Alison Crosthwait

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Things you can talk about in therapy

You can talk about the same thing every single session. Every single one. No problem. You can talk about who you want to be in the world.

Your dreams, aspirations and ambitions.

You can talk about politics. About race and sexuality and gender. About your own biases and beliefs.

About sex too.

You can talk about money. Debt, inheritance, gains, losses. Salaries. Jealousies.

You can talk about your health and the health of those around you. You can talk about the intimate details of your body and the choices you make every day.

What do you eat? How? When? What do you worry and think about when it comes to your food?

You can talk about death. Deaths you’ve witnessed. Deaths you’ve feared.

And births. Births experienced but not remembered, births desired, births contemplated, births witnessed.

You can talk about what impacts you. What you read and watch.

What you are afraid of - what petrifies you? You can talk about that.

If something seems too gross or too terrible or too trivial that’s something to notice.

A while back I wrote a list of all the things I didn’t want anyone to know. I thought it would be a very short list - "I’m open," I thought. The list was long. And it wasn’t a list that I could convince myself to talk about - they truly were secrets.

You can talk about that too. The fact you have secrets. Things you won’t talk about.

Therapy operates at multiple levels - it’s about a lot more than “things to talk about”. But the things are important. The things relate to your experiences and ideas and beliefs and values. The things and how you talk about them are so important.

And you can talk about them all.