Apologia

The therapist who calls herself liberatory charges four hundred dollars. The sliding scale has a waitlist. The waitlist is two years.

A locked door, a sign: welcome.

Rhetoric approaches sideways, solicits your yes before you have spoken.

The therapist arrives with a framework. The client arrives with a body.

One knows in advance. One does not.

We live from good soup— what nourishes, what we return to.

The therapist who does not know what they live from will feed themselves with someone else's hunger.

The dwelling hollows out the space where welcome becomes possible.

You cannot invite someone into a home you do not have.

A room furnished with someone else's unsorted boxes is not welcome. It is storage.

A client says: I felt like I was nothing, but it wasn't scary.

The therapist says: A mystical experience.

The client nods. They no longer know what it was.

A client says: I felt like I was nothing, but it wasn't scary.

Silence.

Like the weight of having to be someone just... set down.

Now they know.

The DSM: suffering seen from outside.

The intake form: questions the institution decided matter.

The treatment plan: a language insurance recognizes.

None of these is the face.

I use these instruments. I bill. I diagnose. I document.

I hold them the way you hold a photograph of someone— it is not them.

The client sits across from me.

Not their history. Not their attachment style. Not the target we identified.

The face exceeds what I think I know.

They can say something that overturns.

Asymmetry:

Everyone talks about the therapist's power.

The therapist holds responsibility. The client holds refusal.

Before technique, ethics. Before interpretation, the face. Before knowing, willingness.

The client is your teacher. Everything else follows, or it is violence.

This document totalizes. Claims. Positions.

The saying becomes said.

So: apologia. A movement away— apo, from + logos, discourse.

You can say that's not it.

I am obligated to listen. You are not obligated to speak.