Working with Oversharing Clients

Clients sharing too much or inappropriately in therapy can undermine effectiveness and derail therapeutic progress, but there are strategies to help get the session back on track.

Related articles: Ethical Therapist Self-Disclosure, Validating and Reassuring Clients: Benefits and Potential Traps, Compliance vs Engagement: What’s the Difference?

Introduction

As the client’s monologue continues, you realise that your eyes are glazing over, you are not following the minute details, and you suddenly sit up, wondering how the session could have strayed so far from the collaboratively produced goals for it. Moreover, you realise that somewhere along the way, you just gave up on making interventions, as the client is barely letting you get a word in edgewise.

Welcome to the world of client oversharing! This article addresses what it is, how it shows up in session, why it happens, and how you can respond to get the client back on track.

What is oversharing?

Someone who discloses excessive, unnecessary, and/or inappropriate personal information – details which go beyond the relevant boundaries of the communication context – can be said to be oversharing.

It can occur in various settings. It may happen among friends or other social gatherings, via text messages or emails, on social media platforms, during first dates or early in a romantic relationship, in work environments, and certainly in therapy. In social or work situations, oversharing can lead to discomfort, misunderstandings, or even loss of friendships, romances, or jobs.

In the therapeutic environment, it relates to the disclosure of information that may not align with the stated therapeutic goals. It diverts the focus from more productive exploration and discussion as the client heads off on unrelated tangents. In group therapy, there is the additional danger of excessive personal details possibly triggering other group members, retraumatising them, or at least provoking intense emotional response (Abraham, 2025; Brown, 2025). The danger for you as therapist is that, when oversharing is allowed to continue without being dealt with, you will feel hugely ineffective as a therapist.

How oversharing shows up in therapy

We claim as therapists that we want to be transparent about what we are doing, and that openness is the healthiest communication style. But at what point does a client’s opening up cross the line from “openness”, “sharing”, and “transparency”, to “oversharing”? Here are some of the ways that oversharing can show up in session.

Non-goal-oriented topics: say, constant talk about the latest celebrity gossip or fashion trend, or where the client is headed on holiday.

Excessive focus on others or unrelated personal stories: long monologues about the feelings or problems of the -ex that jilted the client and/or significant narration of unrelated personal anecdotes.

Going off on tangents: repeatedly straying from session-relevant utterances to aspects irrelevant to the therapy.

Inappropriate detail: minute reporting of details unnecessary for the context, even if the general topic is aligned with therapeutic goals.

Too much information: occurring when explicit details of intimate relationships are revealed without relevance to the therapeutic context.

Overemphasis on minor details of a significant life event: probably avoiding the deeper emotional aspects that are vital to explore.

First session (or early) deep disclosure: highly traumatic experiences being shared before appropriate therapeutic alliance has been built up: overwhelming and progress-hindering from the beginning.

Blaming external factors or others: as opposed to the client delving into their own thoughts, emotions, and long patterns which are making them miserable.

Reassurance seeking: frequently needing validation for thoughts or actions leading to unproductive sessions (adapted from Abraham, 2025).

Why oversharing happens

Clients are always trying to meet needs, and oversharing is one way that can happen. Below are need-centred explanations for why it happens in session.

A coping mechanism to distract or vent feelings

As therapists, we may ask, “Why is the client telling me this?” if there seem to be too many, or inappropriate, details. Beyond that, we want to know, “Why are they telling me this now?” If it is a question of continually veering away from the agreed direction or goals of the session, what is the client avoiding? What do they somehow seem reticent to address? You may question whether the vast information you are getting is in fact a coping mechanism to help them distract themselves from what they dread facing.

Alternatively, the client may be needing to vent and/or gain support. Some people have little experience in how to do that effectively, or in a therapy session.

A response to trauma

People who have experienced traumatic events may feel compelled to share their traumatic experiences over and over. This behaviour is also sometimes called repetitive disclosure. In telling you about it, they are trying to make sense of their experience so that they can move on.

Conversely, clients trying to gear up to face their trauma may overshare by way of going around the event with clearly irrelevant details, veering off on tangents, or taking the energy “out of the room” with unrelated anecdotes.  Here, we may need to ask what is behind that oversharing that, in fact, is keeping relevant, appropriate sharing from happening. Paradoxically, this oversharing can be a potent communication: that something (behind the spoken words) needs to be explored further – when the time is right – in a nonthreatening way.

