[Flip419]

My session with my T is 45-50 min. Sometimes it is silent, and I feel like I have to fill the air with some kind of small talk, or revert back to an old problem I brought up.

Does this happen to you? What do you do?

[Ad Intra]

Sometimes I'll babble. I yet haven't had a session where I had nothing to talk about but when transitioning we may have a minute of quite and I'll babble about something random. Silence unnerves me at times. I really need to stop that.

[iheartjacques]

I like it when my t has some kind of plan or outline for direction. That way it feels like I'm making progress. Even if it's two steps forward, three steps back. He uses a mix of psychodynamic and CBT.

[guilloche]

Well... I bring a list. I don't think my T really likes this much. He's made comments about being more spontaneous, but he's so expensive, I don't want to risk forgetting something important while wasting time on something that doesn't matter to me. He also sometimes looks like he wants to giggle a bit when he tells me, "OK, what else is on your list? Did we cover everything?"

I make my list during the week. I'm still pretty new with this T, so sometimes it includes things from the past that I think are important data points for him ("oh yeah, you really need to know about this... for context of my life"). If anything upsetting happens during the weeks in between sessions, I try to jot them down and think about them. I try to prioritize things that are bothering me.

It's not a great approach, because I am not great at T yet, but it's one approach. I try to maintain some flexibility - if we start talking about item #1 of 5, and we get off on something interesting and important that wasn't on the list, I am totally ok with that (unless there's something else pressing on the list that is time sensitive! Then I might tell him that we need to save time for that!).

I used to have that problem. If I had nothing I wanted to talk about, t would say let's just sit here and "be", which after about 2.2 seconds I would start babbling nonsense to fill the silence. It took awhile, but I did eventually come to enjoy it, just sitting there "being" as she said in that safe and sacred space.

[ThingWithFeathers]

My t works hard to help me talk. She can tell if I'm struggling and will step in to help guide the conversation. I think silence is sometimes really valuable, especially if there's a lot of feeling there. But if it's silent and there's no feeling there, that would be difficult and not very productive.