“Aren't I Normal?” — The Question Beneath the Question
“Doesn't everyone have intense emotions?”
My client stares at me, waiting for my response. In that moment, I am reminded of another session in which a client laughed dismissively, saying,
“Oh, does anyone really know themselves?”
These are not unreasonable questions. But they are deflections, and often a signal to me that the conversation has approached something tender within the client, so that they want to steer the focus away from them. My response tends to be the same:
“I will happily answer that question, but right now we're not talking about everyone. We're talking about you.”
What I don't always say out loud is that the question itself is an answer. Nobody asks “doesn't everyone feel this way?” about something they consider unremarkable. We don't ask if everyone breathes air. We ask when we suspect that the thing we're describing might make us strange. The question is not really a question. It's a bid. Tell me I'm not the only one. Tell me this doesn't mean what I'm afraid it means about me.
I've come to think of this as one of the most common hidden requests in the room, underneath dozens of different sentences. It rarely announces itself as “please reassure me I'm normal.” It arrives instead as intellectual curiosity, or philosophical musing, or a joke. A client will say something like “isn't everyone a little bit narcissistic?” right after describing a moment of self-absorption of which they're ashamed. The generalization is the disguise. It lets the client gesture at the discomfort without having to stand fully inside it.
Why the Detour
There's a reason this move is so instinctive. Shame thrives on the belief that there is something wrong with us—something that makes us bad, unlovable or unimportant—and that if others see it, they will reject or ignore us. Reaching for “everyone” is an attempt to avoid that isolation. If the feeling belongs to everyone, it isn't a verdict on us.
So when a client asks, “doesn't everyone have intense emotions?” I hear two questions; the surface-level question, which is genuinely interesting and which I could answer with research, with philosophy, with my own opinion. And underneath it, quieter, the real question: Is what I just told you a sign that something is wrong with me?
Answering the first question, however thoughtfully, would let the second one go unaddressed. And the second question is the one that brought the client into the room in the first place.
Staying With It
This is why I redirect back to them. Not because the abstract question doesn't matter, but because answering it would collude with the deflection—it would allow the client and me to look away from the fear that made them reach for the deflection to begin with.
Often, when I redirect the focus back to them, there's a visible shift. A small exhale. Sometimes a flicker of relief, sometimes a flicker of resistance—as if some part of the client was hoping I'd take the bait and let them off the hook. When I don't, and when nothing catastrophic follows, something begins to loosen. They discover, sometimes for the first time, that being seen— not as an example of “everyone,” but as themselves—does not produce the rejection they feared.
The Reassurance They Actually Need
I want to be clear that I'm not withholding reassurance out of a belief that clients should sit in discomfort for its own sake. It's the opposite. I think most people who ask, “isn't this normal?” are starving for reassurance, and I want to give it to them—just not the version that lets them stay hidden.
Telling someone, “yes, everyone feels that way” is a kind of reassurance, but it's reassurance about everyone. It leaves the client's specific experience unexamined. The more useful reassurance—the one that actually treats the underlying fear—sounds different. It sounds like curiosity about their particular version of the feeling. It sounds like naming that what they've shared doesn't change how I see them.
It shows them it is safe for them to be known.