Due to a lack of emotional regulation or boundaries

Adverse childhood experiences, trauma, and other life situations (including parents who chronically overshared) can mean that clients struggle to regulate themselves emotionally. They may overshare impulsively to release negative emotions. Lacking clear boundaries, clients may overshare too early in the therapy (as noted above), before trust can be built, or before they are emotionally ready to deal with what comes up.

To feel validated

The reassurance-seeking we noted above occurs because clients want to feel seen, heard, and understood. They may have had a past of being made wrong and overshare because they want to be confirmed as right. Continued sharing with no filters often impels the therapist to react, usually by providing the sought-after validation or agreement. The therapist is human, after all, and may be caught unawares feeling the need to keep things polite and comfortable.

When clients’ oversharing is centred on blame of others, the direction of therapeutic interventions is clear; the therapist needs to help the client find the strength and resilience to take responsibility for their role in what is happening, or for making it better. Similarly, the oversharing of constant reassurance-seeking begs for work on helping the client move toward an inner locus of control and sense of agency.

To build relationship quickly

First-session or early disclosure can often be a sign that someone wants to establish a deep connection quickly; the client may have the hope of bonding with the therapist by this type of oversharing; it can have unintended consequences if the client is not actually ready to work with the material that they are disclosing.

For reasons of attention-seeking

Related to seeking validation, oversharing in session may occur to elicit praise, admiration, or other positive responses. This form of attention-seeking may be related to narcissistic, histrionic, or other personality disorders. Here you get an unrelenting stream of updates on their thoughts and feelings; the response in the therapist is often to feel quite drained, as having to constantly provide that sort of response is mentally and emotionally fatiguing.

Let’s look at specific strategies that help re-balance oversharing tendencies (we note that what is considered appropriate boundary-wise is culture-specific, varying widely between cultures) (Psychologia; 2025; Brown, 2025). 

How therapists can respond

If you are caught up in needing to respond to an oversharing client, it is easy to throw up your hands and scream, “Help!” Part of that is likely due to the frustration of observing how unaware of their behaviour the client is – and how difficult it can be to stem this typically entrenched habit.

While it is true that they would struggle to change immediately, you can assist them to move toward a more relationship-enhancing speech style by working with three concepts embodied in an “ABC of overshare rebalancing”: awareness, boundaries, consequences. That is, you can help them become aware of what they are doing and how they are doing it; you can set boundaries with them around the oversharing in session, encouraging them to learn how to set boundaries on their own behaviour (once made aware of it); and you can continue to point out the negative relational consequences – both in general life and in session – of the behaviour.

Awareness

Self-awareness is subtle. Caught up in their narrative, clients may not realise how long they have been talking, or how many extra-to-requirement details they have divulged. Those with ADHD or other neurodivergent brains may further experience time-blindness, blocking their realisation. Yet if they are doing it in session, they are likely to be doing it in general life as well. Gently calling attention to what is happening (and the consequences of it) can help kickstart a series of psychoeducation interventions and strategies.

Contexts and triggers

As clients come to have a glimmer of awareness about the behaviour, they can be asked about contextual triggers: in what contexts do they overshare? What are their triggers? Can they keep a journal to help them be aware of this? Some situations which trigger oversharers are:

1. Feeling socially anxious
2. Being around certain personality types
3. Consuming alcohol
4. Feeling tired or emotionally drained
5. Specific topics of conversation (Brown, 2025)

Categories of information

One strategy clients can use to prevent themselves oversharing is to categorise information from public to private on, say, a scale of 1 to 5:

1. Public information – facts anyone could know (one’s name, profession)
2. Casual information – general preferences or experiences (favourite movies, vacation spots)
3. Personal information – one’s values, beliefs, and general challenges
4. Private information – specific personal struggles, relationship details
5. Intimate information – deeply personal experiences, traumas, secrets

Before sharing, the client is advised to quickly assess what level the information falls under, then consider whether their relationship with the listener matches that intimacy level. As a general rule, it’s best to stick to levels 1-2 with acquaintances, levels 1-3 with friends, and save levels 4-5 for close friends, family, or you, their therapist (and as we have noted, even in session it’s possible to disclose too quickly, undermining recovery from trauma).

