So, what do you actually do all day?
I have a friend who knows I am a licensed therapist. But he has no idea what I do.
I’d imagine he has some image in his head of a therapist wearing a long robe and holding a wizard’s staff. He seems to connect counseling with “the gift of counsel.” He asks many questions and expects answers to these questions.
Recently, he was talking to me about his mother-in-law and the distrust he feels toward her because of a suspected lie. I simply stated: “It seems like honesty is a really important quality for you.” He seemed put off, almost as if saying, “Well, yes, but what’s that got to do with this? How do I change her?”
For some, advice is the closest thing to a solution. The problem is, problems keep coming. Mo money, mo problems, Biggie said. Well… mo questions, mo problems, a therapist could say.
What We Actually Want From Someone Wiser
There’s a reason we crave advice. We value our elders for a reason: grandparents, pastors, people who’ve lived long enough to have earned some wisdom. Advice has its place, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting it. But somewhere along the way, a lot of us started expecting therapy or mentorship to function the same way. Walk in with a problem, walk out with an answer.
My boss, Dr. Greg Bottaro, said something on this week’s podcast episode that caught my attention:
“That’s not what therapy is. Therapy is not advice. We have elders in the community, grandparents, pastors, people who can give advice. That’s not what therapy is and that’s not what mentorship is. It’s about presence that opens up the deeper reality of who we are — being loved — which then expands and generalizes to the ultimate source of love, who is God.”
Maybe part of this comes from something bigger than any one friendship. A lot of us are a little starved for elders: people who’ve earned the right to speak into our lives just by having lived longer and paid closer attention. When that’s missing, it makes sense to look for it somewhere else, even in a therapist’s office. Not a bad instinct. Just aimed at the wrong target.
Presence Instead of a Prescription
There’s an image I picked up from Adrian van Kaam’s The Art of Existential Counseling (a book Dr. Greg himself later reissued with a new introduction) that’s stuck with me: real change is like a river slowly carving its way through desert land. Sometimes the path is easy; the ground slopes downhill and the water just moves. But sometimes the river runs into a boulder, and it has to go around it, or wear it down over time, one patient pass at a time.
Either way, the river isn’t rushing. It isn’t blasted through with dynamite. It’s finding its own way, at its own pace, and that slowness is exactly what lets vegetation take root along the banks once the path is set.
Advice is dynamite. It might clear the boulder, but nothing grows in a canal that got blasted open overnight. Presence is the slow water. It engages the will instead of overriding it, and that’s the only way the path actually holds.
“All right,” you may say, “but what does presence even mean? Where is that in experience?” Good question.
Presence could be defined as an act of solidarity rather than an act of expertise. It’s the difference between problem-solving and empathizing.
Advice can, even with good intentions, treat the other person as a problem to be solved: an object to be fixed. Like a lot of quick fixes, it can feel good in the short term and cost something in the long run.
Presence is entering someone’s pain instead of standing over it with a solution. And because it treats the person as an end rather than a means, it becomes, even in a small way, a rehearsal of the total gift of self we’re made for. We all long to be treated with dignity, and for someone who pulls the best out of us.
The distinction Dr. Greg is making is easy to say and hard to sit with. Advice is efficient. Presence is slow. Advice gives you something to do. Presence just asks you to be known. And being known, without immediately being fixed, can feel like nothing is happening at all.
But something is happening. When a person sits with you, really sits with you, without rushing to solve you, you start to experience what it’s like to be loved without having to perform, explain, or earn it first. That experience isn’t a technique. It’s closer to a disposition of openness.
In therapy or mentorship, I’ve always pictured a person leaning against a closed door. The therapist is present and ready, but not forceful or directive. They don’t demand that the door open. They only remain present so that, if and when it opens (even slightly!), the natural momentum of the lean carries it further open.
Presence does this. Advice doesn’t.
Advice, in this image, is shouting through the door, telling the person what to do. That’s not the same as connection.
And I think we know this, at least intuitively. Imagine a father who, upon hearing you share marital distress, hands you a list of tips for navigating your spouse’s bad mood, versus a father who simply acknowledges your distress, shares in your pain, and holds that space for you. The father who holds space leaves you feeling far more seen and connected. That level of connection lends itself to greater interior peace in navigating the stuff at home.
Where the Doorway Leads
This is where CatholicPsych’s whole approach makes sense to me. Presence is how the deeper reality gets uncovered: that you are loved. And that particular kind of being-loved doesn’t stay contained in the room. It generalizes. It stretches outward, past the therapist or mentor, toward the One who is the actual source of it.
When Dr. Greg names “the ultimate source of love, who is God,” he’s naming the whole point. The human presence is real, but it’s pointing at something bigger than itself the entire time.
That’s also why mentorship and therapy can’t be reduced to advice-giving, even really good advice. A person who knows they’re loved will often find their own way to the decision anyway, not because someone told them the answer, but because they stopped bracing against being seen. We have a natural disposition to grow once we’re able to identify the obstacles in the way.
The Slower, Truer Thing
I never did give my friend an answer about his mother-in-law. I still haven’t. What I did do was lean and stay present to the honesty he clearly valued, without shouting through the door about what to do with it.
I don’t know if that felt like enough for him in the moment. It probably didn’t; presence rarely does. But that’s the whole risk of it: you give up the quick relief of the answer for the slower, harder work of being known and staying near.
It’s not so different from what the Church calls the Real Presence in the Eucharist. Not a message about love sent from a distance, but God actually staying. Maybe that’s the real gift of counsel: not information handed over, but a person who stays close enough, long enough, that you find your own way to the door and start to lean into it yourself.