Are You Talking About the “Right” Thing in Therapy?

“Am I talking about the right thing?”
“Should I be focusing on something more important?”

These are questions I’ve heard often in therapy rooms. They carry an understandable anxiety, as if there were some secret syllabus to follow. But healing doesn’t work that way. Therapy is not a quiz. It’s a conversation—a living, breathing one—where what matters most is that you’ve shown up with something true.

Everything is Connected

Life isn’t neat. One moment bleeds into the next. A comment about your boss can open a window into how you felt around your father. A passing remark about clutter can lead to tears about aging. The specifics don’t need to be grand. They just need to be real.

A session about procrastination may gently peel back layers of perfectionism, fear of failure, or a long-standing grief you didn’t know was still active.

A moment of stress around a dinner invitation might end up revealing deep truths about belonging or your sense of self-worth.

There is no perfect place to start. All threads touch.

What Your Psychologist Is Actually Listening For

We do hear your words. But beneath them, we’re attuned to something deeper:

• Patterns and posture—How you face difficulty, how you protect yourself, how you soften.
• Unspoken assumptions—What seems permissible or off-limits to say. What you rush past. Where your voice gets quieter.
• The live relationship—How you relate to me in the room often mirrors how you relate to others (and yourself). Therapy becomes a small version of the larger world—a space where old patterns can be noticed, revised, healed.

The Session Is a Microcosm

What happens in the therapy room isn’t separate from the rest of life. It’s a distilled version of it.

If you struggle to ask for help out there, you may hesitate here.

If you tend to apologize for taking up space, that same instinct will show up on the couch.

These echoes aren’t failures—they’re invitations.

Change Happens in Layers

You don’t have to solve a problem for it to start to shift.
You don’t even have to name it.

Sometimes, the work happens underground—between sessions, or during moments that seem unrelated.

• A fear softens.
• An old behavior loosens its grip.
• A choice feels more available than before.

And you didn’t try to make that happen. It just did.

Insight is lovely. But insight is not the only form of progress.

If You Don’t Know What to Say, Say That

Here’s what I hope you’ll remember:

1. There is no “right” topic. What feels alive in you is the right place to begin.
2. The process works, even when you don’t see how. Your therapist is holding the whole arc, even when you’re mid-sentence or mid-storm.
3. Change doesn’t always feel dramatic. Many of the most important shifts feel ordinary at first.
4. Stillness isn’t empty. Moments of quiet in therapy can be among the most potent.

Trust the Process

Therapy isn’t about proving something or presenting your best self. It’s not about performance. It’s about bringing what’s real—however messy, incomplete, or uncertain it feels—and allowing it to unfold in the presence of someone who knows how to listen for what matters.

In fact, the moments when you feel like you have “nothing to say” might be the ones where something new is finally ready to be heard.

And that, more than any polished agenda, is the right thing.