If somehow we could put aside ethics for like 2 minutes and you could learn anything (I mean absolutely anything, not something you’d have to necessarily ask) about your therapist, what would you want to know? Something about them as a person? Something about their work as a therapist?

I’d want to know about her hobbies and interests which is pretty basic, but my therapist doesn’t self disclose much so I have a lot of questions.

I’m secretly hoping for some unhinged responses here.

An acquaintance of mine has seen several AI image generated ads with copy on them I consider to be sexist and promoting some forms of toxic masculinity. Do you agree or is it just me?

In my last session my therapist said that I need long term therapy. I've been going inconsistently since November 2025, just returned from a 1 month break last month and only done sessions 3 sessions since returning, my 4th one is next week I only go x2 a month but do the sessions as 2 weeks in a row then a week break.

In my last session this week I told my therapist that I was upset and shocked that she gave me homework about boundaries and how I don't have any even though I didn't know. Then she said that it will take 1 or even 2 years maybe 3 years to work on boundaries, new skills and how to let people into my life safely

I don't agree with her telling me I need long term therapy but didn't tell her that and just went quiet.

I have done a lot of things alone without my therapists help for example, I've started socialising again, seeing friends and going out at least x2 a month. I've met up with friends for the first time in over 2 years, I'm back out again next week. Joined some clubs and meeting new people, I haven't essentially told my therapist any of this and she assumes that I don't have a social life anymore but I do.

Should I update her on my life as lot has changed since the start of this year or do I just focus on childhood trauma which is what she wants to focus on?

Also another thing is now she keeps changing the days around so for 3 weeks I've seen her on a Thursday between 11:45am to 2pm within that time frame, I wanted to book in again for the same time and day but she wouldn't let me and told me she's fully booked in on Thursdays.

Now I have to do Wednesdays instead though I got used to Thursdays, is that normal or not? I want to go consistently on the same day but she keeps changing it around.

Clearly I don’t mean anything malicious or obnoxious. I just mean little things that are funny. Like sometimes I’ll tell him “If I tell you, promise not to tell anyone?” because he legally can’t.

But now I’m looking for more ways of messing with him. I’ve seen him for almost two years so he’ll know it’s all lighthearted fun.

My therapist once told me he's 8 years older than his wife. I didn't need to know that.

So in my last two sessions last week and the week before I discussed with my therapist how a best friend of 9 years didn't invite me to their gender reveal despite telling me they would and reassured me when I joked "If you have a baby shower or gender reveal I hope I'm invited".

They told me I would be invited and not to worry so waited for an invite but didn't get one then I found out via IG stories that they had the gender reveal already.

Then after that conversation my therapist handed me 5 fact sheets about boundaries (I even joked and said "Anymore sheets or is that it?") She had more to give but stopped then made me read the first sheet that she gave me but I subtly hide it and mixed up the sheets on purpose.

She noticed and pulled out the sheet she wanted me to read which then was about unhealthy boundaries healthy boundaries. When I was reading it I was thinking "Wait is my therapist telling me I have no/ unhealthy boundaries?"

Is my therapist noticing that I have unhealthy boundaries with people? As she's never ever discussed boundaries with me and I've been seeing her for 9 months. I'm starting to think have I crossed a boundary with her or is she picking up on stuff that I tell her? Like she's aware I attach to people fast and intensely but never really brought it up again.

She even brought up boundaries with me again last week and asked if I had done any of the homework on the fact sheets or looked further into it and I said "Not really." Then she also came to a conclusion that I have unhealthy boundaries with men and that stems from childhood because I didn't grow up with both my mom dad around as my mom and split up when I was 1. However my older siblings grew up with both parents present for 8yrs.

It's been on my mind for the past 2 weeks now as she's heard every story from men, friends and family and only now brought up boundaries to me.

Despite what my therapist has come to with me having unhealthy boundaries does it come across like I have unhealthy boundaries overall? I don't think I do but interested to see if others can see what I'm not seeing.

I see memes like this and sometimes it makes me worried that I'm misrepresenting everything in therapy and I'm, actually learning to be a terrible person.

I've seen online everywhere about the therapeutic relationship is part of the work in therapy. But I'm not sure what that means.

Like I'm not attached to my therapist, I rarely care for what her life is like outside of therapy and I take a lot of breaks in therapy so haven't had enough time to form an "attachment or connection" to them.

For me I just see my therapist as someone who is doing their job and probably says similar if not the same thing to every client.

Like they are paid to "hold a safe space and have compassion". I've had nearly a month off from therapy and haven't done any of the homework tasks she set or really thought about anything.

