How much do your chat with your T?

I don't really chat with my T very often. Just occasionally for a couple of minutes.

I should add that I don't think chatting is bad, it certainly can help calm me, I just know I can small talk for hours and totally avoid the point so I try not to do that.

Not really at all. I always come in feeling I have too much to say for the allotted time, as it is.

Very little chat initially, then none. Because of my former psycho therapist experience, I couldn't handle it. I def think it helps build rapport though. Last week, we did chat a little about a couple of things. It revealed a bit as to who she is as a person. And I not only didn't freak out about it, I actually appreciated it. Woot!

urrghhhh. how are things going with your T, granite?
Yeah, I think that is what my T tries to do as well.

If we chat at all it is only ever a few sentences max.

We chat for a minute or two at the beginning, but not much. We do have a lot of asides/jokes/short anecdotes within the session. But as much as I would love just to chat and joke around with T, I pretty much only get to see her for 50 minutes every two weeks so I try to conserve my time with her.

Quite a bit. But T tends to refer back to whatever I first talked about when beginning the session and Ties it into something about me.

A lot or not at all, depending on how you look at it. I went to an open day of an university a weekend ago, and my pdoc asked how I'd found the university and the bachelor I was interested in. One could view it as mere chatting. One could also view it as working on/thinking of the future, bringing up something positive, etc. I do the latter, and they do too.

"Useless" chatting (pdoc mentioning his computer has been extremely slow all day, T about really liking this room) is generally limited to a line every other session or something.
Unless you also count jokes.
I like it to keep the environment relaxed; to 'unwind' and remember they are human too and not so different from me - instead of the big scary doctor/professional who doesn't give a damn as long as he can tick the "Asked about mood" "Asked about side effects" boxes in the computer system. Sort of the "We're in this together to find how we can make you feel better".

Almost never. Our time is short and I struggle to open up.

And there's also a difference between "Seen the Olympics?" " Yeah, the skating. Person X was really good" and "Seen the Olympics?" "Yeah, I saw Person Y fall just before the finish. That must have been a disappointment. But then again, ..." [something about how the medal isn't everything, the goal is not to be the best but to be good enough to have fun]

I'm not a big fan of superficial small talk. Make it philosophical, or personal [I remember when I fell from my horse just before the last jump, it felt ..] and it probably has some use.

"It's cold out."
"Yes. It makes it harder to get out of bed in the morning."
Is not useless in therapy. But saying "Yeah, it's winter" probably would be.

I never chat with my T. I can't even imagine about what should I chat with him about. It wouldn't help to establish connection for me anyway, I would feel that he is stealing my time.

I think in another words, when my T kind of chat with me, it is more like "checking up" with me, as a therapeutic approach. So the reason of the chat, such as "How have you been last week" or "How have you been doing between sessions?" and I would start talking about some daily stuff.

When you say you see your T twice per week, how much does it cost per week to see your T? I know that seeing a T is pretty costly, unless it is funded by the government somehow, with free support organisations.

So...what do you talk during therapy that you have prepared?

For me personally, I would avoid chats, because I would rather chat with a friend, which is outside the realm of therapy. Seeing my T for around an hour session is really expensive, so I would get onto the trauma stuff for her to professionally work on, so as to not waste time.

We chat a fair amount. I find it very helpful to maintain the connection and also take a break from the heavy trauma work we do.

His fee is $175 (U.S.), insurance covers 60% (he's out of network), so I ultimately pay $70. But I have to pay him up front (I use credit card), then submit to insurance, and insurance sends me a check. We were seeing a marriage counselor weekly at the same rate, but are working on terminating with him, seeing him only biweekly or monthly (probably just one or two sessions to go). So weekly expenses are fairly similar. (H also has an FSA through his job, so some of the money we pay is ultimately untaxed income.) T is helping provide me some support through that, since I was really attached to MC and also was used to some sort of therapy session twice a week.

The twice a week thing is not going to be long-term, I don't think. It's more that I/we feel there's a lot of work to do, and I'm making progress (unlike with ex-T). Going twice a week seems to help with that and also makes me feel a bit more secure in the attachment. I was also used to a fair amount of outside contact with MC and ex-T, and current T discourages that (though allows it to some extent and with boundaries), preferring to offer extra sessions as opposed to e-mail (he does charge for longer e-mails--but his responses to the couple I've sent have been really long and thorough), because it's easier to communicate more clearly in person. So I figure maybe I'll do the twice weekly for a couple months, then try weekly, see how that goes, maybe with an extra session here and there if I'm in a particularly stressful period/having a rough time.

Those are good points. Some of the stuff with my T has been more philosophical. Or if I'm sharing some story/observation (like your second Olympics example) that maybe doesn't have that much to do with the specific therapy topic/goal of the day, it's still revealing something about me as a person and/or past, so that could help T to understand me more, get a more complete picture of who I am. And sometimes the tangents we go on lead to other, more therapeutic topics. And we might not have gotten to those topics without the tangents/chatting.

I should add most if not all of the small talk at the end of the session comes when my scheduled appointment ends... I am her last appointment of the day so we on occasion will talk for about 10-15 minutes. If there happens to be somebody after me we will wrap up about 5 minutes early and we switch over.