Never done therapy before? Curious about starting, but nervous or unsure what it will be like? What are you supposed to say? What do you need to do? How should you act?

Don’t worry. I’m here to provide you with THE ULTIMATE CHECKLIST FOR STARTING THERAPY!

  1. Show up.
  2. Uhhh, yeah… that’s pretty much it, actually.

I’ve had numerous clients who, even after some years of working together, will still tell me they spent all day wondering what they were supposed to talk about. Sometimes a client joins a session and immediately tells me everything is fine, nothing new, business as usual, and that it’ll be a struggle to fill the time today.

Often, these end up being some of the most productive sessions we have. It’s fascinating.

I get it, though. We all have our own ideas of what therapy will look and feel like. It can be scary. It can make us nervous or uncertain, and we can feel like we don’t have much to talk about.

But what’s important to remind ourselves of is this: showing up is not only enough to get started, but it can be therapeutic in itself. It’s part of the process.

Think about it: You might be someone with little to no motivation, feeling lethargic or fatigued, and yet you still managed to put clothes on, comb your hair, pluck an eyebrow, and log on (or walk in) for the appointment you scheduled.

You did that in spite of everything those feelings were telling you. Even if you wanted to quantify it as only a 1% therapeutic impact (and I’d argue it’s much more), that’s still more than 0 and, therefore, progress.

And that’s just one example. I could share many more, but the point I’m trying to make is that therapy consists of a unique relationship unlike any other. However, what it has in common with all other relationships is that it’s important—no, necessary—to show up.

That includes the relationship you have with yourself.

A lot of my work is with people who struggle with self-esteem, and I often remind them that the way they treat themselves shapes how they approach everyone else. I can already feel myself wanting to go off on a tangent, so let me just connect the dots here: showing up for yourself is part of that relationship, and therapy is a great place to practice it.

And if you do sit down and have no idea what to say? Say that. “I don’t know what to talk about today” is a perfectly good place to start. Your therapist can work with it, and more often than you’d expect, it leads somewhere that matters.

If any of this resonated with you, amazing! If any of this made you wish you owned a time machine so you could travel back to a time before you clicked this link, well, hopefully it was more of the former than the latter.

Regardless, I wrote this with the intention of reducing any stigma around starting therapy and to show that it doesn’t have to be a big, scary, daunting event. And I didn’t write it as a sales pitch for my practice, either. Maybe I’m not the right therapist for you, and that’s okay!

Just know that no matter which therapist is sitting across from you (or looking at you from their laptop), they don’t need you to have everything figured out. They just need you to show up.