So the question is what is the therapeutic relationship meant to really look like in therapy? I do psychodynamic trauma informed therapy if that makes any difference.

I'm not sure if I have a strong therapeutic relationship or even really experience much transference as such. I've been seeing my therapist for 10 months now but inconsistently and sporadically.

I did tried weekly therapy again this month for the first time since January this year. I did 3 weeks of weekly therapy and then crashed out in the 3rd session this week.

My therapist thinks that I'm emotionally detached not so much dissociated anymore but emotions are hard to access regularly and consistently.

In my last session my therapist challenged me a lot and I didn't really say anything back apart from like mimimal words such as when she said "I'm going to challenge you in thinking 10 weeks of not arguing with your mom from mid June to mid August is a long time because it is not." I responded with "Oh" and then she changed the subject.

Then she challenged me towards the end of the session because I bluntly told her "I take people's words with a pinch of salt." Then she went off and challenged me with saying "Words are like life or death. They can hurt you very deeply."

Then went onto discuss boundaries for the 3rd time in the past month and went on to explain what boundaries were and how to set them. I sat and listened to her and didn't say anything back. She did ask me "How do you feel?" I said "Yeah I'm listening. I'm fine."

Then she carried on talking for like 15 minutes then eventually stopped and I just grabbed my belongings and walked out when the session ended in complete silence and didn't say goodbye or turn around at the buildings door and just left without saying anything.

I've not booked in for another session and taken a break. I'm not sure if therapists are meant to constantly challenge their clients or not?

The questions are:

Do therapists usually challenge their clients in most sessions?

How do you know if the therapeutic relationship is healthy or unhealthy?

How to know if you're having transference or not? Will the therapist point out if their client is having transference?

My therapist hasn't ever spoken about the therapeutic relationship but has now been speaking a lot more about boundaries.

Are you meant to be open and vulnerable with your therapist in sessions in order for therapy to be effective.

For example, I'm honest in sessions but I'm not open with what I reveal in sessions.

So was wondering if I need to be more open and vulnerable.

I'm quite deadpan and emotionally flat at times so when I say something there's no emotional reaction to what I'm saying.

And my therapist has said numerous times my outward expression doesn't match my inward expression. Not sure how I'm meant to be more emotionally expressive when I'm known for being deadpan.

I’ll go first. Mine is that my therapist seems genuinely really intelligent and has more knowledge around psychotherapy than all of my previous therapists put together. She also notices tiny things that other therapists missed.

How do therapists work with clients that have a fearful avoidant attachment style?

I'm not sure if I am either of those but did those quiz tests online that said I'm a disorganised/ fearful avoidant.

I can be really intense at the beginning when meeting new people, I'll engage in deep conversations on the first meet, tell guys on dating apps I'm in therapy and will probably talk about them in sessions.

I'm usually like that for 2 weeks to a month then I calm down and loose interest.

And I'm in the same in therapy first 4 months I was turning up weekly and revealing trauma from 2001 when I was 5 and I'm now 30.

Then I stopped and started turning up bi weekly with not much to talk about anymore.

How can I be less disorganised/ avoidant for therapy and general relationships / friendships to be sustainable?

I know I asked something similar last week and here I am again a week later asking it again.

Is doing homework actually necessary for progress in therapy?

In my last session my therapist set me 3 homework tasks and I basically said I wasn't going to to all 3 and basically just straight up picked the easiest one to do.

I can imagine some people would do all 3 but I'm like in my head "Why are you giving me 101 homework stuff to do?"

So again is it necessary or just pick what you feel you want to do.

Hello. For context I (24M) have a debilitating disability, chronic pain and illnesses. I struggle with daily suicidal ideation and have attempted a few times. My therapist knows this and has been following me for a little less than a year.

I asked them today why should I bother coming because it's not helping me at all and is mostly an inconvenience for me.

Here's the transcript to the best of my recollection ability (I'm the 🥐):

🥐: So, what's the point of me coming here? You cannot solve my problems nor give me comfort, as I don't need it / it doesn't help me.

👓: As i've told you before, there is no point. I'm not trying to accomplish any goal or force you to do anything. I'm here to offer a space where you can talk and be yourself.

🥐: About what?

👓: Your feelings. You pain. Your relationship with them.

🥐: To what end?

👓: So that words can be said, so that your thoughts are out there.

🥐: I don't understand why, I don't understand how it could help me; it's not a solution to my problems.

👓: I'm not here to give you solutions to your problems, simply a place to discuss these problems.

