Claude Therapy Workspace Template

A GitHub template for working through one bounded personal issue with Claude Code — a career situation, one relationship, a bereavement, a decision you keep circling.

One workspace, one issue. Open a new one for the next thing.

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What this is, and what it isn't

This is a place to organise your own thinking about one thing, with an agent that can hold detail, ask the next question, and write it down properly. It is not therapy, and it does not replace a therapist.

It exists anyway because the alternative is usually nothing. Access to mental health support is uneven, expensive and slow; the hour you eventually get is short and months away. The time before and between sessions is not dead time. Getting an account of what actually happened, what you actually think, and what you actually want written down is useful on its own — and it turns a professional hour spent reconstructing events into one spent on the thing you came for.

The best outcome of this workspace is that you walk into a therapist's room with a clear account instead of a blank page. for-therapist/ exists for exactly that.

If things are acute rather than difficult, see SUPPORT.md.

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Why issue-bounded

A workspace scoped to one issue can be honest about scope. It knows what is in and out; it can be reviewed in one sitting; it can be closed. A general "my mental health" repo accumulates forever, mixes unrelated material, and gets harder to open rather than easier.

The cost of narrow scoping is repetition — you would end up re-explaining who you are in every new workspace. That is what the persistent background context layer is for. It lives outside any one workspace, is written once, and is read by all of them.

        <user data root>/personal-context/          ← who you are: people, history, patterns
             (portable, yours, plain files — never inside ~/.claude)
                              │
         ┌────────────────────┼────────────────────┐
         ▼                    ▼                    ▼
  workspace: career    workspace: <relative>   workspace: grief
   (this template)      (this template)        (this template)

The context layer is built and maintained by a separate plugin — Claude-Personal-Context-Plugin — which runs the intake interview, ingests material you already have, and finds the gaps. This workspace reads from it and proposes writes back to it. See memory/README.md.

Vendor-neutral by design. The context layer is your files, in your store, in a documented format. This workspace is instructed not to use any model-managed or provider-side memory feature. Nothing durable lives inside a chat session or a vendor's account.

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Getting started

gh repo create <issue-slug> \
  --template danielrosehill/Claude-Therapy-Workspace-Template \
  --private --clone
cd <issue-slug>
./scripts/bootstrap.sh          # fills placeholders, asks the four framing questions
claude

Make it private. The template's .gitignore and CLAUDE.md assume a private remote or no remote at all.

Then, in Claude Code:

Say	You get
"let's start"	start-session — orientation, what's open, what you want from today
paste or dictate whatever is on your mind	capture — a written session note plus the threads it belongs to
"let's take this apart"	unpack — one incident or belief, examined slowly
"what does the timeline look like"	timeline — a chronology built from material/
"how else could I read this"	perspectives — the same events through other lenses
"what keeps coming back"	thread-review — cross-session patterns
"I have an appointment on Thursday"	therapist-brief — a two-page handover
"help me write this"	draft-message — a hard conversation, a boundary, an unsent letter
"I think this is done"	close-issue — retrospective, and what graduates to background context

Skills live in .claude/skills/ and work with no plugin installed.

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Layout

context/          the frame — what this issue is, what you want, how you want to be talked to
sessions/         one file per session, dated. Append-only.
threads/          recurring themes, each tracked across sessions
material/         raw material you bring in: messages, transcripts, letters, documents
artefacts/        things made to be used: timelines, maps, drafts
for-therapist/    the bridge — briefs, chronologies, question lists to take to an appointment
memory/           how this workspace reaches the persistent background context layer
archive/          closed threads and superseded artefacts. Nothing is deleted.
docs/             design notes, scope and limits, the framings the skills lean on

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Related

Repo	Role
Claude-Personal-Context-Plugin	Builds and maintains the background context layer this workspace reads
Therapy-Tracking-Plugin	The administrative layer — pre/post-session notes, goals, voice-memo structuring, across an ongoing course of therapy
Claude-Personal-Planning-Plugin	General personal-planning workspaces, including diary and health variants
Claude-Mental-Health-Templates-Index	Index of all of the above

Use Therapy-Tracking-Plugin when you are in therapy and tracking it. Use this template when you are working on one thing, with or without a therapist attached.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. The template is MIT; whatever you write in your instantiated copy is yours and should stay private.