What to Talk About in Therapy When There's Nothing to Talk About

Photo by Joshua Ness via Unsplash

We are currently a few months into the crisis of COVID-19, a worldwide virus that has limited most of the planet’s ability to travel and interact with one another.

Anxiety of all of this aside, the lack of activity that has ensued for many individuals who find themselves stuck at home has made therapy really interesting.

Whether or not you find yourself in the midst of a global pandemic that has forced you to stay home and cease all activities worth discussing, sometimes in therapy you run out of things to talk about.

Many people stop their therapy when this happens.

It makes sense. Therapy isn’t cheap, and it’s time-consuming, and it take a lot of mental and emotional energy. If you use your therapy primarily as a way to vent about your daily life, then of course it makes sense to stop.

But if you want to use your therapy to change your life, not just to vent about it, the lack of day-to-day action can actually be a major gift to your growth.

Without all of the distractions of random yet omnipresent daily stresses, you can now roll up your sleeves and really get to work on some root issues. I’d argue that this is actually when most of the change and transformation happens - when we aren’t jumping around from topic to topic and really dive deep into who we are and who we want to be.

Here are a few things to talk about when there’s nothing to talk about in therapy.

TALK about your relationship with your therapist

Most of us don’t have many relationships in our lives in which we talk about the actual relationship. We might talk about ourselves and our behavior, or the other person and their behavior, but rarely do we look another person in the eye and tell them what they mean to us, and what we’re afraid of and hoping for from them.

The therapy relationship is incredibly strange - it’s basically you telling your secrets and fears to someone who started as a stranger to you and often remains kind of a stranger, even as you grow closer to them.

So why not talk about it? What does your therapist mean to you? Who do they represent? What do you wonder that they’re thinking about you? What are you thinking or wondering about them that you’re afraid to share? Ask your therapist if you can dig into it with them; we’re all trained for this stuff, and they should be able not only to hang with you, but to guide you through it.

get a full understanding of your relationship patterns

You probably do some of this under normal circumstances, but chances are that the current state of the world and the self-quarantining has shrunk your relational world some. What better time to look at how you show up in relationships?

You have enough distance from others right now that you can use this pause to think about what works and what doesn’t in relationship, and to discover exactly how you operate in a less defensive way than when you’re actively entangled with a bunch of people.

Bonus: If you’ve talked to your therapist about your treatment relationship, you’ll be able to sort this all out much more easily.

Work on Resolving - Not Just ReCOVERING FROM - your trauma

This one’s a doozy, and it’s one everyone wants to avoid until they absolutely can’t anymore. That’s because trauma work is a real b*tch.

There’s a range of styles and approaches in trauma work. You can work on learning tools to cope with the fallout or symptoms of past trauma on one end, which is probably the least distressing way to go about it and what works well if you have a really busy life and don’t have the time or space to fall apart in any way.

On the other end of the spectrum, you can do body-based work to actually resolve or “get over” the trauma, by which I mean you can get to a point where it doesn’t have an impact on your functioning in any real way anymore.

Doing the latter is extremely dysregulating (which is a fancy clinical way of saying it makes you feel like sh*t), because it essentially has you return to the traumatic memory and “complete” it - which teaches your brain and nervous system that you are now safe and that the trauma is over.

The perfect time to do this heavy-duty work is when there’s nothing else to talk about in therapy - when your “real” life is calm enough that you can afford to take an hour-long nap after your session to recover, when there are no events or other distractions to make you feel like you’re missing out when you go to bed early.

And if you’re really ready to end therapy, end it right

Let me be clear: You don’t owe your therapist anything. You can certainly send an email or a text or leave a voicemail ending treatment. But don’t you want to maybe face the anxiety of saying goodbye as practice for your other relationships, at the very least? You owe it to yourself to learn how to say a proper goodbye in the context of a meaningful relationship - tell your therapist you want to end during an actual session, and not at the very end, so that you have enough time to talk about what it means to end and to deal with any feelings that come up for you. And to give your therapist a chance to give you some feedback if you want it, or resources if you need them.

Sometimes the gift of nothing to talk about is clarity about what you need

My own experience during this period of social distancing has made me a lot more forthright about what I need and want from my life, including from my therapy. It’s helped me to home in on my own goals for my treatment and personal growth, which has been an incredible experience. I hope you’re able to get some of that, too.

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Sepideh Saremi is a psychotherapist, executive coach, and the founder of Run Walk Talk, which combines mindful running and walking with meaningful conversation.

By the way - this article is for informational and educational purposes only. It’s not intended to diagnose or treat any mental health condition. Please reach out to a professional if you need mental health support.