Lifestyle
Why I rejected the “neutral” aesthetics of therapy rooms
You’ve (finally) made an appointment with a therapist. Just getting the appointment took some legwork. This is an in-person appointment, so you walk from the nearest metro station, or step out of the ride share, or park your car. If you’re really fortunate, you were able to walk there. You arrive to the therapist’s office, perhaps anxious, flustered, maybe numb.
What do you see when you walk in?
You might enter a lobby. It might be windowless. Neutral carpeting, overhead lighting. There might be a bank of small buttons on the wall, and with one press, the button signals to the therapist in the room that you’ve arrived. That’s old school, though. You might enter an old apartment building that’s been rezoned for offices with no waiting room to speak of. Or you might enter directly from the street into an office, without the pacifying liminal space of a waiting room.
As a client of therapists in Los Angeles (one Jungian analyst in a big Westside office building, another in a home office in my neighborhood — and yes, I got to walk there), and as a therapist myself, I’m often thinking about The Room. The fantasy of the contemporary therapy room is often based on images planted by pop culture: The dark wood paneling and furniture of Dr. Melfi’s office in “The Sopranos” comes to mind, or the most recent season of the L.A.-based home office of “In Treatment,” with its distinctive view of the city and its well-appointed and colorful interior. Between just these two shows, one can see how the therapy space and how we perceive it is subtly changing.
I am not a “neutral” therapist, and so my self-designed therapy room is not a neutral, or beige, space.
The first office where I sought therapy was in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. I took an elevator and approached a door with frosted glass. The building was historical and aptly named the Security Building. I was in my early 20s. It was in that office where I began untangling some of my own history, much of which would later appear in my first book. My weekly processing of the past eventually migrated to another building when my therapist moved her practice to a house rezoned for offices in a residential neighborhood. Both locations served as a particular kind of refuge, places where I came to new understandings and occasional epiphanies. In each office, I sat across from my counselor on a couch, held in a space that she created.
“If the unconscious is structured like a language, the design of a therapist’s consulting room is also a language,” Deborah Levy writes in a recent Granta essay. As a writer/therapist, I can appreciate this — including when Levy later notes that therapy rooms are “often beige” and that even if the “room’s mood attempts to be entirely neutral, someone has art-directed its blandness.” When I think of the various therapy rooms I worked in as an associate therapist in a busy community clinic, I recall the attention to having a somewhat blank canvas across many rooms, that each could be outfitted with donated furniture, random books and an occasional piece of art. If you’ve been in therapy for as many years as I have, you probably recognize this blandness.
Up until the 1980s, there was not as much attention given to the decor of the room where patients/clients met. In the U.S. in the early ’90s, elements such as windows, plants and even aquariums were considered choices that might serve as symbolic material for the client. And with the easing of the concept of the therapist as “a blank slate,” shifts have continued to occur in therapy room decor. Where there was once an insistence on an impersonal space, there is now an acknowledgment that the therapist does not have to cloak their identity in a benign anonymity.
I am not a “neutral” therapist, and so my self-designed therapy room is not a neutral, or beige, space. In 2021, more than a year after I had stopped seeing clients in person in rented offices due to the pandemic, I had the opportunity to furnish and decorate my own home office. I thought about how best to create a container — a place where someone would cross the threshold and feel. Therapy can obviously generate loads of feelings, but the best container allows the client to feel it all, in a safe, comfortable environment.
In an episode of “Conan O’Brien Must Go,” O’Brien, dressed as Freud in a wig, fake beard and suit, visits the Freud Museum in Austria. O’Brien, gamely holding a cigar, introduces the museum director, who begins by noting that Freud’s office couch is actually housed in London. Upon hearing this, O’Brien abruptly leaves the room. Since The Couch is not in the Freud Museum, O’Brien returns to the room and does a whole bit using a blow-up mattress.
When I was buying a couch for my own therapy office, I did not think of The Couch. I did, however, think about the various therapy offices I’ve sat or reclined in. There was crying, complaining, dissociating and even laughing on those couches. No particular couch sticks in my memory, so perhaps these were neutral couches awaiting my emotions to spill out over them. When I try to remember sitting across from my therapists in their respective offices, I do remember whether there was carpet or wood floor under my feet, what the bookshelves in the room offered, and whether or not the lighting was natural, lamps or overhead.
Before I designed my own office space, I met my most recent therapist in a room of her home. The bookshelves in the room were a rich mix of cookbooks and psychology books. Occasionally my therapist would have a delicious-smelling soup on simmer in another part of the house — not a design choice, but a pleasant sensory experience in the background. When the pandemic forced us to meet outdoors, her back patio, with its tiled floor, pergola and garden became the room (albeit one with occasional mosquitoes).
