What to Talk About When You Have Nothing to Bring to Therapy
Sometimes, people apologize when they sit down for therapy.
“I don’t really have anything today.”
“Nothing big happened this week.”
“I feel like I should have something specific to talk about.”
No need to apologize y’all!!!
Therapy doesn’t require a crisis, a big reveal, or a weekly highlight reel. You don’t need to arrive with a perfectly packaged insight or a list of things to fix. Showing up with “nothing” is still showing up, and it often tells us more than people expect.
Sometimes “nothing” means things are steady. Sometimes it means things feel flat or numb. Sometimes it means your nervous system finally has a little breathing room and doesn’t quite know what to do with the quiet yet. And sometimes it just means… it was a normal week.
When there’s nothing obvious to talk about, therapy tends to drift away from what happened and toward how things felt. What lingered after a conversation. What annoyed you more than it probably should have. What you brushed past without thinking twice.
This is where the small stuff comes in.
The awkward interaction you keep replaying. The moment you shut down or sped up and didn’t know why. The thing you almost said and then didn’t. None of it is too minor. None of it is wasting time.
Sometimes the “nothing” points to patterns. Maybe you’ve learned to minimize your own experience. Maybe you’re used to only paying attention when something is wrong. Maybe things have always needed to be bad in order to count.
Outpatient therapy leaves room for this kind of noticing. The slower pace gives us space to be curious without needing to fix anything right away. To pay attention to how your system moves when there isn’t an obvious problem to solve.
And here’s something people don’t always realize: your therapist actually gives a shit about all of it.
Not just the big moments or the dramatic weeks. The boring sessions. The quiet ones. The “I don’t know, it was fine” updates. That’s often where trust gets built, and where therapy starts to feel less like a performance and more like a relationship.
You’re not doing therapy wrong if you don’t know what to talk about. You’re doing it honestly.
So if you sit down and realize you’ve got nothing prepared, that’s okay. We can start right there.
