How to Prepare for the Day

Nothing about a couples booking requires preparation. It will work fine if you show up with none. But a handful of small decisions made in advance are the difference between an appointment that starts calm and one that starts frazzled, and none of them take more than a minute.

Settle the length before you call. Sixty, ninety or a hundred and twenty minutes is a conversation to have with each other, not with the person answering the phone while you both hesitate. The same goes for whether either of you wants an add-on. Decide, then book.

Settle who is paying. This sounds absurd to write down and it is the single most common source of low-grade friction at the end of an otherwise good evening. Two people standing at a desk both reaching for a card, or worse, both assuming the other one had it handled. Decide in the car.

Eat something, but not a lot, and not right beforehand. An hour or two of gap between a real meal and lying face-down on a table is about right. Arriving genuinely hungry is worse than arriving slightly full, so do not skip the meal entirely on the theory that an empty stomach is better.

Go easy on caffeine in the hours before. This is not a rule anyone will enforce, it is just that the whole point of the session is your nervous system settling down, and a large coffee at four for a five thirty appointment is working directly against the thing you are paying for.

Alcohol beforehand is a bad trade for the same reason and a worse one for your therapist. Save the drink for after.

Build in slack on the drive. Ten minutes of margin costs you nothing and turns the arrival from a scramble into a sit-down. If you are coming from the south end of the valley at rush hour, make it twenty.

Deal with your phones before you walk in, not in the room. Off, not silent, not face-down. An hour is not long and nothing that arrives inside it will be worse for waiting.

Try not to schedule something demanding directly afterward. A meeting, a difficult phone call, a drive somewhere that requires concentration. You will not be impaired, you will just be slower and softer than usual for a while, and it is a shame to spend that state on a task.

Finally, have the awkward information ready. Any injury, any surgery in the last while, any pregnancy, any area either of you would rather was left alone. It goes on the intake form and it goes to your therapist verbally. Neither of you should be discovering the other's bad knee at the same moment the therapist does.

Everything else can be decided on the day, in the room, in about four seconds.