Temporal Therapeutic Letters: Utilizing Time as a Structural Guide

Abstract

Therapeutic letters have been incorporated into psychotherapy for over half a century, being used for a variety of purposes, including recruiting non-attending members to therapy, implementing therapeutic interventions, summarizing client change, and termination. Therapeutic letters have been used by therapists from a variety of models, such as narrative, solution-focused, and strategic therapies. This article presents a format for writing therapeutic letters that focuses on temporality. These temporal therapeutic letters are structured to highlight the flow of a client's story: past, present, and future. By focusing on temporality, the temporal therapeutic letter acknowledges the client's initial limited identity, highlights their co-constructed resourceful identities, and reflects on the future implementation of those resourceful identities. Two temporal therapeutic letters are presented to demonstrate how therapists can compose this three-part format of letters.