Healing in Therapy: The Sacred In-Between Where Growth Happens

As a therapist, I’m often struck by how much of the work lives not in the big breakthroughs, but in the quiet, unnameable spaces between them. This reflection is about that tender in-between—where healing, becoming, and deep presence unfold.

⸻

There’s a quote I recently encountered: “The most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what’s in between.” It was meant for travel, maybe—but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it in the context of therapy.

So often, we focus on the destination—relief, clarity, transformation, healing. But I’m learning that the most meaningful part of the therapeutic process happens not in the insight or the resolution, but in the space between those things. That quiet, almost imperceptible moment when something shifts in the body. The soft flicker of awareness before it finds words. The ache that arises when someone touches something true for the first time, and then lets it hang in the room, raw and unfinished.

That’s the sacred space. The in-between.

Lately, I’ve found myself holding this awareness in session. A client begins to say something that’s just on the edge of knowing, or sits quietly, eyes lowered, feeling into something they can’t quite name. I see them not as a puzzle to solve, but as a painting in progress—shifting, complex, full of meaning that can’t always be captured in language.

It reminds me of looking through a rain-covered window. The image is softened, blurred by my own subjectivity, yet it’s still so full of life and beauty. I will never fully see someone as they see themselves—and yet, it’s precisely that effort to see, to feel alongside them, that feels so sacred.

It’s a profound and humbling thing to bear witness to another person’s becoming. Not to fix or define, but to hold space while the person they’re meant to be begins to stretch and stir beneath the surface. I think this is what it means to meet someone in the in-between: to stay present through their uncertainty, to listen for what’s forming even when it’s faint, and to let the relationship itself be the bridge they walk across.

In my own life, I often struggle with wanting to know more, do more, be better. I long for clarity and mastery—especially when intellectual engagement feels draining or overwhelming. But this quote has softened something in me. It reminds me that there’s no rush to arrive. That healing in therapy—and in life—is meant to be felt in the body first, integrated slowly, lived through gently.

Maybe, for all of us, the real healing isn’t about where we’re going.

Maybe it’s about what we’re willing to feel along the way.

This is how I try to hold space in my own practice—as a therapist who believes in slowing down, listening deeply, and honoring what can’t yet be named. If this way of working resonates with you, you can learn more here.