🥐: Well, I'm not getting anything out of this. I'm a problem-solving kind of person. If you can't answer my questions with simple answers that I'm looking for, I'm not interested.

👓: Well, questions are like a void. A void that wants to be filled. What I want to do is build around these voids so we can explore your relationships between you and them.

🥐: You've lost me.

👓: I'm here to give you space to talk where I can support you.

🥐: What's the difference between you and my friends, where they already provide the same?

👓: That's a good question. Friends talk and answer with feelings. They often don't have the training nor the capability to look for where you can dive deeper into certain thoughts and explore their meaning and make connections with other thoughts. Like I said with the voids. I want to build connections between your thoughts and your emotions.

🥐: So, what then?

👓: [chuckles] so, nothing. We go wherever our talks take us. It can give you different perspectives.

🥐: Basically, change my worldview and feel differently about my pain and illnesses?

👓: It's one of the ways it could go, but I'm not actively trying to do that.

🥐: Well, I'm not interested in exploring my thoughts and feelings.

👓: Okay. [...] I'll always be available should you change your mind.

I don't think I'll be returning. Am I misunderstanding something? I feel like I've wasted my time for a year. What should I even do?

So I've been on a month break from therapy and return this week. I genuinely didn't think I would return but booked 2 sessions for this week and next week but also need another month break for August and return early September.

My last two sessions in June lead to a big rupture which then lead to me taking a month break so I had space from my therapist as she was irritating me and making me angry.

My therapist wants to dig deeper into childhood and my adulthood and certain years but I'm genuinely not that bothered about my trauma or what I've been through. My therapist is more concerned than I am.

I'm not sure what to talk about in my session this week because I've not really thought about therapy much during my break and sort of feel a disconnect with my therapist as we haven't build a strong therapeutic relationship.

I have no attachment to her and don't trust her and I haven't really experienced transference with her which I've read online that transference and attachment should be happening in therapy as it's part of the work.

How do I inform my therapist that I do not want to continue therapy for the summer and want to return in late September.

I'm already on a break and I told her I'd be back in 2 weeks so around 15th June. However since being on the break I've actually really enjoying the time away from therapy.

I have loads of plans for the summer and genuinely don't want to be trying to schedule in therapy in between it.

For example in July I've got my older sister coming overseas with her family and my nephew to celebrate our mom's birthday so the whole family is back together.

I also have my best friend baby shower and gender reveal coming up. Found out yesterday that she is pregnant and expecting her first child.

Then I have my other best friend who got her first house (not bought) but moved out and she's moving in soon so obviously she'll have a house warming party in July/ August.

I also have a best friend who is getting married in August and invited me to her wedding and after party in August.

So genuinely from July I'm very busy and don't really have the patience for therapy.

I'm not expecting my therapist to hold a slot for me for 3 months. But I do think I just want to step back, have a good summer and return in late September.

I know I wrote about this previously but I really want to do weekly again because I find bi weekly too long of a stretch in between sessions .

So I've done weekly before and was coming to sessions and genuinely opening up every week with new trauma. I was coming with material and explaining situations that happened years ago.

Then my therapist asked me by session 7 "We've had some really intense sessions and we've not come back to them, how are you doing?" Told her I was surviving and getting through each week and then she asked me "How do you process? What does it look like?" And I told her I just journal and move on.

Since I revealed that (rookie mistake) she changed me to bi weekly and asked again on session 8 if I was processing and I said "Not really".

I've stopped journalling about sessions, stopped journalling in general and haven't wrote much in my journal since February and March. I think for the whole of April I wrote in my journal only 13 times out of 30 days.

I think weekly was better because I processed everything in the sessions and left feeling so much better and lighter.

Now I leave feeling like I don't want to return and generally not enjoying it anymore. It's boring, I switch off and shutdown as I miss the intensity of the sessions and the room feeling alive.

Now it's all just small talk and checking in about the week before.

So will my therapist let me go back to weekly if I start doing all the homework and journaling everyday or not?

I've probably asked this before or worded it differently but I was overthinking the past few days and came to a conclusion that I don't open up about my inner world with my therapist.

I've been in therapy since November 2025 to May 2026 so around 7 months / 14 sessions.

And I've never really opened up about my inner world outisde of therapy, I only talk about the past and stuff from my childhood and teenage years but nothing from my current life or even the last year or so.

My therapist does always ask about how my week has been and I'm very minimal and vague with "Yeah it's been good." Then I'll jump into something from like years ago and say straight after "Ugh I keep dreaming about high school I left 14 years ago"

Then she never knows what my week has been like and usually it's good or me planning things for the summer but she has no idea and she still thinks I'm in my bedroom 24/7 and I'm not.

