A few weeks ago I was standing in a hotel ballroom with about two hundred people who want to become better therapists. We had been working hard in the first of two days we’d be together. Then I asked them to do something simple and a little frightening — to turn to a partner, drop the clinical script, and let themselves actually see the other person for sixty seconds.
And then I took it up just a notch. I asked them to notice that they were being seen.
You could feel the room change. Eyes filled. Bodies shifted. Some people laughed the nervous laugh of someone who has just been caught being human. No fixing. No need to pretend. No technique. Just two people letting their guard down enough to know and be known. And then they settled in, like a person settling into a hot bath that was too hot for just a moment but then was awesome.
By the time it was over, the texture of the whole room was different. We had become, briefly, a we.
I have run that exercise on a screen too, in a video room full of little squares. It is not nothing. But it is not that. The difference is real, it is deep, and the science of the last few years has begun to tell us why.
I have been doing more live training lately — including a large Boot Camp coming up in Cleveland this fall — and people keep asking me, kindly, why. It’s a fair question for a guy within weeks of being 78. Yes, I reach more people online, more cheaply, with less jet lag, less carbon, and less wear and tear on this old body of mine. All true. But turning caring humans into the kind of therapist their future clients will need is boosted by actual presence.
Here’s why.
My colleagues and I have argued that psychology took a wrong turn when it fell in love with the average person. There is no average person. Each of us is a unique, living system — a particular history, a particular body, a particular arrangement of fears and loves. The science we have been building instead, what we call an idionomic approach, starts from that uniqueness instead of averaging it away and then tries to find general principles. “Idio” – the unique person; “nomic” the general principle.
And here is a general principle: We did not evolve to be unique and alone. We evolved, as an intensely social species, to track uniqueness in each other — to read this specific face, this specific mood, this specific mind — and, crucially, to sense whether someone is doing that for us. Human beings: the we fostered the me that yearns for we. We notice whether we are being noticed in our particularity. Does this person actually see me? Not a category I belong to. Not a role I am playing. Me.
We have a word for it. We say we matter. It is the same thread I pulled on when I wrote in my last blog that belonging is something you do, and that students flourish in places where they are known and recognized. To matter is to be included as the particular person you are.
When two people are together in the same room, their bodies begin to cooperate in ways neither of them notices. In genuine face-to-face contact two brains fall into step with each other — a coupling that drops sharply when the same conversation moves to texting, and is thinner over screens generally. Mutual eye contact pulls two nervous systems toward a shared rhythm: heart rates and breathing edge closer together. Shared laughter — that helpless, synchronized thing that happens when something is funny in a room — predicts how much two strangers come to like and trust each other.
It’s not mystical – it’s a bandwidth we evolved to detect and that our history amplifies. A person near you is broadcasting hundreds of tiny signals a second — the in-breath before someone speaks, the lean-in, the flicker of a flinch — and your body is reading and answering all of them in real time, beneath the level of words. That two-way traffic is how we register, in the gut and not just the head, that we are being seen in our uniqueness by someone who is, in that same moment, being seen by us. A screen carries a lower-band width representation of a face and a voice. The raw human questions — do you see me? Do I matter to you? – get a thin and sometimes uncertain answer.
Now think about learning to be a therapist. Whatever the method and whatever the protocol, therapists need to learn to sit, openly, in the presence of another person’s pain without fleeing it — to feel their own fear rise and stay anyway, to take the perspective of someone whose life is nothing like their own, to bring their values into the room and act on them while their heart pounds. Those are the very psychological flexibility skills I have spent a lifetime studying. They are embodied, relational processes.
That is what presence gives that the screen cannot fully: rich messages we evolved to wait for: you are not alone, you are seen — you belong.
Let me be careful here. Books and online learning help enormously in therapy and self help. I’ve put a large chunk of my life into creating them. The outcome data show how useful they are. But there is a layer of personal and emotional formation that requires giving and receiving these messages.
So, at this stage of my life, I am getting on planes (and working hard to reduce my carbon footprint elsewhere!). It is why I value rooms full of people willing to be a little frightened together. Not because the screen and printed pages failed us — they didn’t — but because there is a kind of human becoming that asks for presence, and I would rather show up for it than just write about it. That word “about” was built metaphorically long ago from words that meant to circle around something from just outside of it. “Out” will never be “in” – we long ago knew that words and images will never fully capture human experience. The modern world needs to absorb that lesson as we lurch ever deeply into virtual reality. We need to protect a shared space where a unique human being can enter into another person’s uniqueness and both see and be seen.
Scientific references for this blog can be found from these DOI numbers: 10.1038/s41598-024-52587-2; 10.1177/10888683241252036; 10.1007/s10919-016-0245-9
