"What do you want to talk about today?"

T1 used to say, "we have to stop", which seemed a little warmer. And sometimes she said it with real regret, which was nice, it made me feel as if we were getting somewhere.

I saw one who did that. We did it for two times and I quit. I tried to find out what was supposed to go on or be talked about and the t would not say anything. It is now one of the main things I check out about a t. I will never work with a t who does that again.

I hate this too...cant she just figure it out? Cant she just ask me questions and ill answer.. why is it "What would you like o start with?" Like this is some sort of act in a play and Im gonna start where I want. I never do what I want I dont like waiting for answers...just tell me what were gonna start with your the T.

ARGH.

"What do you want to talk about today" is a REAL pet peeve of mine. The therapist should be following up from a previous session, asking you about something that happened last time, or urging you to open up about an issue that's been under discussion ("How'd the conversation go with your dad?")

If the therapist starts with a generic opener, I find myself wanting to ask: Do you remember me at all? You know what I've been thinking about and working on. What's up, are you tired today? Bored with this whole thing?

The other thing, and some abovethread have mentioned this - many of us need to be guided and prodded. THERAPY IS HARD. It's like the joke about writing: "Writing is easy, just sit down and open a vein." The therapist has to be more than passive observer. He needs to steer the session, while being open to the client's wishes. There is a delicate power dynamic involved, and it can work well if the power is fluid and allowed to shift gently between the client and therapist as the session progresses.

A therapist should simply never have the attitude of "I don't care what we talk about, why don't you start." That's guaranteed to make me wanna go ape-$hit.

Any therapist gets one freebie like the "generic opener" from me, but if it becomes a pattern, it's unacceptable. If they can't muster the initiative to remember something we were working on and to ask about it, I write them off as lazy and incompetent. I don't care whether it's just a rhetorical issue, masking deep concern on the therapist's part. It's a sucky question to hear, and if you're training to be a therapist, I'd recommend never using that open.

My T too. Sometimes I find it unnerving and it might go like this:

Anne: You're staring at me! [said with hostility]
T: That's pretty much my job.
Anne: [evil eye]
T: [compassionate smile]. B@stard.

Sometimes I have attempted to manipulate him into starting. It has gone like this:

Anne: Why don't you ask me a question?
T: I can't think of one.
Anne: [looks around for sharp objects to plunge between his eyes]

I have come to find that it feels empowering to start the session myself. I usually say something like I have something on my mind or I want to talk about something. Now, if he asks me a question directly at the beginning, like "how have you been?", I ignore him and say that I want to talk about something. I actually ignore most of his questions, now that I think about it. He must not be very skilled at asking them.

Anne

This is so interesting to me. I know T's get a lot of schooling to be a T...but i never thought about all the THOUGHT that would go into starting a session, or ending a session. This completely makes sense. My T either just waits for me to begin (which i hate), or will say "how are you feeling?" And I know when time is up by her body language (somehow), and she usually tries to use a closing statement summarizing the session, and then say "Well, we have to stop," and then get up to schedule the next session.
Interesting take on this Kitten. You would hate my T! She has explained some of it to me though. My T almost never follows up from a previous session, or asks a specific question unless she knew something important happened in between sessions. The reason for this is because she does not want to insert her agenda at all into how the session goes. Whatever I decide to bring up, regardless if it related to the last session or not, is what is most important to talk about. Sometimes it is frustrating and I have said multiple times "Can't you just ask me questions?!" She always says no. She just told me recently that in the beginning of therapy she tried drawing me out of my shell by asking more questions, but stopped because she was seeing that it wasn't working. She knows I hate sitting in silence and "feeling whatever comes up," but she is adamant that is how your unconscious slips through the consciousness, and it would never emerge if she continuously asked me questions.

Velcro, that's interesting. Maybe it's okay if the decision not to ask questions is a deliberate, strategic choice.

It is important to respect the client, and to try to let thoughts and feeling emerge naturally.

But I see so many people on this forum struggling with therapists who fall down on their duty to delve deep. There are so many people who have taken the courageous step of seeking out therapy - which in itself is just huge - but they need some help once they get there. And they don't get it. The therapist just skates away from issues that are challenging or troubling, taking the easy way out. It just makes me see red.

Once I mentioned to a therapist that my mother took me to the hospital when I was eight because I'd had an episode of vaginal bleeding. The doctors x-rayed me and did all kinds of tests - nothing was found. I told the T that I had no memory of sexual abuse as a child, and he just nodded briskly and dropped the whole thing, clearly relieved to move on. I would have liked to explore the possibility that I was abused, but I've never been able to get a therapist to pursue this with me.

This is just one example among many, of times when I've brought up something difficult in therapy with the hope that the therapist would take up the thread and explore it with me. But therapists are so often squeamish, just like the rest of us. This has always been troubling and baffling to me, because we hold therapists to a different standard. We expect them to be better at these things than their clients. That's why they're in the position of helping. We NEED the therapist to be more courageous than we are, more willing to prod and to delve and to dig deep, to lead us where it's frightening to go. We need the therapist to be not just willing, but determined to get to the causes of the things that have damaged us deeply. Otherwise we'd never consult them in the first place.

It is endlessly astonishing to me that these people who have chosen to make helping others their career, are so often afraid to just buckle down and do it. I mean it's human to try and fail at this. But therapists who can't face these things shouldn't be working with clients.

Just IMHO!

Can I just say....... Amen?

Fair enough.

Looking back, I sometimes arrived in a sulk, but she used facial expressions and body posture to indicate that she was listening. That was enough to get me started.

Some have said here that T's try to avoid value judgements and agendas. My T certainly started off like that, and I found it scary and dehumanising.

No wonder so many people think that therapy is not "real". Ts work their hardest to make it unreal.

This really burns my buns!

Therapy is hard. Is the patient to be given no encouragement at all? That sucks!

This part of therapy theory is dead wrong, in my humble opinion.

It's is the "blank slate" all over again.

This week when I had to start the session, I remembered people's antipathy to "where would you like to start?" so instead of saying that, I just told the client "hi" and looked at him expectantly. And he started right in talking! So that worked great, and I did not lose any points for that. For my closing, I used "it's time to stop now" and got credit for that. The observer said I had closed the session really well this time. So I guess I'm getting better, at least by the standards of the model we are using in the course. I also got full credit for an empathy statement and a long silence I allowed to occur. I'm not sure how much I'll use these exact combinations of words and actions out in the real world, but at least I'll have practiced the basics so it don't feel strange to use them.

When I had my mock session with my mock counselor, she opened with, "what would you like to talk about today?" LOL. It didn't bother me, though.

I used to hate that question but then I realized that I had not prepared for the session or completed my homework. Now I have my topic ready, and T may need to redirect me, but it is all good.