Anyone else do their best clinical thinking in the car on the way home?
Seriously though — some of my best clinical ideas/processing happens after the session is over. The client is gone, I'm sitting with what just happened (sometimes emotionally/mentally drained or reeling), and suddenly I'm seeing threads I didn't pull on. Doors a client may have opened but I didn't walk through.
Curious if others experience this and how you handle it. Three questions:
What actually happens for you in the hour after a hard session ends? Do you decompress, jump to the next client, sit with it?
Do you ever leave a session wishing you'd gone somewhere different with a client — a moment that felt significant, but you missed it?
When that happens, how do you process it? Supervision, peer consultation, a trusted colleague, journaling? How often does it just get pushed to the background because the next client is coming in?
No agenda here, just genuinely curious how others navigate this part of the work. Would love to hear from newer clinicians especially, but all experience levels welcome. Obviously, supervision addresses some of this, but I'm thinking more about the times in between supervision sessions and balancing this with the day-to-day busyness that we all face.