How much do your chat with your T?

If we chat at all it is only ever a few sentences max.

We chat for a minute or two at the beginning, but not much. We do have a lot of asides/jokes/short anecdotes within the session. But as much as I would love just to chat and joke around with T, I pretty much only get to see her for 50 minutes every two weeks so I try to conserve my time with her.

Quite a bit. But T tends to refer back to whatever I first talked about when beginning the session and Ties it into something about me.

A lot or not at all, depending on how you look at it. I went to an open day of an university a weekend ago, and my pdoc asked how I'd found the university and the bachelor I was interested in. One could view it as mere chatting. One could also view it as working on/thinking of the future, bringing up something positive, etc. I do the latter, and they do too.

"Useless" chatting (pdoc mentioning his computer has been extremely slow all day, T about really liking this room) is generally limited to a line every other session or something.
Unless you also count jokes.
I like it to keep the environment relaxed; to 'unwind' and remember they are human too and not so different from me - instead of the big scary doctor/professional who doesn't give a damn as long as he can tick the "Asked about mood" "Asked about side effects" boxes in the computer system. Sort of the "We're in this together to find how we can make you feel better".

Almost never. Our time is short and I struggle to open up.

And there's also a difference between "Seen the Olympics?" " Yeah, the skating. Person X was really good" and "Seen the Olympics?" "Yeah, I saw Person Y fall just before the finish. That must have been a disappointment. But then again, ..." [something about how the medal isn't everything, the goal is not to be the best but to be good enough to have fun]

I'm not a big fan of superficial small talk. Make it philosophical, or personal [I remember when I fell from my horse just before the last jump, it felt ..] and it probably has some use.

"It's cold out."
"Yes. It makes it harder to get out of bed in the morning."
Is not useless in therapy. But saying "Yeah, it's winter" probably would be.

I never chat with my T. I can't even imagine about what should I chat with him about. It wouldn't help to establish connection for me anyway, I would feel that he is stealing my time.

I think in another words, when my T kind of chat with me, it is more like "checking up" with me, as a therapeutic approach. So the reason of the chat, such as "How have you been last week" or "How have you been doing between sessions?" and I would start talking about some daily stuff.

When you say you see your T twice per week, how much does it cost per week to see your T? I know that seeing a T is pretty costly, unless it is funded by the government somehow, with free support organisations.

So...what do you talk during therapy that you have prepared?

For me personally, I would avoid chats, because I would rather chat with a friend, which is outside the realm of therapy. Seeing my T for around an hour session is really expensive, so I would get onto the trauma stuff for her to professionally work on, so as to not waste time.

We chat a fair amount. I find it very helpful to maintain the connection and also take a break from the heavy trauma work we do.

His fee is $175 (U.S.), insurance covers 60% (he's out of network), so I ultimately pay $70. But I have to pay him up front (I use credit card), then submit to insurance, and insurance sends me a check. We were seeing a marriage counselor weekly at the same rate, but are working on terminating with him, seeing him only biweekly or monthly (probably just one or two sessions to go). So weekly expenses are fairly similar. (H also has an FSA through his job, so some of the money we pay is ultimately untaxed income.) T is helping provide me some support through that, since I was really attached to MC and also was used to some sort of therapy session twice a week.

The twice a week thing is not going to be long-term, I don't think. It's more that I/we feel there's a lot of work to do, and I'm making progress (unlike with ex-T). Going twice a week seems to help with that and also makes me feel a bit more secure in the attachment. I was also used to a fair amount of outside contact with MC and ex-T, and current T discourages that (though allows it to some extent and with boundaries), preferring to offer extra sessions as opposed to e-mail (he does charge for longer e-mails--but his responses to the couple I've sent have been really long and thorough), because it's easier to communicate more clearly in person. So I figure maybe I'll do the twice weekly for a couple months, then try weekly, see how that goes, maybe with an extra session here and there if I'm in a particularly stressful period/having a rough time.

Those are good points. Some of the stuff with my T has been more philosophical. Or if I'm sharing some story/observation (like your second Olympics example) that maybe doesn't have that much to do with the specific therapy topic/goal of the day, it's still revealing something about me as a person and/or past, so that could help T to understand me more, get a more complete picture of who I am. And sometimes the tangents we go on lead to other, more therapeutic topics. And we might not have gotten to those topics without the tangents/chatting.

I should add most if not all of the small talk at the end of the session comes when my scheduled appointment ends... I am her last appointment of the day so we on occasion will talk for about 10-15 minutes. If there happens to be somebody after me we will wrap up about 5 minutes early and we switch over.

We chat a lot. It helps to break up the heavy stuff. I feel like it does add to the therapeutic process for me. It helps me feel connected and builds trust.

We chat in exactly two situations:
1) before a longer break, either when he takes some time off, or once when I had to take a 3 months break due to work. In these cases, we usually chat most of the last session. About things such as what I'm going to be doing during the break, or when it was due to work, on what I'll be working, where and so on.

