I’ve been in and out of therapy for most of my life, and I’ve always been under the assumption that therapy sessions are pretty much all confidential, bound by HIPAA, except for in a few circumstances like preventing harm to the client or others.

One of my family members is a family therapist and over the holidays she was sharing stories from her and her colleagues’ clients. I was kind of put off by this but didn’t want to start anything. None of the information made the clients identifiable, so I thought maybe this was the loophole but that still doesn’t sound right to me. Is this normal?