Not specifically in a session, but while I was in therapy, I definitely had some "aha" moments that very much coincided with ideas that my therapist was working on with me. The moments themselves didn't come in session though. In fact, my therapist always emphasized that my learning wouldn't become real until it happened outside his 4 walls.

One of the biggest issues I was having was in regards to suicidality and the impulsivity that kept me in danger and in crisis for years. My therapist and I had talked a great deal about safety plans, coping mechanisms, interventions, effects of my life and on the lives of those around me, etc. to keep me safe, but I was pretty resistant and stuck in, what had become for me, a habit of automatic suicidal thinking to depression and anxiety. One thing I understood was that as long as suicide was an option for me, I would continue to go down that path over and over again, but I wasn't able (or perhaps willing) to change my thinking about that option. I understood it conceptually, but not concretely.

Then came my "aha" moment. My sister died. I had lost people before, but never was the pain of grief as intense as it was for her. I felt the utter pain in myself; I saw the utter pain on the faces of my parents and my children; I knew how difficult it would be for all of us to carry on and move forward in life. . . . And I realized if I took my own life, that pain everyone was experiencing would be even worse because of the confusion, the anger, the aftermath, and the legacy it would leave for those that remained. In that "aha" moment, I finally was able to completely take suicide off the table.

That tragic loss was, oddly enough, the beginning of actual living for me. Everything my T and I had been discussing and working on and going over finally clicked and I was able to truly put a plan of action in place. It wasn't magic; it was simply the perseverance of my therapist combined with a real-life circumstance that finally demonstrated concretely what he had been working to get me to see all along.