People are often prompted to seek therapy because of a triggering event: a break-up, a death, the loss of a job, or some sudden change in life circumstance. They may also come into therapy because the depression, anxiety, or other symptom they have been coping with crosses a threshold and becomes unmanageable.

As we start to explore feelings and reactions in therapy, it is important to distinguish a client’s genuine feelings and reactions from those that they believe they should have, or have been told to have. Clients sometimes find that they don’t really know how they feel, or believe that they should feel a certain way. They can believe that their actual feelings, or what they suspect are their actual feelings, are wrong or bad. People find that they are alienated from their “center”; they don’t trust their feelings to tell them something accurate about their situation.

We try all kinds of ways to circumvent this censorship of feeling, and gain access to what the unconscious mind really does know. The process of therapy can suggest other ways of thinking about an issue for the client, and can introduce a note of doubt about the inevitability of certain feeling rules. I have also found that writing morning pages, as an adjunct to therapy, is a very useful way to help anyone come into better contact with their authentic feelings, needs and beliefs.

Morning pages are an exercise devised by Julia Cameron, and detailed in her book, “The Artist’s Way.” This book outlines a course of action for unblocking creativity, and the morning pages are a cornerstone technique. They are three pages of longhand writing that are to be done immediately upon waking, and are meant to be strictly stream-of-consciousness. In them you pour out whatever is on your mind, without stopping to think about it, without editing it. There is no right or wrong way to do them. In Cameron’s words, “Nothing is too petty, too silly, too stupid, or too weird to be included.” The other critically important aspect of morning pages is that they are totally private, and must not be shown to anyone. In fact, Cameron recommends that you do not even read them yourself for a while. Simply write them, and put them away. The next day, write three more pages.

Often the tone of morning pages, at least at the beginning, is babyish, whiny and self-pitying. This is positive. This is a place where one can let all the bitterness of life out without having to be a good person, a strong person, or a selfless person. These are all concepts that can get in the way of knowing one’s mind. This is not the place to be a do-gooder; this is a place to let it all out. This simple task can be very difficult for people, and the more one was trained to put one’s self aside and do for others the more difficult it is. Expressing the negative feelings is helpful in itself. It provides relief from having to hold it all in. But the morning pages do more than that. They help us to understand what the real problems are. Over time, certain patterns become clear. The complaints tend to have coherence. One is repeatedly complaining about feeling unheard, or over-extended, or frustrated in one’s relationships. These complaints are a doorway into understanding one’s symptoms. The mysterious depression becomes less mysterious when one sees that for several months, all one writes about are tasks and obligations that are eating up all of one’s time.

In addition to helping clarify feelings and problems, morning pages can be a call to action. As Julia Cameron notes in her book, it is difficult to write the same complaint for months and months without being motivated to do something different. When problems become clear, it becomes harder to rationalize not doing anything about them. Clients bring the insights from their pages into the therapeutic discussion, where we can deepen them and begin to generate ideas for change.

Morning pages are a useful technique for circumventing one’s censor and listening to one’s real feelings without the knee-jerk judgments that one has been taught, in childhood and over a lifetime. They are a positive step in taking oneself and one’s feelings seriously, and a way to begin addressing our neglect of ourselves while serving others and living up to other’s expectations. As Cameron says, “Morning pages acquaint us with what we think and what we want.” This is also the goal of therapy, and the morning pages can be a useful addition to meetings with a therapist.