Talking to a Mental Health Professional: A Beginner’s Guide

Opening Up to a Mental Health Professional When You’re New to Therapy

Last Updated on June 30, 2025 by Prath

Reviewed by April Justice, LICSW

A mental health professional saying hi to a client during therapy.

Imagine seeing a mental health professional for the first time.

Are you thinking of someone in a suit, looking stern, and writing down every single thing you talk about? A professional is unlike anything represented in the media.

In reality, most therapists are warm and friendly. They’re not here to judge you from behind a clipboard. But the idea of talking to a therapist for the first time can feel scary.

And in addition, when you think of professionals as strangers, you may struggle to open up and experience the life-changing benefits of therapy for yourself.

Your hesitation is understandable. However, growth, inside and outside sessions, can happen only if you let yourself be seen, little by little.

Hence, in this blog, we’ll explore why it’s sometimes hard to open up and provide practical tips to help you feel more comfortable with your therapist.

Why You May Struggle to Open Up to a Mental Health Professional

In the first therapy session, many people may struggle to express all their emotions.

For example, you may feel distant from your inner experiences, either due to talking to a mental health professional or due to less obvious reasons like wondering if you’re even allowed to talk about certain topics.

Below are three common reasons why you may struggle to open up to a mental health professional.

1) Fearing the Consequences of Negative Emotions

The first reason you may hold back from opening up is the fear of what could happen if you talk about important feelings.

Avoiding your emotions could be a habitual tendency. For example, you may have previously opened up about feeling anxious at work. During that time, your friend may have invalidated you and asked you to ‘stop complaining about everything.’

The negative incident has been wired in your brain as the ultimate truth. Your experience is telling you that the consequences are dire every time you talk about your negative emotions.

Another reason could be the fear of psychological pain. For example, acknowledging intense emotions to a mental health professional may make you feel embarrassed, ashamed, or helpless.

2) Struggling to Verbalise Inner Processes During the First Therapy Session

One of the most common challenges during mental health support in Australia is simply figuring out what to say.

When your therapist asks something like, ‘How are you feeling right now?’ or ‘Where do you feel that in your body?’, you may freeze. For many people, such questions can be confusing, especially if you’ve never analysed your emotions before.

If you’ve spent most of your life ignoring your emotions, trying to articulate them to a mental health professional may feel like learning a new language.

You might find yourself second-guessing everything: ‘Am I saying the right thing?’, ‘What do they want me to say?’ or ‘Why don’t I feel anything right now? These thoughts can make you feel inadequate, not because something is wrong with you, but simply because you’re yet to learn how to verbalise your inner processes.

3) Feeling Disloyal to Loved Ones

Some people hesitate to speak honestly in therapy because they fear it’s disloyal to their loved ones.

If you grew up in a household where you were told to ‘keep things to yourself,’ the idea of sharing personal stories with a therapist might feel like a betrayal.

You might catch yourself spending more time explaining your family’s behaviour or adding context like, ‘But they meant well,’ or ‘They are also struggling with many issues.

You may feel the need to ‘protect’ your loved ones simply because you don’t want the mental health professional to get the ‘wrong idea’ about the people in your life.

4 Tips To Open up to a Mental Health Professional

It’s hard to get much done in therapy without talking about yourself. Yet, one of the most challenging aspects of the first therapy session is initiating a conversation.

Here are some tips to make the process easier:

Start a Journal
Practice, Practice, and More Practice
Start Small
Challenge Yourself

1) Start a Journal

Starting a journal is the simplest way to feel liberated and constructive during the first therapy session.

Like fitness, journaling and mindfulness also require consistent effort and commitment. In fact, in the past 30 years, scientists have discovered the benefits of putting pen to paper with your most intense and deepest thoughts and feelings.

In a 2006 study, young adults who spent only 15 minutes journaling felt less anxious and were better able to express their emotions. Most of the participants were not even used to journaling before the research opportunity presented itself.

When you journal, you’re literally training your brain to name and understand emotions, a process called affect labelling. This method helps you label your emotions.

How to Practise This

Take out 5-10 minutes of your time daily to write about anything that’s on your mind. Don’t restrict yourself to major events or emotions.

Below are some prompts that can help:

What made me feel uncomfortable today?
What do I wish I could say out loud but haven’t?
If I could say one thing to my therapist without fear, what would it be?

Before you wonder how to start therapy, try to read through your journal and highlight 1–2 key points you’d like to begin with. Then, find a mental health professional at TYHO, and address each of these points in the first therapy session.

