How to use a Therapy Journal + Journal Template

When I began my journey through my own therapy almost two decades ago, I journaled ferociously. Over the following years, I filled journals cover to cover as I processed, reflected, and deeply changed.

Years later, in school to be a therapist, I learned that this long season of journaling was a healthy coping skill that helped me through my season of change. 📚✨

Research shows us that everyone can benefit from processing thoughts and emotions with handwriting. Realistically, though, long-form journaling isn’t for everyone. This is why I took my clinical training, my own experience as a journaler, and a little artistic razzle-dazzle to create a fun, engaging, and approachable guided journal!

My guided journal breaks journaling therapy down into bite-size chunks that will help you reflect on sessions, practice the new brain connections created through good therapy, and organize your thoughts so you can get the most out of therapy.

What is the Therapy Journal?

It’s a therapy journal that reduces the tedious labor of long hand journal down to fun, bite-site, fill-in-the-blank pages stuffed with thoughtful and relevant guided prompts. It helps you remember sessions and make notes for next time, as well as track your long-term progress.

But Lindsay, I Hate Journaling!

This journal was specifically designed for you! I made this resource to help everyone get access to the benefits of journaling about therapy – even if they hate journaling.

Think of the Therapy Journal more like an activity book. You’ll find no blank pages in this book. Instead, I’ve loaded it with:

• ✍️ fill-in-the-blank pages,
• 🗺️ body maps and partial-illustrations to complete,
• 📏 bite-sized spaces to journal with specific prompts, and
• ✔️ checkboxes, scales, and other ways to express and record without getting bogged down by a blank page.

Who I Made This Therapy Journal For

I created this therapy journal for people of all ages who want to get the most out of therapy.

Sometimes, just showing up and getting through therapy is all the energy we can muster. And that’s ok. Therapy journaling isn’t right for everyone in every season.

But sometimes, we may find that external factors or simply getting a taste of some recovery gets us really motivated to make the most out of each session. That’s when a bit of journaling between sessions can supercharge our work.

This therapy journal is for:

• 💭 People who often have racing thoughts after a therapy session, and struggle to organize and settle those thoughts.
• 🗃️ People who struggle to remember important things they want to bring up from session to session.
• ⏳ Anyone able and willing to put in a little extra time to get a little boost in the benefits of therapy.

This resource was developed for adults, however, it may be helpful for teens as young as 13 (8th grade in the USA). The school-counseling friendly mini journals sold below are tween-appropriate.

How the Therapy Journal Came to Be

For years, one of the most popular downloads on LindsayBraman.com was a single-page therapy journal template that invited users to answer a few simple questions about each therapy session.

As that resource aged (and showed its age, as my style evolved!), it felt like it was time to revisit and update the resource. Following a particularly difficult therapy session of my own, I camped at a table in my favorite Saint Louis tea shop and- in one sitting- drafted the first version of the now-206 page therapy journal available today!

Why Journal Therapy? (aka, supporting research)

One of the ways that therapy works to improve mental health is via the new connections it creates in our brains. Therapy can take a while to work.¹ It isn’t easy to create new thought and emotion patterns when defaulting to old, well-practiced neural pathways is so easy. Journaling after therapy helps therapy be more effective by increasing self-awareness and by re-tracing the new patterns being created in therapy and strengthening those connections in our brains. Handwriting can be particularly effective because it engages more areas of our brain in the learning process.² Psychologist Sheldon Bach wrote “when no human is available, (a journal) can stand as a silent witness (to) thoughts and emotions, which might otherwise feel overwhelming.”³

Journaling after therapy helps therapy be more effective by increasing self-awareness, by tracing the new patterns being created in therapy, and through strengthening those connections in our brains.

A 2022 study that evaluated the outcome of dozens of previous studies found that journaling had a positive effect on mental health outcomes, on average reducing anxiety symptoms by 9% and PTSD symptoms by 6%.⁴

Therapy journaling is also really helpful for organizing thoughts! You may be able to use your appointments more effectively by bringing your journal in and referring to it as needed.

Tips to Make Your Journaling Count

1. ✍️ Handwrite if you can. Handwriting helps reinforce the new connections in our brain that are created by good therapy.⁵²
2. ⏰ Don’t make yourself play catch up. It’s easy to feel shame about missing a few entries and let that shame discourage us from future journaling, especially for folks who struggle with maladaptive perfectionism.⁶ Get around this by giving yourself permission to skip, and permission to not try and “catch up” when you start journaling again.

