The Question I Ask in Every Session
by Catherine · 12 July 2026 · Psychology & Living
Catherine, a Toronto therapist with seventeen years of experience, describes her central question to clients: when they last did something no one but themselves will ever know about. Her thesis is that a society of constant visibility and measurability has stripped many people of the last refuge for unobserved existence. This quiet exhaustion – a life perpetually performed for an invisible audience – lies at the heart of her seemingly successful clients' struggles.
Catherine has practiced as a therapist in Toronto for seventeen years, focused on people who appear successful from the outside and feel empty within — a combination so common in her practice that she eventually developed a single question she asks in nearly every first session: "When did you last do something no one but you will ever know about?"
Most of her clients stall on that question. A lawyer known for his flawless record of wins needed three sessions to find any answer at all, and when he did, it was something small: as a teenager he'd written short stories in secret, never shown anyone, never published, and stopped eventually because it had "no future." Catherine has learned that these invisible, useless, never-evaluated acts are often exactly where people meet themselves most directly — without the audience for which most other actions in life are secretly staged.
Her thesis, which she states carefully because it doesn't sit well with everyone, is this: a society that has made every achievement visible, measurable, and shareable has taken away, from many people, the one place where they could simply exist for themselves, without evaluation. That produces a quiet, hard-to-name exhaustion that doesn't feel like classic depression so much as a life constantly performed for an invisible audience.
"I don't tell anyone what to do in secret," Catherine says. "I only ask whether they still have something they don't show. For a surprising number of people, the answer has been no for years — and that's exactly where we start working."
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