At a glance
You want to record the session because you lose it by the evening, and you half suspect you would speak differently with something running. Both of those are true at the same time. This article looks at what the wish to record is carrying, and what to do with it.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- The hour that will not stay. Clients tell me they left a session changed and by the next morning could not say what had moved.
- What the request is usually asking. When clients ask to record, the question underneath is often whether they are allowed to need more of me than the hour holds.
- The finished sentence. Clients who know something is running tend to complete their sentences, and the complete ones are rarely the interesting ones.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
Why does the session disappear by the evening?
What fades is not the content. It is the state you were in when the content made sense.
You walk out having understood something with more than your head. Something loosened in the chest, a sentence landed in the right place, and for a while the week looks different. Then you cycle home, answer two messages, eat, and by the time you go to bed you are holding the summary rather than the thing itself. Most people read that as a memory problem and try to fix it with better recall. It is closer to the reverse. The understanding arrived with feeling attached to it, and feeling is the part that will not file.
So the frustration is real and it is not carelessness. You are not forgetting a fact. You are losing access to a condition you were in for an hour, in which certain things were obvious and sayable. By the evening you are back in the condition you live in most of the time, where they are neither.
What is the wish to record actually asking for?
Often it is asking whether you are allowed to take me with you when the hour ends.
In the British school of object relations I trained in, this is the ordinary business of taking a relationship inside: a person you have been understood by becomes, slowly, someone you can bring to mind when they are not in front of you. That is not available in the first weeks. Early on, I exist in one hour a week and nowhere else, and the understanding seems to live in the room rather than in you.
A recording is a reasonable solution to that problem. It makes the hour portable. It is worth knowing that is what you are solving, because then you can watch what happens to the wish over a few months. For many people it quietly fades, not because they stopped wanting continuity, but because they no longer need a device to supply it.
Would I say less if the session were being recorded?
You might, and the evidence is less one-sided than the fear suggests.
In one service where audio recording was routine, 72 patients and 15 therapists were asked what they made of it. Most in both groups were positive, 90% of the patients listened to their recordings between sessions, and the therapists were more worried than the patients that a recording might distress them.1 That was a single centre working in one way with anxiety, where recording was already ordinary, and everyone was reporting on themselves, so it describes what recording can be rather than what it would be for you.
What I notice is narrower than the whole hour. It is the few minutes where you would have said the unflattering thing, or let a sentence trail off because you did not yet know how it ended. Those are the minutes the work usually happens in. Whether a recording costs you them depends less on the device than on who you imagine might one day hear it, and that is worth asking yourself before you ask me.
Why does asking feel like an accusation?
Because a recording is also a record, and records exist in case someone needs proof.
People hesitate for different reasons and it is worth separating them. Some have been disbelieved about something that mattered, and a recording is the first arrangement in years where their account of events would not be the only one. Some want a witness rather than evidence: not proof against me, but proof to themselves that the conversation happened and they were in it. Some are, quite reasonably, keeping an option open with a person they do not yet know well. Which of those it is changes what the recording would be for, and none of them is a bad reason to ask.
Ask anyway. The hesitation itself is usually the more interesting half, and a therapist who cannot hold the question without taking it personally has told you something useful about the fit.
What can I do instead, and when is recording the wrong answer?
Start from what you want the recording to do, because most of the things people want from it have a cheaper answer.
- If you want one sentence. Say so at the time. Ask me to say it again while you write it down. It takes 30 seconds and you keep the words that actually landed rather than all the words around them.
- If you want continuity. Open the next session with what stayed with you and what went. That is better material than a recording, because what survived the week is information.
- If you want proof that something is changing. One line a week in your own handwriting, dated. Read it back after three months, not after three days.
- If you want to think it through again. Write for 10 minutes the same evening, before the hour has tidied itself into a conclusion.
There are places where recording does not belong. In couples work it changes what each person can risk saying in front of the other, and it is usually the quieter one who pays for it. If you want a recording in order to show it to somebody else, that is a different request and should be named as that, because it makes a third person present in a room built for two. If the wish comes from not trusting what will be said about you, the mistrust is the work and a recording will not touch it. And a recording cannot stand in for a session you keep leaving early, or for saying the thing you have not said. A free 30-minute call is enough to work out what you are trying to hold on to.
Questions people ask
Should I ask, or can I just record?
Ask. Recording without saying so changes the relationship whether or not it is ever discovered, and the asking is part of the work.
What will you say if I ask to record our sessions?
I would want to know what you are hoping it will do, and then we decide it together. The answer is rarely a flat yes or no on the first session.
Can I take notes in the session instead?
You can, and it has a cost worth knowing about. Writing while we talk puts you slightly outside the conversation, which is sometimes a relief and sometimes the problem.
Does wanting to record mean therapy is not working?
No, and it often means the opposite. People want to keep hold of sessions that are doing something to them.
Can I ask for this with a therapist I have been seeing for years?
Yes, and the question will probably be why now. A wish that arrives late in the work is usually about something that has just changed.
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How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
