Making the Most Out of Therapy: In-Between Session Time

You’ve found a good fit with a therapist, their approach and what you want to work on. Well done on taking those steps and investing in your relationship with yourself. What can you do to consolidate between therapy sessions?

A weekly session is the typical container most of us are working with in therapy. It can feel both like plenty of time and nowhere near enough. Therapy doesn’t just happen in those weekly installments. It also happens in the six days and twenty-three hours in between, in the moment where you catch yourself mid-pattern, or in the conversation and emotions you avoid, or in the breath you take before responding rather than reacting.

It’s important to think about and set intentions around how you want to put therapy learning into practice during the rest of the week when you aren’t meeting. Since therapy is often a once a week (or less) dose; it’s up to you to attune and attend to how you want to show both in your sessions and outside of them in your daily life.

The session can often be where an insight or an intention gets named. The in-between time is where it gets practiced. This article focuses on some ideas around how to use that interstitial space well, whether you're doing individual work or showing up for therapy as a couple.

Let the Session Echo, Don't Just End

Part of what makes therapy so useful is having that regularly scheduled container to ‘file’ topics and situations that arise in daily life. We often overestimate our memory during the flow of our weeks. By the time we get to session certain useful ideas or questions we’ve wrestled with over the week have dissipated away.

It's tempting to walk out of a session and immediately fill the silence, perhaps checking your phone right away and jumping into the next task. While this is understandable, it also skips a valuable opportunity to integrate growth and change into your life from therapy. Give yourself five minutes after a session to sit with what came up. What’s resonating for you? Celebrate spending time on your growth and notice how you grew and what you learned. Try asking yourself what felt true, and what felt unfinished and might need more attention.

Jotting down a few lines down right after a session while it's still fresh can be extremely helpful to make therapy more coherent over time. Note a phrase or a resource the therapist shared that landed with you, or a feeling that surfaced that you’d like to spend more time with, a question that’s still ‘up’ for you. You don't need a formal journaling practice for this, a note in your phone works fine. The goal isn't to analyze it further, just to let it land before life rushes back in.

Notice the Moments That Echo the Work

Challenging moments during your week are where much solid integration can happen. If you're working on emotion regulation in therapy for example, the in-between therapy time is full of small tests: the email that makes your chest tighten, the urge to snap at someone you love, the moment you want to numb out instead of feel something uncomfortable. These aren't interruptions to your therapy. They are your therapy outside the therapy room.

You don't have to handle these moments perfectly. The aim isn't flawless execution of a skill you talked about in your last session, it's about noticing and tagging them (“oh, this is the pattern we've been looking at”). That noticing, even after the fact, is the muscle that gets stronger with use so we can notice sooner to the actual moment it’s arising and respond more intentionally.

Let Curiosity Replace Judgment

Maybe the most useful in-between practice is simply staying curious about yourself rather than critical. When you notice an old pattern resurface, the goal isn't to berate yourself for not having "fixed" it yet. Patterns that took years to form don't dissolve in a few sessions. Self-compassion in these moments can help create the safety needed for change to take root.

You can also ‘take a poll’ and check in with like-minded and curious friends who also ponder some of the questions that you are engaged with. How do they handle certain challenging emotions, or interpersonal frictions that are hard to navigate? Or consider checking in with them (if you trust their view points and they’ve known you a long time) about feedback for you on your therapy goals and questions.

Celebrations

Celebrate your wins. These are the moments (big or small) in your days where you are more intentional and consciously aware of your desired changes. BJ Fogg has a lovely TED talk around how habit shifting is much easier and faster when we use celebration to anchor moments of new and helpful behaviour. When we practice intentions and homework from therapy in our daily lives, we can deepen and extend that impact by letting ourselves feel proud about it. Celebrating in this context usually means evoking and savoring warm, proud ‘shining’ kinds of feelings, and marking those wins in our own way (perhaps by high fiving with someone close by, doing a little victory dance or letting loose with a spirit-raising “whoop!" or “I did it, yes!”).

Bring It Back to the Room

All of this in-between noticing and practicing helps give you and your therapist more to work with. The richest sessions aren't usually built from vague starting places, but from specific moments you bring in related to your therapy goals. By bringing in these thoughtful and relevant moments, they serve as the valuable material that turns a weekly therapy session into a thriving life with the momentum of change.

Therapy is not meant to be contained to the room. The session plants some seeds; the in-between time is where it gets seeded into our lives and can grow.

If you're curious about starting therapy, individually or with a partner, reach out. I'd be glad to talk it through with you.