How do you guys know what's relevant? I often don't.

There are some things that are clearly relevant and have a major impact on my day to day life. There are some things to which I give too much importance and time in therapy and I'd probably best let them lie and move along.

And then there are all these things that seem like details or background and I don't think of them as relevant at all and T asks a question and suddenly OMG there's this whole area I haven't explored at all, not that I was concealing it deliberately or consciously, and it's deep and intense and major.

One time I told her about a misunderstanding I had with my kid where he was terribly hurt and panic-stricken because he thought I'd left him behind in anger when in fact I'd just gone to park the car somewhere legal and I wasn't angry at all. I was telling her about it because honestly it had been a slow news week and I didn't really have much I wanted to discuss. (My son and I had talked about the incident and repaired that hurt so that was okay).

Well it turned out to be this huge session about abandonment and reassurance and knowing as a kid that your grown up is there and me being a latchkey kid and my home's front door having a sticky lock that I sometimes couldn't open and the literal and metaphorical experience of being stuck out in the cold. It was a lot of stuff I'd never discussed in the previous few years.

Stuff like that has happened even when I opened with something as insipid as "don't you hate that the store across the way has sandwiches that look good but aren't?" Other times I say something in passing and it truly has no importance even if she seizes on it and thinks it might.

Does this happen to you too?