I lead the sessions as well, usually after a few minutes of surface level chit chat T will open with “so how are things going?” and I will go from there. Sometimes he will waaaayyyyy overanalyze something and we end up spending more time than I thought on a particular topic, like when I mentioned I always make a cake from scratch for my son’s birthday, and my T ended up digging out a possibly biggger meaning (he was somewhat correct.) But I do steer our coversation and set the topics for the most part.

I have found coming prepared in my head with a few general topics helps, although I always feel like if I come prepared with topics 1,2, and 3, we maybe get to point 1.5 or something. I try to have the same general structure to my sessions, in the sense that I might do a quick recap of any big issues that happened in the past week. So this will somewhat help things because I usually get to the bigger topic I want to discuss after a little chit chat, quick recap, then bigger issue.