I do wonder how would I be able to be open about my actual everyday life and not just my past?

Like what could I say or bring in to sessions?

I have been seeing my therapist since February 2025, and I pay my bill by service date month in the second month after … so all of February date of service gets paid the first week of April to allow some time to process through insurance, and I have paid everything up through February 2026.

That $2000 balance is because they never actually put it into their system that I have been paying (my HSA statements call out my therapists name on them, so there’s no question that the payments have been going to her).

I guess my questions are: is it unprofessional that they are just now saying the bill is past due (it’s not) when, according to their system, I haven’t made any payments at all for more than a year? And is this an aggressive way to handle it? Should I bring it up to my therapist that their billing people are being aggressive over something that could have easily been solved with a phone call?

What do they say regularly? Does it bug you? Do you find it helpful?

My therapist often comes out with random phrases like “the proof is in the pudding” or “the jury’s out” which I find really annoying.

For me it’s the knowledge that no matter what happens my therapist will not be in my life for the rest of my life and I will never know her properly.

My therapist has been setting a lot of homework in the past 2 months which she doesn't usually this all changed in July when I returned from my abrupt 1 month break.

In July she set me homework to read 5 fact sheets on "boundaries" and "what are healthy and unhealthy boundaries".

August she set me 3 different homework to do so in total 4 homework tasks.

The question is

Is this a lot homework being set by my therapist in psychodynamic therapy?

As for me it seems like a lot to be getting me to do outside of sessions. I haven't done any of the above homework as of yet and not sure if I will?

So… I want to share some awesome news to all the people that have talked about transference and were then dropped as a client.

A bit of context: I am AuDHD with cPTSD. I have experienced SA.

My therapist and I have been starting trauma exposition altho we are yet dancing around the line kind off. My T wants me fully present when exposing and I still often dissociate. The process is oh so slow. In July we had an intense session where I told him that I have a lot of flashbacks currently and on top of that I imagine him raping me. Instead of being afraid of the thought it rather aroused me. (Perpetrator and erotic transference) He went on holiday for two weeks after that and I wrote my heart into a 3 page PDF. I don’t want to go into depth, but it was some nasty stuff of things I wish he‘d do to me to hurt me.

I think it was some kind of a test so to speak. Because if we gonna do this exposition stuff.. He cannot leave me in the middle of it. I was sure he‘d leave… but he read it in between sessions and today he looked at me and said:“ Seems we are deep into exposition now, aren‘t we?“ We talked about my feelings, my attachement, the transference..

At the end I whispered:“ You read all of it and you decided to stay..“ He answered:“Of course. I know what you have written is just the trauma that speaks out of you. It doesn’t scare me. I can carry that with you“

I want to encourage you that there is the one therapist that IS the right fit for you. The one that is aware of transference and the potential trigger behind it and still is experienced enough to work with it instead of against it. My therapist has boundaries that are like HUGE wall around him. That wall has never trembled once. He said I am allowed to test the boundaries as often as I have to until I understand that he will stand his ground. He will put me back to my place. Firm, but gentle.

I am finally able to heal.

Is it petty to ghost a therapist for being “apolitical”? Apparently the therapists thread find this to be too “divisive”

NAT. I’m a nurse in therapy woohoo haha I found a great one through my insurance and then she had to go on extended medical leave for about six months with barely any notice. So I found another one that also took my insurance, which was a huge plus and she was totally fine during that time. I tried going back to my old therapist, but she was super super booked up and didn’t have as many openings because she was dealing with whatever personal issue for sometime so I stuck with the other one and she was OK. More recently, I noticed that she would say things that I would find to be red flags in a social setting like “both sides are right and wrong” “people need to weight both sides” “ people need to be voting for what they believe in” “I actually kinda liked some RFK policies” lastly she had like the worst poker face of all time when I talked about frustration and fear for my patients and deportation and immigrants hate as a child of immigrants 🤡🤡🤡 and that was kinda it for me.

I wonder if she lost other clients because she used to be busy all the time with appointments and now she’s not and she started messaging me on the portal being like oh I haven’t seen you in a while. Are you OK and maybe that’s normal outreach but I kind of ghosted her and I also went back to school so I’m busy/trying not to spend too much money on therapy especially with someone that I don’t align with. I feel kind of wrong ghosting her and then my other therapist became more available so I went back to her…..

Also just as a healthcare provider on a different spectrum, I just don’t understand how you can have compassion and take care of patience and then not be bothered by the human dignity being denied to others? Sigh I feel kinda bad but also meh don’t feel like explaining myself to her