Themes & topics

Talk to Claude (or the in-app chat) about the same thing enough times and a shape starts to emerge — work stress that keeps circling back, a relationship that keeps coming up, a pattern of self-criticism that shows up under a dozen different names. Themes & topics is Therapy's attempt to notice that shape for you, so you don't have to hold the whole history in your head.

What it actually is

After a session, Claude (or the in-app chat) saves a short summary — not a transcript, a summary, written the way you'd describe the conversation to a friend. Over time, those summaries accumulate. The themes insight looks across all of them and pulls out the topics and threads that keep recurring: things like "conflict with a manager," "sleep," "comparing myself to others," or "a specific relationship." When a theme shows up in session after session, it rises to the top of your dashboard instead of staying buried in individual notes you'd have to reread yourself.

How it's computed

An AI model — the same kind of model you're talking to in the session itself — reads your saved summaries and looks for topics that repeat across them, in your own language rather than a fixed clinical taxonomy. It's pattern-matching on text, not a structured survey: there's no checklist of pre-defined categories it's slotting you into. If you keep describing a specific dynamic with a coworker, it gets named for what it is, in words close to the ones you used.

This runs periodically, not live during a session, so a theme showing up in your dashboard reflects your history up to the last time it ran, not necessarily what you talked about five minutes ago.

How to read it

Treat a recurring theme as an invitation to look, not a verdict. Seeing "conflict with family" surface three sessions running doesn't mean anything is wrong with you — it might just mean it's genuinely unresolved and worth more direct attention than it's been getting. Themes are most useful as a mirror: a way to notice what you've actually been circling, which can be hard to see from inside any single conversation.

It's also worth reading themes next to their frequency, not just their existence. A theme that appears once might be a passing week. One that appears across two months of sessions is a different kind of signal.

What it can't tell you

A theme is a description, not a diagnosis, and not a ranking of what matters most in your life. It can't tell you why something keeps coming up, whether it's improving, or what to do about it — for that, the emotional trajectory and technique effectiveness insights are better starting points, alongside an actual conversation with someone qualified. It also only knows what you've chosen to bring into a session; if something big is happening that you haven't talked through with Claude or the in-app chat, it stays invisible to this feature, same as it would to any notebook you hadn't written in.