Three sentences are enough preparation for a session: what question or issue would you like to explore, what do you want to work towards, and what are the relevant facts. Everything below just helps us arrive at those three, and you have permission to skip the rest.
I mean the permission part. Some people arrive with pages of notes and a family history in chapters. It comes from a good place, but it's not a strict requirement. You can arrive having thought about the session for weeks, or having had no time to think about it at all. So read this as an offer, not a checklist.
Choose one thing
If you’re coming, something brought you. Often several things: a relationship that keeps hurting, a heaviness that won’t lift, a pattern you’ve watched yourself repeat. You don’t have to pick the biggest one. Pick the one that’s most alive right now, the one you’d bring up in the first five minutes anyway.
One is enough, and one is better than three. A session that tries to hold everything holds nothing well. And choosing the doorway doesn’t decide where we end up. The issues in a life are often connected, and starting with one doesn’t stop something related from becoming important as we work.
Ask yourself what “better” would look like
This is the question people are least prepared for, and the most useful one to sit with on the way over. Not “what’s wrong”, which you already know, but: if this session helped, what would be different? What would you be doing, or feeling, or no longer carrying?
You don’t need a polished answer. “I want to stop dreading her calls” is a fine answer. “I want to feel like myself again” is a fine answer. A rough direction is enough. It gives us somewhere to work towards without deciding in advance what the answer has to be.
Gather a few family facts, if they come easily
Not stories, and not conclusions. Facts. Who’s in the family, roughly in order. The big events: births, deaths, separations, migrations, serious illnesses. Whether someone left, or was left out, or died tragically.
If you know these, they’re useful, because in this work the plain events of a family often matter more than anyone’s version of them. If you don’t know them, that’s not a problem, and please don’t interview your relatives before you come. Family histories have gaps. Bring what you know, and leave the gaps as gaps: a gap is information too.
You decide what you share
You might be carrying something you’re not sure you want to say out loud. You don’t have to decide before the session, and you don’t have to decide in the session either. You choose what you share and when, every time. Nothing is extracted.
Tell me it exists, if you like, without telling me what it is. This work can hold a thing without opening it. Knowing something is there is often enough for us to work with.
On the day
Practicalities, briefly. For an online session, find a room where you won’t be interrupted and can speak freely, and if you have them, use headphones. Give yourself a soft edge after the hour if you can: a walk, a coffee, twenty minutes before the next demand. You may still be thinking or feeling differently afterwards, and it can be useful to give that a little room before moving straight into the next thing.
And if you’ve read all this and done none of it? Come anyway. The first sentences of the session are “What brings you?”, and everything in this post can happen from there. If all you arrive with is what hurts, what you want instead, and one family fact you think matters, that is plenty. And if you arrive without even those, we can find them together. The preparation is a head start, not an entrance exam.
Everything practical about booking lives on the sessions page, and if you’d like to know what the hour itself is like, I’ve written what to expect in a session.