Communication

How much one is getting out of a session with a therapist depends on the chemistry between the two people as well as your own willingness to tell about yourself. Being personal wasn't my thing before I started going to therapy sessions. I basically had to learn how to be in a session. I saw a psychologist during my last year before I moved away from home, and this was completely different to what I've experienced where I live now. Back home I usually answered in short sentences, where as here the psychologist(s) gave me the opportunity to speak more freely rather than just answering questions with yes or no.

Telling a person your secrets, no matter how personal, is scary. I often sat there wanting to talk about a topic yet I felt the anxiety approaching very rapidly. The tendency of speaking quite vague was there in the beginning, especially when we talked about love, physical or emotional. You know that once you've started a sentence that there's no going back. The feeling of embarrasment over whatever the topic was disappeared soon enough.

The taboo and stigma rearding talking about mental health and personal things made a big gap between talking one on one with a therapist and "the real world". There was still only a few selected who I trusted well enough to talk about myself in that way. However, this has changed, at least a bit. I feel it's easier to speak about it to a bigger selection of people than before. The tendency of being precise on what I'm talking about is also changed. Nowadays I'm probably a bit too direct. So I'm saying that I'm having a bad day if someone asks. How else is a person supposed to know if you're answering something else? If we are supposed to overcome the taboo of talking about our mental health, we need to say what is actually happening. Answering that you're fine when asked was a thing I thought for a long time as a social norm, and therefore you weren't supposed to let anyone know. Conversation in a friendship is a two way-thing. My impression is that you're honoring eachother's respect when talking about personal problems. You have to trust the other person just as the other person has to trust you.