The answer to that question is both, “It varies greatly,” and “It’s often very similar.” I experience clients coming to me with a wide range of challenges, and as we start to unpack the issues and uncover the underlying feelings and beliefs, the same themes start to emerge. Here are some examples!

• “I feel irritable most of the time, I snapped at the barista, I lose my temper with my kids or partner.”
• “I can’t seem to motivate. There’s so much I know I should be doing, but I just can’t seem to get started.”
• “I feel sad most of the time these days. I don’t know why. Everything just feels blah.”
• “I’ve had a big upheaval in my life (job ending, relationship ending), and I feel like I don’t know who I am anymore.”
• “I’m frustrated with my partner (or they’re frustrated with me). When we argue, things seem to flare up really fast. We want to figure this out and communicate better.”

Yes! These are all very different issues. So the clients and I start exploring. We may zoom in on pivotal moments in their experience. We may consider the different feelings, thoughts, and beliefs that arise in those moments. We may explore childhood memories that come up, situations that have a similar vibe to what they’re feeling nowadays.

And in those explorations is where I notice the similar themes emerge (I phrased these as “we” statements because I believe they happen for all of us):

• We’ve been so focused on ____ (career success, taking care of others, being who we thought we should be) that we have lost connection with our true selves.
• We’ve actually got a lot of big feelings churning around inside of us, and we don’t know how to express them. Or we don’t feel comfortable expressing them. And so they’re just in there, and they’re affecting us throughout the day.
• We’ve been so focused on “doing the right thing” that we’re in a state of constant low-, mid-, or high-level anxiety, and we’ve lost connection to our sense of empowerment and ability.
• We experienced things in childhood that hurt us, and that hurt has never had a chance to be shared, validated, or healed. These hurt younger-parts of ourselves are still inside us, and they often unknowingly affect our feelings and actions nowadays.
• We’ve lost connection with our sense of our own worth.

And so in therapy we work on multiple levels. We can work on tools and strategies for dealing with irritability and anger; for prompting motivation, goal setting, and action taking; for improving communication in your relationships. And we also work on affirming our younger selves (going back to those hurt parts and giving them the care and attention they deserved). We work on expressing our feelings so that they’re not just tearing us up inside. We work on getting to know ourselves for real. We work on reconnecting with our inner strength and trust in our own abilities.

I love helping clients with this stuff!