Expectant Waiting and Therapy

I don’t have faith in a lot of the things I believed when I was younger, but there is a way faith still exists for me. 

I don’t talk about it much, but I grew up going to a Quaker school from age 5-15, which meant sitting in meeting for 20mins a day. 

In Quaker meeting, there isn’t an authority figure interpreting belief to you — everyone just sits in silence and can share things that move them if they choose.

They call this silence “expectant waiting,” which is essentially holding the door open to let something to speak to you — and this is incredibly similar to the position I take as a therapist. 

The therapist’s task is not to just analyze and report findings back to the client, telling them “the truth” about who they are, but to open a space where important experiences can be encountered by the two of you in an exploratory way. 

By definition this means you don’t know where the process will go or what you will find. Skill here is not in preemptively knowing everything but in being unflinchingly available to receive and explore what shows up. 

So it’s this faith in “expectantly waiting” — trusting that something meaningful will arrive when two people meet and set their goal to be as authentic as possible that’s still real for me.