My therapy office is a 350-square-foot ADU behind my home. When a client enters, the first thing they see is a glass door with a bright yellow frame and behind it, a large monstera plant, which has grown along with them session by session. On the wall behind the couch where clients sit, I hung a tapestry that features a sun rising over an abstract landscape of pinks and yellows. Since the tapestry is in my eye line as I face clients, I think of it as a constant reminder that each person sitting in front of me has the potential to feel renewal and the possibility of change on a continual basis. The blinds on the east-facing window filter in natural light. From where my client sits on a slate blue couch, their eye might fall on the hanging bookshelves, where I’ve placed a few select volumes, such as the therapy-favorite “Waking the Tiger” by Peter Levine, as well as a few unexpected titles, like “Love in a F—Up World” by Dean Spade, and “Grapefruit” by Yoko Ono.
My therapy room is, quite literally, an extension of my home. Far from an institutional feel, the room’s colors, lighting and furnishings are meant to elicit a sense of warmth, connection and solace.
Above the book shelf is another shelf with more whimsical items: a container of various sea animal toys, for an imagined future where I offer clients sand play, as well as two varieties of cat tarot card decks. My desk, where I perch my phone atop a stack of old and new psychology tomes to see remote clients via Zoom, is its own sacred space: orange and blue dishes of honey and orange calcite, abalone shells, a stub of palo santo, and a deer figurine that reminds me of the animal images I conjured as a client doing the work of EMDR. A Himalayan salt lamp emits a soft orange light.
My therapy room is, quite literally, an extension of my home. Far from an institutional feel, the room’s colors, lighting and furnishings are meant to elicit a sense of warmth, connection and solace. And like my home, the language of this room wants to invite and beckon. It can hold the spectrum of emotions evoked in therapy, as well as the silences.
A common refrain we return to in therapy is that “everything is temporary.” Change is constant. In my ideal therapy room, plants live in the room when no one else is in it. Seasonal flowers are brought in, and when they die, composted. The scent of coffee or chai might linger. A client’s fingers might clutch a smooth black onyx, or a jagged rose quartz, or tissues. We are changed, both client and therapist, in the process. As my clients embark on the private journey that is therapy, in a room thoughtfully arranged to contain everything, the room itself is the reliable axis around which meaningful and deep changes can occur.
Wendy C. Ortiz is the author of three books and is a therapist in private practice in Los Angeles.
A tarp covers the facade of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, on June 13, 2026. Workers removed President Donald Trump’s name from the facade of the building.
Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images
WASHINGTON – Workers have taken down President Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center, hours after a court-ordered Friday deadline to remove it from the building, and less than six months after it was first affixed to the iconic performing arts venue. The removal of the more than a dozen bronze letters followed a judge’s ruling that the Center could not be renamed without Congressional approval.
In a court filing, Kennedy Center Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer Charles Matthew Floca confirmed that President Trump’s name has been removed from the building façade, despite what Floca said were weather-related delays. References to Trump on the center’s website are also gone.
Just a month into his second term, Trump ousted the Kennedy Center’s president, board chair and board members, then replaced them with a group of trustees that soon named Trump as chairman. Soon after, the president’s name was added to the building, so that it became, “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
The administration had on Friday asked a higher court to stay the ruling as it argued that Trump’s name on the building had helped attract donors and was crucial to raising funds for the Kennedy Center’s renovation.
“Without the name, “Trump” on the Building, our fundraising will not only come to a halt,” the administration wrote in a court filing, “but any and all monies raised or committed would be obligated to be returned, refunded or terminated.”
An appeals court denied that request Friday night. Workers erected scaffolding on Friday around the section of the building where Trump’s name had been added in December 2025. Then, in a pre-dawn operation, the laborers draped the scaffolding in tarpaulin, before removing the giant metallic letters. The Kennedy Center had asked a judge to briefly extend the deadline for this removal —because of Friday night thunderstorms forecast for Washington D.C.
Finally, with the scaffolding up, and tarpaulin covering their efforts, workers began to remove Trump’s name. Hundreds of people braved the rain and thunderstorms overnight to document the take-down. Some heckled those involved for hiding the removal using tarpaulin – with shouts of “Cover up!” and “Cowards!”
Among the onlookers watching proceedings was Krystal Brewer, 40, who works for a social justice advocacy group. She said removing Trump’s name was a way to enforce accountability, maintain government checks and balances, and reclaim a piece of Washington from a president who she said has tried to impose his stamp on the nation’s capital. “It’s about just not being able to do something just because you think you’re the most powerful person and you can defy the courts,” Brewer said.
Protestors wave a U.S. and signs as workers prepare to remove President Donald Trump’s name from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, Saturday, June 13, 2026.
Cliff Owen/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Cliff Owen/AP
Trump has recently overseen the controversial demolition of the White House’s East Wing in favor of a giant ballroom, and ordered large banners of his face to hang from several federal buildings during his second term. “I wanted to see us get a part of our city back,” said Brewer. “With all the things that he’s trying to destroy and corrupt and taint and alter, it’s nice to see a piece of it being restored.”
Also among those gathered on the Center’s plaza Friday was Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio, who initiated the lawsuit to remove Trump’s name from the building. She wrote on social media that she had stood outside to watch, writing “No more stalling. It’s time for Trump to obey the law.”
Watching the tarps go up a little before 2 a.m., