My first session was telling about me, what brought me there and what I hoped I might get out of therapy. I couldn't give a lot of detail except to say that I was in bone deep, soul deep misery and something had to change. We talked about how he did things (scheduling, fees, informed consent type stuff) and it sounded good to me, so we went straight into an initial "real session" for the rest of the time. For him, that meant collecting some basic information about me, my family constellation, education etc. He asked if I had questions and I wanted to know a little bit about his family and education and stuff.