“I’m going to start today’s session by challenging you not to try to make me laugh during our time together. This is not because you are not an amusing person, but I wonder where we might get if we did away with the idea of trying to entertain.”
“When you say you’re ‘addicted’ to buying shirts that don’t fit and wearing them anyway, do you feel an actual compulsion at work here, or is this another case of online jargon?”
“I was struck, last time, by your statement that what you were looking for was a kind of exfoliant for the personality. I’d like to look into how it came about that your psyche has melded skincare with morality. There seems to be a real connection between aesthetic effort and emotional effort for you—would you say that’s accurate?”
“I admire your interest in authenticity, though I do not think it makes a woman—or any person—a cliché to ‘also’ feel bad about their neck.”
“You say you have no need to tell your family about your dates with women, since none of them have been serious. I wonder if they might get serious if you started taking them more seriously, or if you’re consciously avoiding doing so to save yourself the administrative hassle of coming out.”
“This urge to throw your phone off a bridge or into some major body of water is one we’ve found ourselves talking through in multiple sessions. You imagine feeling very free. Indeed, you describe this feeling of total elation at the idea of being parted from your phone by chance or force. What is stopping you from—and I’m sorry if this sounds obvious, but . . . what is stopping you from simply turning it off?”
“What do you think it would feel like . . . to delete your cat’s Instagram account?”
“I wonder whether it might benefit us to differentiate between the concepts of friendship, extended community, and imagined audience. I think there is some elision at work, and really these are very different kinds of relationships, with very different obligations and mores. And then, of course, one of them exists in the mind only.”
“If you don’t enjoy smoking and aren’t addicted to cigarettes—as you say, you don’t like them enough to buy them yourself and only smoke socially, when your friends or acquaintances are doing it—why don’t you quit? And if you don’t want to quit, can we dig in a little bit to the source of your reaction just now, when I called you a smoker, because that was quite a strong reaction.”
“The journal-based worksheets I’ve given you are merely exercises to get you thinking about your feelings and responses to those feelings. I cannot therefore provide feedback or ‘grade’ them.”
“When you say that you feel you’ll never find another person willing to be in a long-term relationship with you, that makes me feel very personally sad. I wonder if we might ask whether you are willing to be in a long-term relationship with yourself?”