The Room That Got Aired Out

Three years ago I was in my own therapy. I'm a therapist, and I think every therapist should be doing their own work, and not enough of us are. I was working through things about my father. He wasn't abusive, just absent in that particular way some fathers are absent: physically present, emotionally somewhere else entirely. I had spent years intellectualizing it, which is embarrassingly on-brand for someone in my profession. My therapist asked me to close my eyes and notice what was in my body. Standard somatic work. I've done it a hundred times with clients. I was not expecting anything unusual. What happened was that I became aware, and I want to be precise here because I think precision matters, of a presence that felt parental in quality. Not my father. Not the idea of my father. Something that felt like what I imagine a fully present father would feel like. Patient. Without any agenda. Just there. I started crying in a way I haven't cried since I was a child. My therapist told me later she almost said something but decided to let it happen. It lasted maybe eight minutes. When it was over I felt like something structural had changed. Not healed. I want to be careful with that word. But changed. Like a room I had been avoiding had been opened and aired out. I don't have a clean theological framework for it. Raised loosely Episcopal, then nothing, then loosely something again. What I know is that what I felt in that room did not come from me. It was not a product of the exercise. I have spent fifteen years learning to tell the difference between what is real and what I'm constructing, and I am telling you that was real.