Pausing before speaking or hitting “send”

Along with that moment of assessment about the category of the information to be disclosed, clients can be urged to pause and reflect on the question: “Is this information relevant, appropriate, and helpful to share in this context?” If someone asks a question the client does not know how to answer without oversharing, advise them to try saying: “That’s a thoughtful question. Let me think about it for a moment.” This gives them a moment of mental space to formulate a response that reveals only what they are comfortable sharing.

Obviously, in this digital world, the consequences for sharing something that we later regret having disclosed – whether on social media or by email, text, or other messaging system – can be severe; there is now a written record of what we said, able to haunt us – or make relational, career, or legal trouble – forever more. A good idea to prevent impulsive disclosure is for the client to set the missive aside for an hour or more and then go back to it, asking themselves:

• Would I be comfortable if this message were shared with others?
• How would I feel if I received this level of personal information?
• Does this strengthen or potentially strain our relationship?

The client can consider sending a screenshot to a trusted friend before sharing something they are uncertain about, asking if the friend thinks they are oversharing (Brown, 2025; Leyvas, 2025). Another potentially helpful tool for clients is using AI tools such as ChatGPT as a “coach” to discuss appropriate communication within specific scenarios.

Pivoting back to the listener

An invaluable, “advanced” skill is that of deftly making a “safe” response and then handing the “floor” back to the listener with a related question, thus redirecting the conversation away from topics where the client might be tempted to overshare. Here are some redirection techniques:

• The bridge: Acknowledge the question, then redirect (“That’s an interesting question about my two years between jobs. It reminds me of an article I read recently about new ways people are enjoying a “gap” year. How do you manage transitions between different life periods?”)
• The boomerang: Return a similar but less personal question (“I’m still figuring out my best exercise routine since the surgery. What about you? What sorts of sporting activities do you like?”)
• The light deflection: Use humour to gently sidestep (“My dating life? It’s like a reality TV show nobody would watch! Speaking of shows, have you seen anything good lately?”) (Adapted from Brown, 2025.)

Boundaries

Therapists can begin the psychoeducation of an oversharing client with boundary-setting statements, such as the following:

1. “Let me interrupt you for a second to ask you a question before you continue.” These boundaries delineate the scope of conversation, ensuring that discussions remain aligned with the client’s therapeutic goals. 
   
2. “I’m sorry; I got lost. Can you please explain how that relates to the goals we have today/for your therapy?” This is more pointed, but still an honest request from the therapist to understand how seemingly overshared material relates to the client’s goals.
   
3. Some therapists have been known to advise clients in advance that “I will stop you when I have enough information to move on so that we can meet your therapy goals as efficiently as possible.” The gentle interruptions may occur at times because therapists perceive that, by diving too deeply into therapeutic stories, clients will derail the session, re-traumatising themselves or causing panic attacks. Thus, they use both verbal and non-verbal cues to help clients comprehend the limits of productive sharing. 

Through these boundary-setting strategies, therapists can gently redirect conversations back to the therapeutic focus when oversharing occurs. The therapist’s role as a guide and facilitator becomes especially prominent in instances of oversharing because they must navigate the fine line between fostering client expression and maintaining therapeutic progress.

Over time, as trust and the therapeutic alliance grow, therapists can gently help the client to notice the negative consequences that they are encountering – probably more often outside of session than in it – through their oversharing.

The consequences of oversharing

Many are the people who come away from an interpersonal encounter and grimly ask ourselves: “Why did I say all that?” The chances are high that most of us have overshared at one time or another. For those that do it habitually, we note that, apart from what the person says, oversharing can be about when, why, and to whom one says it.

That is, the oversharer can inadvertently violate unspoken norms (typically culturally bound) around context or setting, the other person’s comfort level, the depth of the discloser’s relationship with the person hearing the information, or the person’s motivation for sharing (Brown, 2025). All of these can result in unintended consequences which reveal the dark side of “openness” or “vulnerability” gone wrong. Consider these consequences.

Oversharing makes others feel uncomfortable or overwhelmed

Some information just should be kept private. As an example of when oversharing could have happened and did not, we note the case of a work colleague who was undergoing treatment to transition from being a woman to being a man. Fortunately, he set boundaries at work by outlining the broader details of what was happening, but asked people in the company to “respect his privacy” around some of the more private questions related to anatomical and other changes. Had he felt the need to share such details, many people in the company would have felt extremely uncomfortable.

Risks to safety and security are increased

Oversharers may put themselves, their family or friends, or even their homes at risk when information about, say a travel itinerary, the kids’ school location, one’s address, or personal documents is shared online, such as on social media.

