The Missing Body and the Split: The Comfort of the Clinic in the Online World

Sitting in my clinic, sipping on some thoughts because coffee has caffeine (chuckle), I wonder if I’ve lost my grip on humor. Am I too isolated these days that my humor has dried up? I think and think, rotting slightly in my well-crafted, hand-picked chair. The book starts speaking to me; our conversation is loud and keeps getting louder. It speaks to my life, my boredom, and my need to feel stirred.

Another session waits. Let’s make some notes. (As if I make notes after every session, but the therapist's image needs to be kept intact here.) Sweet, notes are done. Back to reading. Back to writing.

Days go by. I haven’t met my friends. Conversations with family are sparse. I haven’t stepped out much. It is fine, fine in the way it has been fine for days and will likely remain fine. But is life meant to be merely fine? Or do we long for a quality of life that feels textured, inhabited?

Why does this image of a therapist, somewhat stuck in a therapy room, luxuriating in time—feel unsettling? I say stuck because where does one go, really? And yes, one could argue: then don’t be in private practice. Everything comes with a cost, especially independence. Independence often comes paired with isolation, unless that isolation is actively resisted.

Perhaps not everyone wants to be part of an institute or a structured collective. But what about community? Community offers belonging, a place to be shared rather than merely occupied. This isn’t only about therapists. It could be anyone. Stepping outside is effortful. And what happens when we remain in a room long enough for it to close us off from the world?

I notice this strange pairing: solace in the room, discomfort in public. What might this be about? Therapy, after all, was once in-person—not “offline,” but embodied. Changing times demand adaptation, yes, but this adaptation has altered the psychic ecology of therapy itself. For both therapist and patient-person, therapy now often unfolds in spaces already saturated with comfort—physical and mental.

But wasn’t therapy also about movement? Physical, psychic, emotional, social? Earlier, patients travelled to sessions. They made time. They encountered the world, the commute, and sometimes even other people in the waiting room. Something happened before and after the session. Now, when physical movement is missing for both therapist and patient-person, what shifts in the work? What is lost if we don’t consciously try to bridge this gap?

We begin to treat therapy as facilitating only one kind of movement—mental, verbal, reflective. But the body cannot be separated from the psyche. Can the therapist step out of the room? Can the patient-person create rituals before and after sessions, openings and closures, so the work doesn’t collapse into the same chair, the same screen, the same inertia? Can psychic space truly shift without any physical movement at all?

I sit with these questions, especially as online therapy becomes increasingly convenient and the body remains mostly out of frame. I have my own ways of inviting the body back into the clinic. Are they evolved? Absolutely not. But they are attempts—gestures toward conversation.

This is what I do, and why.

I ask my patients to take conscious time before and after therapy for a short walk. If they were coming in person, they would already be moving, already transitioning. Movement changes mental space. I ask them to sit in a consistent place—a therapy space, even at home. And if they are in the same city, I encourage in-person sessions. Therapy is unconscious-conscious work; it requires more than thinking and meaning-making. It requires real-time movement.

We often hear the analogy: the gym is for the body, therapy is for the mind. I beg to differ. The gym requires motivation, mental cooperation, emotional regulation, and social presence. Therapy engages the mind, body, psyche, and the social world together.

The same applies to the therapist.

Movement is essential—not only the permission to rot in bed at times, but also to be seen in public. Why? I know my reasons. Others can find their own. Stepping out allows you not to be a therapist for a while, to experience the mundaneness of life. There was a time when I felt people at work should simply open up to me, even socially. Why? Because I was a therapist. But I’m not their therapist.

Perhaps it is comforting for therapists to remain only therapists. The comfort works both ways. But can we allow play? Absurdity? Different social experiences where no one is asking us to hold, contain, or interpret?

Sometimes, stepping out of the room is also a clinical act.

Keep Moving