Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I did my clinical internship at a substance-use treatment program in Manhattan.
Most of the clients were mandated to be there. Many had just come out of prison. Many were navigating homelessness. Almost all of them had lived through significant trauma.
I was still learning how to sit in a room with people whose lives looked very different from mine, and how to recognize the places where, underneath those differences, we were the same.
Years later, I see versions of that same moment in a very different context.
In my therapy work now, I sit with thoughtful, high-functioning people whose lives look nothing like that room on paper.
And yet, what unfolds internally is often strikingly similar.
One day, I was leading a group session. We were sitting in a semicircle, mid-conversation, when the door suddenly burst open and one of the members came in. He had just gotten into an argument with someone in the hallway.
He sat down, still activated, and said something I’ve never forgotten.
He said, “It’s like there’s a coat closet in my head.”
And then he explained:
It’s filled with all these feelings—old experiences, things that never got processed. And more and more keeps getting shoved in there. Until eventually, there’s no room left, the door bursts open, and everything spills out at once.
He looked around the room and said, “That’s what just happened to me.”
I remember feeling struck not just by how clearly he described his own experience, but by how immediately recognizable it was. Everyone in the room understood exactly what he meant. Because whether or not our lives have looked like his, that mechanism is something we all share. We all have some version of that closet.
Over the years, I’ve come to think of this as one of the simplest ways to understand what therapy actually is.
It’s not about “fixing” you. It’s not about getting rid of your emotions. It’s about opening the closet.
When everything is packed in tightly—unprocessed feelings, old experiences, reactions you’ve never had space to fully understand—there’s very little room to think. Very little room to choose. You’re more likely to react automatically, to feel overwhelmed, to say or do something that doesn’t quite feel like you. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, to shut down completely.
Not because something is wrong with you, but because there’s no space.
What we do in therapy is begin, slowly, to take things out of the closet. One at a time. We lay them out, we look at them, we give each one the attention it didn’t get at the time.
Some of them you realize you’ve been carrying for a long time without knowing why. Some of them still matter. Some of them don’t. Over time, you begin to sort through them—to understand what belongs to you, what doesn’t, what you want to keep, and what you’re ready to let go of.
And something shifts.
Not because your life becomes simple or free of challenge, but because you’re no longer operating from a place of internal overcrowding. There’s space.
What I often see in my work now is not people whose lives are chaotic on the outside. It’s people whose lives look quite functional. People who are thoughtful, capable, and used to holding a lot.
But internally, the closet is full. So decision-making feels heavier than it needs to. Reactions come out sharper, or more delayed, than intended. There’s a sense of pressure that doesn’t quite match what’s actually happening in the present moment.
And often, there's a question bubbling up underneath it all: Why does this feel harder than it should?
In my experience, the answer is rarely that you need more discipline, more strategy, or more effort. Often, it’s that there isn’t enough space inside for you to actually access your own thinking, your own preferences, your own voice.
And that’s not something you force. It’s something you make room for.
The goal isn’t to empty the closet completely. It’s to be able to open the door and see what’s there.
So that when something happens—when you’re faced with a decision, a conflict, a moment that matters—you’re not flooded by everything at once. You can choose. You can respond instead of react. You can decide, consciously, which “coat” you want to put on.
That moment in the group room has stayed with me for years. Because in one sentence, he described something essential about being human.
We all have a closet.
The question isn’t whether it’s there. It’s whether you have the space to open it—and know what’s inside.