My sessions are normally Thursday and I find a week a short but long time. I get triggered a lot and just am carrying a heavy load but I have the issue of not knowing how to prioritize. Usually one session isn't enough to cover everything

My second issue is that things eb and flow and unless I am in that moment and it's still at the surface level I tend not to mention it in session. But it could be something that comes up again and again.
For instance I'll have night terrors and spiral several times a week every week but unless it has happened the night before my brain already blocks the experience out and so it doesn't get mentioned in therapy. Which is an issue because it doesn't get addresses

[Amyjay]

Rather than talk about what happens during the week I try to stick to the overall goals of therapy. It is working on the goals that will ease my symptoms, rather than working on the symptoms, if that makes sense.
I don't know your personal situation, but mine is working with the effects of chronic childhood trauma. So I get a lot of the symptoms of that... nightmares, flashbacks, a whole range of triggers etc. For me working on the underlying cause - the trauma and dissociation that comes form that - is what keeps me moving forward. In my case, treating the symptoms (nightmares, flashbacks etc) of my every day life would be like constantly sticking bandaids on new wounds. It might ease the pain of those individual expressions of symptoms, but do nothing to solve the underlying condition that causes them.
Complex trauma is complex. It takes years to address all the fallout from that. You are right - there is SO much stuff to address. Anyway, that is what is helpful for me - to keep my eyes on the overall goal of reducing trauma symptoms by working within the three-stage framework of complex trauma therapy.

[LonesomeTonight]

I find it can help to make notes between sessions of stuff that happened and that you might want to talk about. Then the morning of therapy, you can look at the list and think of what seems most important. I've also sometimes read the list out, and we've figured out what to discuss from there. I go twice a week now and have found that really helps (not sure if it's an option for you). It's gotten me out of the pattern of sort of recapping my week for much of the session, which I'd fallen into with my previous T. But current T is also good at keeping me from just rambling on about stuff that happened.


I've had a similar experience with having a particular topic keep getting pushed to the back burner because a more pressing issue keeps coming up. If it's something that keeps affecting you, it might be worth bringing up, even if it seems less important at the time. Maybe even just say you don't want to spend the full session on it, but it's something you want to mention. You could also ask your T to help you prioritize.

[ArtleyWilkins]

I didn't really talk much about the day-to-day goings on in my life. Therapy was more about my emotional health. Sometimes I guess that was tied to what was happening, but more along the lines of how I was holding up or reacting to or managing emotionally which honestly was a set of ongoing patterns no matter what I was up against. Basically, the goals and needs were pretty consistent no matter what was going on, so the minutiae of events during the week really weren't the focus.