Your feedback form could be a therapeutic act
Including the questions I now use for you to copy and paste
Your feedback form is not just another admin task.
It is part of how you listen. Part of how you reflect on your work. And if you think about it carefully, it can be part of how future clients decide whether you are the right therapist for them.
I’ve recently overhauled my own. It surfaced questions I hadn’t sat with properly before and actually thought about what I’m trying to learn, about who the form is really for, and what it means to ask for feedback in a profession where the relationship is everything.
Before I get into what I changed, I want to start somewhere more fundamental.
A well-designed feedback form does three things.
It helps you reflect on your practice without spiralling into self-evaluation. Most of us are either avoiding looking at our work critically or going too far the other way reading every session for evidence of what we got wrong. A structured form gives you a contained way to look. You’re reading responses, not rewriting your professional identity.
It gives clients a chance to notice their own progress, sometimes for the first time. The end of therapy can feel anticlimactic. A lot has happened, but the change has been gradual, and people don’t always see it clearly. Being asked what has changed for you since you started? can help a client consolidate something they’ve been living without quite naming.
That’s not a small thing. The form is doing clinical work.
And it gives future clients language for what it actually feels like to be in the room with you. Generic reviews — “Sarah was lovely, I’d recommend her” — don’t help the right client find you.
Specific ones do. A form that invites clients to reflect carefully tends to produce responses that are genuinely useful to someone sitting on a website at eleven at night, wondering if you’re the right person for them.
Those three things matter. They also pull in different directions if you’re not careful about design.
Below — what I changed, why the order of your questions matters more than you think, and what to actually do with the responses.