How to Use My Therapy Journal:

1. After a therapy session, take time to reflect and make notes using the guided prompts. It might be helpful to do this right after a therapy appointment while your memory is fresh, later that evening, or even the next morning after you’ve had some time to process. Try not to delay more than 24 hours.
2. Fill out the session’s pages in the journal. Five basic pages repeat in sets, with unique weekly prompts between them (each journal contains enough room to journal 64 sessions).
3. When you see a repeat page, stop, rest, and reflect until the next session.
4. Before your next appointment, check-in with yourself and review your last entry. Consider how you want to use the information in your next appointment.
5. Reflect on whether you are comfortable sharing your journal entry, and if so, have a conversation with your therapist about how you might use it in your sessions.
6. Journaling through this guided journal should help you develop your own intuitive sense of what is and isn’t helpful to write down after therapy. When you’ve completed your first journal, you can replace it with a new one or adapt the most helpful prompts to a practice of journaling on blank pages.

TIP: Stuck? Check out sample completed pages in the index.

Example of A Therapy Journaling Reflective Worksheet

Should You Share Your Therapy Journal with Your Therapist?

You and your therapist can decide if sharing your journal entries is helpful for your work together or not.

By simply taking the time to write – and through that, increasing our awareness of ourselves and our experience- journaling can help make our therapy more effective,⁴ even if we never share our completed journaling worksheets or entries with anyone.

For Professionals: Therapy Homework Made Easy

For therapists and counselors who assign homework, finding the right resources to share can be a challenge. The line between working overtime to source appropriate materials or defaulting to tired materials can be difficult to navigate. That’s why, as I developed this resource for clients, I also created a modified version that therapists can print and use as therapy homework.

Print-and-Fold Therapy Homework Edition

Inspired by the zines created and traded by artists and activists, two folds turn this one-sided worksheet into a small, approachable booklet of therapy homework. Bundled into a set of 4 and offered as a digital download, this packet can help offer some between-session containment for clients and introduce the practice of journaling about therapy. (NEW: A slightly modified version of this digital download is available specifically for school counselors and other practitioners working with tweens and teens).

Buy these therapy homework printables below or, as always, get access for professional use of all my printable resources as a $5/mo patron.

What’s Inside:

Like all my resources, my therapy journal focuses on content that’s

• research-based.
• easy to engage.
• not overly clinical or pathologizing.

Some Prompts You’ll Find in the Therapy Journal:

SESSION TOPIC: This could be ambiguous. Leave it blank or just enter the topic that sticks out most to you.

THREE IMPORTANT THINGS: This is an intentionally open prompt with lots of space to meander through thoughts. The three things could be concepts, feelings, therapy milestones like opening up about something new, etc.

FEELINGS / SENSATIONS: Most people experience a lot of emotion in therapy, and these emotions are important to notice. Some people may not be able to describe those feelings until they have had time to reflect on their counseling sessions. Equally important is noticing physical sensations: Did a headache begin during counseling? Did you notice tightness in your body or a sense of release in your body at any point?

THINGS TO MENTION NEXT TIME: It is not unusual to realize exactly what we want to bring up next time right at the end (or just after!) a therapy session. But often, if we don’t make notes, we forget by the time our next session arrives! If something feels pressing to talk about, list it so you won’t forget.

The Bottom Line

Journaling can be a helpful tool to enhance the benefits of therapy, offering a structured way to process thoughts and emotions. Whether you love journaling or have always found it challenging, I designed this resource to make the practice of journaling therapy as accessible and effective as possible.

Content on this site is for educational purposes and does not replace mental health treatment. See site Terms of Use for more information.

1. Lambert, M. J., Hansen, N. B., & Finch, A. E. (2001). Patient-focused research: Using patient outcome data to enhance treatment effects. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 69(2), 159–172. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.69.2.159 [↩]
2. Zivan, M., Vaknin, S., Peleg, N., Ackerman, R., & Horowitz-Kraus, T. (2023). Higher theta-beta ratio during screen-based vs. printed paper is related to lower attention in children: An EEG study. Plos one, 18(5), e0283863 [↩] [↩]
3. Bach, S. (1994). The Language of Perversion and the Language of Love. United Kingdom: J. Aronson. [↩]
4. Sohal M, Singh P, Dhillon BS, Gill HS. Efficacy of journaling in the management of mental illness: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Fam Med Community Health. 2022 Mar;10(1):e001154. doi: 10.1136/fmch-2021-001154. PMID: 35304431; PMCID: PMC8935176. [↩] [↩]
5. Bendix, A. (2024) Writing by hand may increase brain connectivity more than typing, NBCNews.com. (Accessed: 27 March 2024). [↩]
6. Gutierrez, D., Horton, C., & Murray, C. (2020). The Effect of Shame and Guilt on Students Writing Habits. UC Riverside Undergraduate Research Journal, 14(1). [↩]