You Don't Need the Right Words to Start Therapy
If you're anything like me, scheduling an appointment with a new therapist comes with a very specific kind of dread: how am I supposed to explain 42 years of life to a stranger in 50 minutes? At that rate, I won't finish explaining my childhood until sometime next spring.
So I used to show up prepared. Rehearsed short bio, hit the highlights, catch this new person up to speed on why I am the way I am and why I need support right now. Like I was applying for the job of being my own client.
Here's what I've learned since, both as someone who's sat in that chair and as someone who now sits across from it: a good therapist doesn't need your life CV in the first 15 minutes. All they need is for you to show up. The rest just happens.
You don't need the right words. Sometimes you don't need words at all.
And if you're living here in The Hague and English isn't your first language, or even if it is and you've just spent all day speaking Dutch, code-switching, translating in your head, that pressure gets worse. You've already used up your good words on the grocery store, your kid's school, the gemeente website that somehow still won't load properly. By the time you sit down to actually talk about how you're doing, and why you came in the first place, you've got nothing eloquent left. And then you assume that means you're not ready, or not doing it right.
You are doing it right. You just don't know it yet.
So what if I genuinely don't know where to start?
Then you say that. Out loud, in whatever words show up first, however messy. "I don't know how to explain this" is a complete sentence, and honestly, it's a pretty useful one to start with. My job isn't to grade your explanation. It's to help you figure out what's actually going on, and that process almost never starts with a perfect summary. It starts with a fragment, a half-formed thing, sometimes just a feeling you can point at but not name yet.
I've sat with people mid-sentence more times than I can count, watching them stop, restart, switch languages halfway through a thought, apologize for not making sense. None of that has ever once been the problem. It's usually exactly where the real conversation starts.
Does it matter if English isn't your first language?
Not to me. I've worked with people who speak English fluently, people who are still building confidence in it, and everything in between. What I care about is whether you feel like you can be honest, not whether your grammar's clean while you do it. If you need to pause and find a word, pause. If a phrase comes out in the wrong language first and you have to backtrack, that's fine too. I promise I've spoken stranger sentence structures than whatever you're worried about saying.
What if I just cry instead of talking?
Also fine. Genuinely. Crying is communication too, it just doesn't come with a translation problem attached.
The actual point
Therapy isn't a performance, and you're not being evaluated on delivery. You could walk into a session and say four disconnected sentences and a shrug, and we'd still have plenty to work with. What actually moves things forward isn't articulate language, it's honesty, however clumsy it comes out.
Forget the 42-years-in-50-minutes math. Save yourself the speech, and just show up. That's the whole job.