes we work directly with something a client has written, reading a passage together and slowing down where the body tightens or softens on a particular line. Sometimes a client brings a voice memo they made at 11pm and we listen to a few minutes of it in session. Sometimes we never look at what they have written, and it lives as their own private record, which is also useful.

There is no expectation either way. The work happens in the room we share. Writing, when it helps, is one of the ways you keep the thread alive between those rooms.