2) Practice, Practice, and More Practice

Remember how you struggled to draw a straight line when you were young? But now, you can draw it much better than before. This is due to practice.

Similarly, opening up to a mental health professional can also be learned with practice. Neuroscience shows that repetition or consistency creates neural pathways to maintain new behaviours (like being emotionally expressive), and these behaviours start to feel more natural over time.

Each time you express an emotion or practice the skill of opening up, you’re building that mental ‘muscle’ to do better next time.

How to Practise This

Try speaking aloud to yourself in private. For example:

‘Today I felt anxious when…’

‘I think I’m scared because…’

If you don’t have privacy, try to record a voice note to yourself about your day. You can also talk about a specific emotion you felt today, and dissect it as much as possible.

For example, imagine you fought with your mother. You walk away from her and find some space alone. You’re not even sure what emotions you’re feeling or why the fight happened in the first place.

Was it anger? Hurt? Guilt? Or all of the above? Identifying these emotions may help you open up to your mental health professional, who will then explore what triggered your emotional and behavioural reactions.

3) Start Small

You don’t have to open up about your deepest trauma in the very first therapy session. In fact, you don’t even need to talk about it in the second or third session.

The idea of seeking mental health support in Australia is to learn scientific tools to become resilient, better equipped to handle future issues, and navigate relationship conflicts in a healthy way. However, the means and methods to reach this goal can vary for different individuals.

While some people may feel comfortable opening up in the first therapy sessions, others may take their own time to explore deeper issues.

If you relate to the latter (ie need more time), start small. Talking about relatively smaller issues can help regulate your window of tolerance (ie a concept from trauma therapy that refers to the optimal emotional zone where you can function and reflect without feeling overwhelmed).

By starting small and adjusting the pace to suit your needs, you allow your nervous system to relax and remain regulated.

How to Practise This

Begin with neutral or lower-stakes topics, like:
- ‘I was nervous about coming today.’
- ‘I’ve never done this before, and I’m not sure what to expect.’
Share a recent, small frustration (eg an argument at work) to get used to expressing emotions.

End the session by reflecting: What was easy to share? What was hard? This provides your therapist with insight and helps you build your emotional range over time.

4) Challenge Yourself (Gently)

Opening up to a mental health professional may require you to be honest, vulnerable and put yourself in an unfamiliar state.

But sometimes, the only way forward is to gently challenge yourself. Therapy is hard work, and there’s no getting around experiencing its benefits.

This doesn’t mean forcing yourself to share everything all at once. Rather, it’s about opening yourself up to the possibility of exploring emotions and thoughts that you may have previously buried deep in your mind.

But in doing so, your mental health professional may also teach you that being vulnerable is okay. Therapists refer to this process as exposure-based emotional processing.

Challenging yourself is powerful because it interrupts avoidance. And avoidance, while comforting in the short term, is often what keeps people stuck in long-term distress.

How to Practise This

Here are some easy ways to challenge yourself to open up during the first therapy session:

Label your hesitations out loud before opening up to your mental health professional. Try saying, ‘There’s something I want to talk about, but I’m scared you’ll judge me.’
Set a ‘stretch goal’ for each therapy session. A stretch goal is something that feels slightly outside your comfort zone but not overwhelming. For example, you can try talking about something you usually avoid (like sex or money), share a memory that makes you feel emotional, or label a difficult feeling instead of just saying ‘I feel weird’.
When you’re unsure how to begin the conversation, try rehearsing ahead of time. Before talking to a mental health professional, write down sentences like, ‘I wasn’t planning to talk about this, but I think I should,’ or ‘This is something I’ve never said out loud before…’
Reflect on your first therapy session. What was the session like? What did you talk about? What issues did you want to bring up, but couldn’t due to the fear of opening up? Writing down your thoughts and reflections can help you better express your emotions in the next therapy session.

Key Takeaways

It’s perfectly normal to struggle with opening up to a mental health professional, especially during your first therapy session.
There are many reasons people hold back, including fear of judgment, struggling to verbalise their emotions, and the fear of betraying their loved ones by talking about them.
Practical steps, such as journaling, starting small, or even challenging yourself to open up step by step, can make the entire process a little easier.

If you’re spending your time searching for ‘therapists near me’ or looking for mental health support in Australia, we can help.

At Talk Your Heart Out (TYHO), all Australian Therapists have the right qualifications and soft skills to conduct high-quality therapy.

The hardest part is often just getting started. But once you do, there’s no stopping you from experiencing the true benefits of therapy.

Find a Therapist near you.