You stand at a door. You have stood at it before, in your mind. Maybe many times.
You have thought about reaching out. You have closed the laptop instead. You have looked at a therapist's website and read the bio twice, and then you went and made tea. You have written the first message to a counsellor in Victoria three times and not sent it.
This is the threshold. It is its own place.
I have come to think the threshold is part of the work. People sometimes apologize for how long they waited to book. They tell me, with some embarrassment, that they had the website open for six months. As if the time before therapy were wasted time.
It was not. The time before therapy is the time you spent listening, slowly, to the part of you that suspected something needed to change. The threshold is not a delay. It is a kind of preparation.
A line from Mary Oliver:
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
That question is unbearable, in a way. It is also why people come to therapy. Not always to feel better. Sometimes to feel something at all. To stop the months that are starting to feel like the same month. To remember that there is a self in there making decisions, not only a function moving from Monday to Monday.
People in Victoria book a first session for many reasons. Anxiety. Depression. A breakup. A pattern that has repeated three times now and they are tired of it. Grief. Substance use that has stopped being a coping skill and started being a problem. Becoming a parent. Becoming a person without children when you thought you would be a parent. Career questions. Relationship questions. The kind of question that does not have a name yet.
Whatever brought you to the threshold, it is enough. You do not have to know what to call it.
What happens in a first session?
Less than you fear. More than you might expect.
You will not be asked to tell me everything in the first hour. You will not be expected to perform anything. There is no test you can fail.
What I am doing in a first session, mostly, is meeting you. Listening to how you tell your own story. Noticing where the energy is, and where it goes quiet. Asking about what brought you in, but also about what you would like to be different, six months from now.
I am asking, in a soft way, what your soul is reaching for that you have not yet given yourself permission to name.
The Jungian analyst James Hollis writes:
"The questions our life is organised around will either enlarge or diminish it."
Most people I see arrive with the small questions running in the background. How do I avoid disappointment. How do I stay safe. How do I keep this person from leaving. How do I get my parents to finally see me.
The bigger questions sit quietly behind those. They tend not to come out in the first hour. Sometimes they do not come out for months.
What is my real life? What am I avoiding? What am I capable of that I am pretending I am not? Who would I be if I let myself?
Therapy is one of the few places those questions are allowed to be slow.
A common worry I hear: I do not want to be that person who goes to therapy forever.
You do not have to be. We work in chapters. Some people come for eight sessions and leave with what they needed. Some people come for longer because what they are working with is deeper, and it deserves time. Some people come, leave, and return a year later for a different chapter. All of these are good ways to use therapy.
What I care about is that the work is real. Not therapy as performance. Not therapy as a hobby. Therapy as one of the places you make contact with what is actually happening inside you, so you can do something with it.
There is a Rilke line I keep coming back to in this work:
"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage."
The dragons are what you have been afraid to look at. The thing your family did not talk about. The pattern that you suspect started when you were eight. The version of you that you have not been letting yourself feel.
I do not romanticise this work. It is sometimes uncomfortable. There are sessions you leave heavier than you arrived. But mostly, mostly, it is the slow returning of something you thought you had lost.
If you are reading this from Victoria, or anywhere in BC, and you have been on the threshold for a while, I want to say something simple.
You do not have to know what to call what you are carrying. You do not have to have the right vocabulary. You do not have to come in with a plan. A first session is not a commitment. It is one conversation.
What would change for you if you stopped waiting?
I am Utku Ucay, a Registered Clinical Counsellor in Victoria, BC. I work with individuals and couples in person and online across British Columbia. You are welcome to book a free fifteen minute consultation if you would like to talk briefly before deciding.