Imbalance of relationship may occur

When one person overshares and their conversational partner does not, it creates an imbalance of power whereby the non-oversharing person knows much more about the oversharer than the oversharer knows about the person not disclosing so much. This may not be problematic in itself, but can lead to unhealthy relational dynamics, such as resentment on the part of the listener if they feel like they are always the one who has to listen with little chance to share or, worse, too much power in that person’s hands, if they would be inclined to use the information unethically against the oversharer. In general, it may have the effect of people shying away from the oversharer, who demonstrates little interest in them through dominating the conversational space.

People seek therapy, of course, so that they can have someone to listen to them, and it is expected that the client will be speaking for a substantial part of the session; that said, imbalance can still occur if the client engages in a difficult-to-interrupt monologue that defies polite interruption for appropriate therapeutic interventions.

Professionalism is lost

People who overshare at work find that their colleagues lose respect for them and may regard their behaviour as unprofessional. Depending on what is shared, oversharers may also be regarded as chronically complaining rather than just getting on with life or with what is required at work.

Those oversharing may feel regret or embarrassment afterward

Related to the above point on professionalism, the sudden realisation that one has said too much, in whatever context, gives the sinking feeling that lack of awareness of one’s unmet needs has caused others’ perceptions of them to decline: unfortunate anywhere, but probably a “career-limiting move” when it happens at work!

People may stop trusting the oversharer

Oversharing can be used as a shortcut to closer, more intimate relationships, but if a person overshares too much or with the wrong person, the opposite may occur. Some people may begin to question the person’s judgment and discretion (Psychologia, 2025; Leyvas, 2025).

Vulnerability vs. oversharing

Not all personal disclosure is oversharing. Constructive vulnerability—sharing appropriate personal insights that build genuine connection—is healthy and important for relationships. The key is learning the difference.

To the client who protests that “I’m just trying to be open and vulnerable”, we can offer these strategies (relevant to out-of-session encounters) to differentiate between relationally helpful vulnerability and oversharing, replacing the latter with the former.

• Sharing feelings rather than explicit details (“I’ve been going through a challenging time” vs. detailed account of their problems).
• Focusing on insights rather than incidents (“That experience taught me to value transparency” vs. sharing every detail of the experience).
• Sharing strengths alongside struggles (“I’m working on better work-life balance and have made progress by setting these boundaries…”) (Brown, 2025; Leyvas, 2025).

Conclusion

Oversharing is a fairly common occurrence which is not limited to clients; most of us have done it on one occasion or other. Although clients may engage in oversharing in session to meet unmet needs, appropriate therapeutic response – facilitating awareness, setting boundaries, and helping client see negative consequences – can help them to find alternative ways to meet the needs without hindering their own therapeutic progress (in session) or jeopardising work or personal relationships outside therapy.

Key takeaways

• Oversharing is when someone discloses excessive, unnecessary, and/or inappropriate personal information in details which go beyond the relevant boundaries of the communication context. It can occur in many contexts: work, personal, therapy.
• It shows up in therapy as too many or irrelevant details, too-early disclosure, or reassurance seeking.
• Clients overshare to meet needs such as to distract or vent, as a response to trauma, due to a lack of boundaries or emotional regulation, to gain validation or attention, or to build relationship quickly.
• Therapists can respond to oversharing by helping clients with the ABCs of rebalancing oversharing behaviour: assisting clients in gaining Awareness of the behaviour, setting Boundaries in session (plus teaching clients to set their own boundaries), and helping clients see the negative Consequences of oversharing.

References

• Abraham, S. (2025). Can you overshare in therapy? A guide to openness. Grow Therapy. Retrieved on 12 June 2025 from: https://growtherapy.com/blog/when-you-disclose-too-much-in-therapy/    
• Brown, K. (2025). 15 ways to stop oversharing at work and in relationships. Science of People. Retrieved on 12 June 2025 from: https://www.scienceofpeople.com/stop-oversharing/
• Leyvas, M. (2025). How to stop oversharing: 4 simple strategies that work. Balanced Wellness. Retrieved on 12 June 2025 from https://balanced-wellness.org/blog/how-to-stop-oversharing.
• Psychologia. (2025). How to Stop Oversharing: The Art of Holding Back. Psychologia. Retrieved on 12 June 2025 from: https://psychologia.co/how-to-stop-oversharing/