Presence means being wholly attentive and deeply attuned to another person's words, body language, feelings, and avoided emotions. Presence involves holding space for every part of a client's experience, including shameful or unlovable parts. Presence builds trust, creates safety, and enables vulnerability, making techniques effective rather than merely procedural. Presence underpins secure attachment in children and strengthens adult relationships when caregivers or partners set aside distractions and offer full attention. Presence can be cultivated through simple practices that increase capacity for sustained, loving attention.
By presence, I mean the ability to be wholly attentive and deeply attuned to another person's experience: their words, their body language, the feelings they express, and the ones they struggle to avoid. Presence means holding space for every part of a client's experience, even the parts that feel shameful, uninteresting, or unlovable. Without presence, therapy becomes just a toolkit of techniques bound together by theory, but stripped of real transformative power.
New therapists often get caught up in methods-such as challenging beliefs in cognitive-behavioral therapy, offering interpretations in psychodynamic work, or asking open-ended questions in client-centered therapy. These skills matter, of course, but they're secondary. What really opens the door to transformative change is presence: the quality that builds trust, helps clients feel safe, and makes it possible for them to risk being vulnerable.
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