Dear Therapist: On Preparing the Inner Room

Time spent feeling into yourself before a session is not indulgence — it’s preparation.
Before the door opens, before the client sits, it is worth pausing to notice:
How am I arriving?
Am I rested? Doubtful? Guarded? Awake?
Even the smallest questions — Have I had coffee yet? — are small doors into presence.

The doubt, too, is human. It does not need to be silenced. It needs acknowledgment.
To name our unease is to clear the room within ourselves, making space for another to enter.
Presence requires that we temporarily set aside the self — not to erase it, but to widen it.
Three minutes with a pen can do this.
Write what clouds the mind. Empty it onto paper. Let the page hold what you no longer need to carry into the hour ahead.

This small ritual has followed me through the years. When practiced, it restores something sacred: the stillness before contact.
In those brief minutes of writing, I find that my thoughts soften, my breath returns, and the room feels larger — as if the sky itself has been wiped clean.

This morning, my page held resentment, anger, sadness, paranoia.
Old feelings toward my father, my friends — the submerged currents that therapy, both given and received, continues to stir.
Opening a private practice brought new waves of insecurity; the subconscious, faithful as the tide, delivered its reminders through dreams.

In one dream, my parents pressed me to account for myself. I turned on my father:
“Why don’t you do this for your own feelings toward Mom?”
A classic projection, perhaps — or the psyche demanding symmetry.
In another, a boy my age wore a wire. I tore it away and silenced it, waking with relief.
Was he my shadow? My twin? Myself? The image remains unresolved, but the act of writing it brings shape to the blur.

That is the quiet power of reflection.
Even attention to something as small as the hum of a fly near the window can return us to the present.
We need not always plunge into the subconscious depths; even light observation can be cleansing.

To write as a therapist is a form of reading — of oneself.
It is an act of translation between the inner and the outer world, a bridge between knowing and feeling.
Whether through journaling, art, music, or prayer, find your medium.
Express so that you may receive.
So that when another sits across from you, they may find in your openness a place to rest, to speak, to see themselves reflected — clearly, and without judgment.

That is our work.
To tend the inner room, so the outer one may hold the world.