Collaborative Documentation: Therapist Experiences in Jointly Writing Progress Notes

Systemic therapy is predicated on a collaborative relationship between therapist and client. This joint pursuit of client goals occurs in the therapy room but may dissolve once the therapist begins filling out any necessary paperwork (e.g., progress notes, biopsychosocial evaluations, or assessments). Collaborative documentation is one means of bringing forth the client's voice during the session and for documentation. Most therapists write progress notes on their own once the session has ended; however, this leads to a privileging of the therapist's voice in the document rather than the client's voice. This article explores collaborative documentation and provides the voices of doctoral student-therapists as they experienced their initial forays into this process. We provide an explanation of how we believe collaborative documentation helped privilege the client's voice, decreased the power imbalance between therapist and client, and provided ideas as to the implementation and use of joint progress note development.