When the Session Ends: Holding the Fire After Saying the Unsayable in Therapy
Image Credit: Susan Wilkinson
You’ve been attending your sessions and there comes a point where you feel safe enough to say it.
The thing you swore you never would disclose.
It’s the shame that lived so deep underground you couldn’t separate it from yourself, or even if you did, it’s locked so tight in a box and away from any light.
The thought or memory or confession that felt unspeakable.
And then it comes out.
You notice the room is still intact. The therapist hasn’t flinched. The clock keeps ticking. The session ends.
And then you are left with it.
The Fire That Follows
What I hadn’t expected after my own disclosure was what came next. I didn’t leave the session with a sense of calm or resolution. I left with a fire. I searched for a while for an image to capture what I felt and the one above seemed to be accurate to my experience.
A swirl of energy in my chest and stomach, hot and uncontained, as though I had torn open something long-suppressed and it refused to go back underground. It was restless, alive and impossible to ignore.
In the immediate aftermath I did what many do: I reached for something grounding and ordinary. I had a beer in the garden, letting the evening air soothe the edges. For a short while, it helped.
But the following days were harder. The fire didn’t leave. It asked to be contained, and it asked to be carried and on occasion, it asked to destroy things.
Image Credit: Getty Images
The Temptation to Disclose Everything
One of the most difficult realisations in those days was that not everything that emerges in therapy can, or should, be immediately shared in relationships.
Honesty is a great policy, yes.
But there are moments when disclosing everything, especially unprocessed and still-burning material, can strain intimacy rather than deepen it. There’s a subtle line where sharing becomes martyrdom: “Here, you hold this for me,” instead of carrying it responsibly myself.
And yet hiding or withdrawing and isolating completely can also erode closeness.
This is the tightrope: not denying, not offloading, but learning to compartmentalise with care.
To keep enough of the truth alive inside me to continue working with it, without placing the full burden on those closest to me.
It’s such a hard balance, and one that can’t be expressed totally and accurately in this blog, but only touched on.
Perhaps one of the hardest lessons therapy teaches: how to hold what surfaces without cutting yourself off from intimacy, and without collapsing intimacy under the weight of unprocessed pain.
Image Credit: Point Normal
Containment versus Confrontation
At first I told myself that I had to confront the fire itself: wrestle with it, master it, put it to bed.
But almost immediately, I sensed that that was the wrong move.
This material, or rather the parts of me that carried it, were like frightened children.
Confronting them too harshly sent them fleeing deeper underground.
What was needed instead was something a bit gentler: containment, not confrontation.
A willingness to sit nearby, to keep them company without demanding their full trust all at once.
But how does one contain fire?
The Body’s Answer
The body found its own way.
I dropped to the floor and did push-ups. Squats. Anything to channel the restless sympathetic energy pulsing through me.
I wasn’t trying to be some kind of machine; I was just trying to stop myself from combusting.
And strangely, it helped. Movement became a way to taper off some of the charge, to ground myself back into the present moment.
It wasn’t a cure. The fire remained. But it was a little less overwhelming, a little more liveable.
It struck me that this was the nervous system at work. It was leftover sympathetic arousal discharging itself in the simplest way it knew how. What I had thought of as panic was, in fact, my body showing me how to survive the aftermath of truth.
Image Credit: Getty Images
Retreat into Fantasy
Of course, I didn’t only physically move, I psychologically retreated.
I disappeared into fantasy at times, letting imagined worlds absorb me.
For a while it worked. It numbed the edges of the fire, distracted me from the intensity. But underneath, the energy still wouldn’t let up.
I realised as well that fantasising wasn’t a failure but it was a survival strategy. It bought me some time and space.
But it could not integrate what had been spoken. At some point, I had to return to the fire.
Therapy Doesn’t End at the Hour
This is the part of therapy that often goes unspoken: the hours after the session, when the therapist is gone and you are left holding what has surfaced.
Many people assume therapy will leave them lighter, calmer, clearer. Sometimes it does. But more often than that, it leaves you more awake, more alive, and therefore more unsettled, rather than that caricature of being more composed and embracing the world as you step outside the consulting room.
The work of therapy is not confined to the hour. It continues in the in-between: the way your body trembles after disclosure, in the images that force themselves into your dreams at night, in the instinct to hide and the counter-instinct to emerge.
And I had to learn this, which flipped my expectations on its head:
To expect therapy to resolve everything neatly within the session is to miss the deeper rhythm of healing.
It is not a straight line but a spiral.
Image Credit: Getty Image
Dostoevsky as Companion
In my solitude, I found myself strangely turning to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
This wasn’t therapy or advice, but it was a mirror.
The central character, Raskolnikov, with his turmoil and oscillation between pride and shame and bouncing between hiding and exposure became a strange companion to my own being and situation. I began to see fragments of myself in his restless pacing and his inability to integrate the enormity of what he had done. I assure you I didn’t murder anybody.
Reading him, I felt less alone in my own aftershock.
Literature can sometimes do what nothing else can, which is to hold up a reflection of our internal world without demanding we explain or resolve it, but just sitting with it in itself is okay to do so.
The Paradox of Disclosure
What disclosure really teaches us is paradox.
On the one hand, it liberates. To say the unsayable is to reclaim your voice, to shatter the illusion that silence was safety, opening the possibility of being known.
On the other hand, it destabilises. Silence may have been suffocating, but it was familiar. Once broken, the nervous system reacts into fire, restlessness, shame and urgency.
The body doesn’t always experience truth as relief; sometimes it experiences it as threat.
And so disclosure is not the end of the work. It is the beginning of a new layer which I call, not suprisingly: learning how to hold what has been released.
Image Credit: Arturo Esparza
Containment as an Act of Care
What I am learning slowly and clumsily is that the task after disclosure is not to banish the fire but to befriend it.
To create containers, however temporary, that signal to the body: you are not alone with this.
For me those containers are simple: movement, solitude, literature.
For others, they might be journalling, prayer, walking, art, or talking to a trusted friend.
The form matters less than the intention: to meet the energy without overwhelming it.
This is not confrontation. It is accompaniment, and it is the hero’s journey.
What This Means for Therapy
From the outside, therapy can look like a series of conversations.
But from the inside, it is more like entering a furnace.
You bring in fragments of yourself that have long been hidden, and they are met with the steady gaze of another.
The therapist may not flinch, but you will. Not always in the consulting room, but often after.
The work of therapy is as much about learning to survive that fire, and to keep returning to it, not running away, as it is about insight or analysis.
Final Thoughts
I don’t have a neat ending here, because I’m still in the middle of it. The fire hasn’t gone. Some days it feels manageable; other days it surges back with force.
But what I know is this: once spoken, truth will not be silenced again. The task now is not to hide, not to bury, but to learn how to live alongside it until it softens of its own accord.
Maybe that’s the heart of therapy. Not catharsis in the moment, but the slow and often uncomfortable process of learning to carry what once carried you.
So, if you leave therapy not lighter but more restless, not calmer but more awake, know this: you are not failing. You are in the fire. And the fire is where things begin to change.
Image Credit: Levi Meir Clancy