I am now five and a half weeks into a six and a half week therapy break; at the very start, when I was feeling unusually determined and enthusiastic about putting some ‘strategies’ in place (!), I decided to keep a Twitter diary of the break and tweet at least once a day using the hashtag #therapybreak. There are 46 days in this therapy break (including the day of my last session in July and the first session in September), and when I got to Day 22 I used Storify to create a record of the tweets from the first half of the break. The Story can be found here:

https://storify.com/lifeinabind/therapy-break-day-1-to-day-22

I hadn’t set out to tweet in this way during a therapy break before, and I found it helpful; for one thing, it meant I had to think a little on some days, to decide what to pick out for my daily tweet. This focused my mind on moments I was grateful for; on aspects which had been positive in an otherwise less positive day; and it helped me to think further about the difficult times, and to try and resolve to turn things around. The support I received in response to tweets when things were going less well was very encouraging and also made a difference – thank you so much to those who responded!

When I started the daily tweets it was also in the hope that I might find the result encouraging to look back on, particularly leading up to future breaks. I hope that will be the case; and more immediately, the tweets will certainly help me to ‘scrapbook’ my therapy break. Though there is so much I need to talk to my therapist about once we resume sessions, that my idealistic idea of us looking through it together during the first session back, may well fall by the wayside!

I will publish the link to my #therapybreak tweets from the second half of the break (Day 23 to Day 46) next week, when the break is over and I have resumed sessions….