You’re Allowed to Ask: Making Sense of the Strange Language of Therapy

There’s a particular kind of silence that can arrive in a therapy room when your therapist says something like, ‘Let’s just sit with that for a moment.’ It’s the silence of trying very hard to look like you know what that means. Of nodding along while a small part of you wonders whether you’ve missed a memo.

You haven’t. Therapy is a specialised space with its own language, and most people arrive without a glossary. That’s not a failing. It’s just the starting point.

Here are some of the phrases that come up again and again, decoded — plus a few ways to ask for clarity when the words don’t land.

‘Sitting with it’

This doesn’t mean you have to sit in discomfort indefinitely, and it definitely doesn’t mean ‘stop talking and figure it out alone.’ It’s closer to: let’s not rush to fix this in the next thirty seconds. Let’s give the feeling a bit of room before we tidy it away.

If you’ve just said, ‘I think I’m angry at my dad,’ and your therapist says, ‘Okay — can we sit with that?’ they’re usually inviting you to notice what happens next. Maybe your jaw tightens. Maybe you want to laugh. Maybe you want to change the subject. All of that is useful information.

If it helps, you can treat it as a pause rather than a performance. You don’t have to produce anything impressive during it.

‘Holding the tension’

This one sounds vaguely like a yoga instruction, but it usually means: two things can be true at once. You can love someone and be furious with them. You can want to change and feel frightened of changing. You can be relieved a relationship ended and grieve it deeply.

The phrase isn’t asking you to resolve the contradiction today. It’s asking whether you can let both pieces exist without immediately deleting one of them. Therapists sometimes call this ‘holding both’ or ‘working with the ambivalence.’ It’s not indecision — it’s range.

‘Notice that’

A gentle instruction, not a command. ‘Notice that your shoulders just went up’ is different from ‘Your shoulders are up — why are you tense?’ The first is an invitation to observe. The second can feel like an accusation, even when it isn’t meant that way.

If your therapist says ‘notice that,’ you’re allowed to say what you notice, or to say you don’t notice anything. Both are honest answers.

‘Where do you feel that in your body?’

This isn’t a test of your interoceptive skills. It’s a way of checking in with the physical layer of an emotion, which can sometimes hold information that words haven’t caught up with yet.

You might feel a tight chest, a hollow stomach, heat in your face, or absolutely nothing at all. ‘I don’t know’ is a perfectly valid response. Sometimes the answer arrives five minutes later, on the bus home.

‘Let’s park that’

Not a dismissal. Usually a pacing decision. If you’ve opened up three big topics in ten minutes and the session is heading towards the end, your therapist might suggest parking one of them so you’re not left dangling.

It can feel frustrating to hear this, especially if you’ve finally built up to saying something. It’s okay to say, ‘I’d rather stay with this one, actually.’ Pacing is a negotiation, not a decree.

‘What comes up?’

An open door. It means: what’s appearing in your mind or body right now, without filtering it for relevance first. A memory, a song lyric, a random image, a feeling of irritation — none of it is wrong. Therapy is one of the few places where the seemingly irrelevant can turn out to be the thread.

‘Unpack that’

A slightly overused metaphor, but it simply means: let’s slow down and look at the pieces. What happened? What did you make it mean? What did you feel? What did you do next? You don’t have to unpack everything at once. You’re allowed to say, ‘I don’t know where to start.’

‘Boundaries’ and ‘containment’

These get used a lot. Boundaries are usually about what you can and can’t offer — time, access, emotional labour, contact between sessions. Containment is a fancier word for the frame that holds the work: the same time each week, the agreed length, the confidentiality. It’s not cold bureaucracy. It’s the container that makes the messy stuff safer to open.

The permission slip

You are allowed to interrupt. You are allowed to say, ‘I don’t know what that means.’ You are allowed to ask, ‘Can you say that in a normal way?’ or ‘Can you give me an example?’ You are allowed to say, ‘That phrase doesn’t land for me — can we try different words?’

Some useful scripts, if you want them:

• ‘I’m not sure I follow — could you say more about what you mean by that?’
• ‘Can you give me a concrete example?’
• ‘I think I understand the words, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with them.’
• ‘That sounds like it should mean something to me, but it doesn’t yet. Is that okay?’

Therapy isn’t an exam, and your therapist isn’t marking you on vocabulary. The language is there to help, not to exclude. If a phrase doesn’t fit, the useful move is usually the simplest one: say so. That’s not a disruption to the work. It’s part of it.