The Wait
The Wait is the stretch between sessions, where good intentions are easiest to lose. These pages look at the afterglow, the dips, and how to hold your ground until next time.
The Wait is the stretch nobody plans for. The session is over, the attention has moved on, and you are left holding something inside an ordinary week that has not changed to accommodate it. It is where good intentions are easiest to lose, and it is the reason this hub exists.
Two findings in this pillar are worth holding together. The first is that feeling worse for a while is common rather than a sign of failure: in trauma-focused treatment, a temporary increase in symptoms was not associated with a worse final outcome. The second is that what you do between sessions counts. Across cognitive and behavioural therapy, work done between sessions was associated with better outcomes than treatment without it.
The afterglow that some people describe fades at very different rates, and expecting it to hold is its own kind of trap. Planning for the dip, rather than being surprised by it, is most of the skill here.
The takeaway
- A dip a few days out is common and is not evidence that something went wrong.
- The days between sessions are part of the treatment, not a pause in it.
- Decide in advance what you will do on a hard day, while it is still easy to decide.
Pages in this pillar
Asendar™ was built for exactly this stretch of the work: holding what a session opened up and carrying it into the days that follow. If you want a simple read on where you are starting from today, take your Mental Readiness Score.
Take your Mental Readiness Score