What to Talk About in Therapy When You're Feeling Good
Spoiler alert: don’t cancel your appointment.
Oftentimes I’ll have clients begin a session with “I don’t know what to talk about, everything’s going really well” or cancel the session altogether, citing an improvement in mood and therefore no need for therapy.
For the record, both are totally cool with me. The first situation gives us space to explore that feeling further. The second situation doesn’t, but it does give my client extra time during their week to use however they’d like.
I take a client-centered, humanistic approach to working with clients. I see my clients as experts in their own lives and trust that they can make the best decisions about what they need. I encourage autonomy and ownership of their therapeutic process. I happily provide my clients the flexibility to cancel and reschedule (within 24 hours because my time is valuable too, y’all!) as long as there’s no clinical risk in doing so.
I also know when you’re paying a good chunk of money to spend 45 minutes with someone, you want to make sure that 45 minutes is useful.
And.
You spend time and money processing all the ways life is tough. Why wouldn’t you spend time and money celebrating all the ways life is joyful?
There are opportunities to learn from every experience, no matter what kind of judgment we attach to that experience.
We’ve been conditioned to conceptualize the therapeutic process in the framework of the medical model. In Western medicine, there is a strict definition of which bodily functions constitute “health”, and “health” becomes the norm. When the body acts outside of that definition, it is labeled “unhealthy” or “abnormal” and needs to be fixed. That’s when we’re taught to go see the doctor, get a prescription for fixing the problem, and be on our merry way until another problem arises.
Likewise in the mental health world, we’ve been told that the “healthy norm” is happiness, and any emotional experience outside our definition of happiness becomes “abnormal”.
This is a dangerous perspective. Happiness is one emotion, and being a fully-alive-and-present human requires experiencing a wide variety of emotions. This is an essential part of the human condition.
There are no inherently “good” or “bad” emotions. Emotions provide meaning and enrich our lived experience. Emotions communicate to us about what’s going on and what we need. Yet when we are not happy, we are taught to go to therapy, figure out how to “fix” the “problem” of not being happy, and then be on our merry way once we start feeling happy again.
Therapy can then become associated with pain and discomfort (and a whole slew of stigmatizing beliefs) rather than a place to process and contemplate the richness of the human experience in community with another person.
The next time you’re feeling good before a therapy session, keep your appointment.
Here are some questions to talk through with your therapist:
What do you notice about your thoughts? How are you thinking about and understanding what’s happening in your life right now?
What do you notice about your behaviors? How are you spending your time? How are you interacting with the outside world?
What do you notice about your emotions? How have you been feeling? What is your relationship like with these emotions right now?
What does your inner self-talk sound like? How are you talking to, caring for, and viewing yourself?
What makes it easy for you to do what you need to do (work tasks, personal responsibilities, etc.)? Are there barriers that have been removed? If so, what happened to them?
How are you able to deal with pain, uncertainty, discomfort, or worry right now?
How are you able to deal with things going differently than expected right now?
What have you been doing lately that brings you joy?
Which people or communities have you been spending time with lately?
How have you been approaching your sleep, diet, movement, sexuality, and spirituality lately?
What do you want to remind yourself of when you experience difficulty again in the future?
The information you’ll gather will be incredibly helpful in the process of learning more about yourself. We have to spend time acknowledging what’s working and why, so we can better understand when things don’t work so well anymore.