On waiting rooms, inner and outer

There is a small room next to my practice where people sit before their first session. It has two chairs, a lamp, and a window onto the courtyard. People rarely remember it afterwards. But something important happens there: it is the last place where you are still deciding whether to begin.

I have come to think most of us carry an inner version of that room. We sit in it for months, sometimes years — before a difficult conversation, before ending something, before starting therapy. From the outside it looks like procrastination. From the inside it feels like being unable to move. Neither description is quite fair.

Waiting has a function. Something in us is testing whether the change we are considering can be survived. The psyche does not move on command; it moves when the container feels reliable enough. This is why pushing yourself to just do it so often produces nothing but a new reason to feel inadequate. The waiting was never laziness. It was a negotiation.

But waiting rooms can also become residences. The negotiation completes, and out of habit we keep sitting there, re-reading the same magazines of our own arguments. One useful question distinguishes the two states: am I still learning anything in here? If every round of deliberation produces the same conclusions in the same order, the waiting has done its work, and what remains is the older, simpler fear of the door.

In sessions I treat the time before beginning as material, not as delay. How a person waits — anxiously, defiantly, secretly hoping to be called in, secretly hoping to be forgotten — usually describes how they relate to their own becoming. Tell me about your waiting room and you have told me a great deal.

If you are in one now: you do not have to leap. It is enough, today, to notice that you are sitting in a room with a door, and that the door was never locked.