2) If we have discussed some difficult things during the session, sometimes we chat for a minute or two before ending the session.

I think in both of these cases it's to make me feel more comfortable, grounded, to regulate my feelings a bit. Especially in the second case I might otherwise leave with emotions all over the place, and I'm bad at dealing with that.

It is usually initiated by my T. I would not just start chatting myself, I'd just be quiet. I don't mind the bit of chatting that we do, but I would be bothered if we did it instead of talking about stuff I want to talk about. However, that has never happened so far.

We never chat and we never have!
I don’t really mind. I don’t know what we would talk about. She has always seemed far too strict to chat with. Like she would say there is no need for it. Which there kind of isn’t. Well, there is for building a relationship, but I don’t think it would help me because of my attachment issues. It would just be one more thing to worry about.

I suppose I could though, if I wanted to. The start of the session is always silence. Her waiting for me to speak, so... maybe I will try one day!

For me, it started out as just a little at first but over the past few years, it feels like we spend more than 85% of the session chatting and then all the stuff we should have spent the session talking about either gets crammed into the last 15 minutes or comes spewing out in a frantic text right after he leaves. I had thought about bringing it up with him several times but I was afraid it was going to make him mad, like I was accusing him of not doing his job or something.

I don't know if this would be considered chat but I almost always begin the session with "news". I want T to know about my life and what goes on in it. For me, it's very comforting to know that my T is up-to-date on events in my life. She's used to me talking about my own (non-emotional) current events at the beginning of the session.

I do the lighter stuff like "news" at the beginning so I can dive in afterward with what I need help with. "News' generally doesn't take more than 15 minutes.

If I have big struggles, I'll forego the "news report".

It's interesting that you talk about "news." That became kind of an issue with ex-T. Where I'd spend much of the session updating her, both with general stuff that happened in the past week and with my marriage counseling session, which generally happened a day or two before my session with her. So much time was often spent catching up that there wasn't as much time left for actual therapy. It often happened in marriage counseling, too (especially because H can be quite the storyteller...think 15 minutes describing a trip to Costco with our daughter).

I've tried to avoid getting into that same trap with my current T and have generally succeeded. Like I'll come in with stuff I plan to talk about. He has said he'll sometimes fall into the update thing with clients he's seen for a longer time, but even though we're at about the 6-month mark, I don't feel like we're doing that. It's amazing how much more we can fit into a session without all the updates. Sure, I'll talk about some relevant or important stuff that happened, but there's not the "Here's all the stuff I did in the past week" recap. Plus, lately, I've been seeing him twice a week, and that helps, too--less time to recap!

Thinking about how I am unable to see my T until August, and I haven't seen her since November... I will want to chat with her for hours and hours when I finally see her again, there's so much that will have happened! I'll have to try to control myself, lol. Can't waste time in session chatting when I have so much s--t to work through.

I counted the recap thing as therapy actually. Especially with pdoc; we talk about things that bother me now or that came up during the week. How to deal with the bothersome stuff. And he points out the good things.
T is more "working on stuff".
They complement each other like that. Pdoc is more "how can I help you now, what do you need to get to the next appointment?" The long-term plans are more med related, or "maybe work on x sometime" (with a T qualified in working-on-x).
T is "what can we start doing today that helps you in a year" with some 'what do you need help with right now' thrown in.

It's like, say I'm getting hit at home every day (I'm not). Pdoc will help me figure out how to buy and install a good lock on my bedroom door and the best time to do so; T will help me make plans to move out.
Seeing only T means a lot of broken noses before the moving-out moment is there. Seeing only pdoc would prevent the broken noses, although locks can break down and I've got to leave my room at some point for food. Which would require new strategies. Or maybe the person breaking my nose would move out or be kicked out.. or realize the futility of trying to break my nose and stop doing so. Or I'd fight back and that would help. It's not always a temporary stop-gap.

My first T I saw when I was really ill (prior to the leg amputation). I had a lot of things going on like doctor's/treatment appts (averaging 9 to 11 a week in the last months), fights at home, and sometimes things at school. Just listing them literally took all session, yet that venting was absolutely required to help me cope/get through. So she suggested I email.
I emailed every day, or maybe 5 times a week if I skipped a day somewhere (no need to email on 'session day'). Which would leave time in session to focus on the things I needed to discuss/find a solution for, and work on things that would help me longer-term. Although that was very limited and, as my problems increased in severity and my ability to deal with them declined in a huge way (pain got worse, doctor's appts increased, I barely slept because of the pain), I guess it was back to handling-acute-things for just about all of the session.

So if that's chatting, I believe in chatting.
Sometimes T's are so focused on the long-term - like renovating your house - that they ignore you need to make enough money this month to avoid foreclosure, at which point you wouldn't have a house. Or that you need to deal with your pyromanic neighbour today, 'cause else you'll have to start rebuilding the house before you can ever renovate. Or that yes, saving money for that comfortable, Emperor-size, ten million thread count bed is a good goal - but it'll take me a year to have enough money, and I'd like to not sleep on the floor before that..