Psychotherapy Tools: Dictionary

From my experience, I realized that one of the biggest challenges in therapy I face is not having the vocabulary to describe my thoughts and feelings. One recent experience is ‘abandonment issues’. This simple term opened the whole new area of unexplored territory. To avoid this from happening in future, I decided to come up with Therapy dictionary.

A Therapy dictionary works like this. If you see a patient repeat some phrase frequently you ask them what they mean by that and make a note of it on a separate sheet. This sheet will become your dictionary for that patient. You can refer to it. You can ask them about it like for instance are you still struggling with ‘abandonment issues’. These phrases and terms don’t need to be technical; even when they are, it is important to clarify with the patient what they mean when they use them. Introducing new labels to patients is tricky like for instance, in my case my therapist can say I might be struggling with ‘attachment issues’. Then she can ask me what I think this means and note it down and then explain to me what that label means in psychotherapy literature. Later on if she sees me using it in the same and future sessions she can ask me what I mean by ‘attachment issues’ when I use the phrase and update the definition that she had in the dictionary.

Keep in mind, this dictionary is unique for every patient. It is a set of terms that the patient and therapist use to describe the patient’s behavior patterns.

I will further develop it after reading Jean Piaget’s The Language and Thought of the Child.