God Walked Into My Therapy Room (And Nobody Asked Him to Leave)

I’m not a religious man. I don’t go to services. I don’t pray. I’ve never had a conversion experience and I don’t expect one. If you’re looking for a psychiatrist who will integrate faith into your treatment, I’m probably not the right fit.

But I need to tell you about something that keeps happening in my office. Something I don’t have a clinical term for.

A patient said it best. We’d been working together for about six months — difficult work, the kind that leaves you both a little raw. We’d reached a moment of genuine honesty. Not the performative kind. The kind where everything drops away and two people are simply present with each other, holding something true between them.

She looked at me and said: “I feel like God is in the room right now.”

I knew exactly what she meant.

Beyond the Clinical

Psychiatry has a complicated relationship with spirituality. Freud was openly hostile to religion — called it an illusion, a neurosis, something to be outgrown. And for decades, the field followed his lead. Spiritual experiences were symptoms to be explained, not phenomena to be respected.

I disagree. Not because I’ve found faith, but because I’ve been in enough rooms with enough people to recognize that certain moments of human connection have a quality that transcends the clinical.

I don’t believe in God. But I believe in what happens when two people are fully present with each other. Whatever you want to call that — I’ve felt it. And so have my patients.

— Dr. John S. Tamerin

Call it grace. Call it presence. Call it the therapeutic alliance operating at peak efficiency. The label doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s real, it’s powerful, and most clinical training completely ignores it.

What Creates the Sacred Moment

These moments don’t happen in every session. They can’t be manufactured. But after fifty-five years, I’ve noticed the conditions that make them possible.

Radical honesty. Not the confessional kind, where someone vomits up a secret and then waits to feel better. The deeper kind, where a person says something they’ve never said — maybe never even thought clearly — and in saying it, discovers a truth they didn’t know they were carrying.

Mutual presence. This is the part most therapists get wrong. They think their job is to listen. It is — but it’s more than that. In these moments, I’m not just receiving information. I’m with the person. Fully. Not planning my next intervention. Not categorizing their symptoms. Simply being present to the full weight of another human’s experience.

Absence of performance. In daily life, we are always performing — for our partners, our children, our colleagues, ourselves. These moments happen when the performance stops. When the mask comes off and what’s underneath isn’t as ugly as the patient feared. In fact, it’s usually more beautiful than they imagined.

The Therapeutic Relationship as Container

There’s a concept in psychodynamic therapy called the “holding environment” — the idea that therapy creates a space safe enough to contain experiences that would be overwhelming elsewhere. I’ve always liked this concept, but I think it undersells what actually happens.

The best therapeutic relationships don’t just contain difficult experiences. They transform them. A memory that was toxic in isolation becomes bearable when shared. A shame that was corrosive in secrecy becomes manageable — even meaningful — when witnessed by someone who doesn’t flinch.

Shame is a solitary disease. It thrives in secrecy and silence. The cure is almost embarrassingly simple: being truly known by another person and discovering that you are still acceptable.

— Dr. John S. Tamerin

That’s what my patient meant when she said God was in the room. She wasn’t having a religious experience. She was having a human one — perhaps the most human one possible. She was being fully known and fully accepted at the same time. For someone who had spent her life believing that being known meant being rejected, that combination was, quite literally, transcendent.

The Therapist’s Experience

I want to say something that therapists aren’t supposed to admit: these moments affect me, too.

There is a particular quality of attention that arises when two people are genuinely present with each other. It’s reciprocal. The patient feels held, and the therapist feels — I don’t have a better word for this — honored. Not by praise or gratitude, but by the simple fact that another human being has chosen to be this vulnerable in your presence.

That never gets old. I’ve been doing this for fifty-five years, and those moments still hit me. They’re the reason I haven’t retired. They’re the reason I still look forward to Monday mornings.

What This Has to Do with Healing

I’m not arguing that spiritual experiences in therapy are necessary for healing. Plenty of excellent therapeutic work happens at a more practical level — adjusting medications, building habits, solving problems. That work matters.

But I am arguing that the deepest healing — the kind that changes not just what you do but who you are — happens in moments of genuine human connection. Moments where the boundary between helper and helped dissolves a little. Moments where two people touch something bigger than either of them.

You don’t need to be religious to experience this. You don’t need to believe in anything. You just need to be willing to show up — fully, honestly, without the armor — and let someone else do the same.

The Open Door

I don’t promise my patients spiritual experiences. I don’t even mention the possibility. But I do create the conditions for them: a room without judgment, a relationship built on honesty, and a willingness to sit with whatever shows up — including the sacred, the numinous, the inexplicable.

If you’ve been in therapy before and it felt like something was missing — not a technique, not a diagnosis, but a quality of presence — you might know exactly what I’m describing. And you might be ready for a different kind of conversation.

The door is open. Whatever walks through it is welcome.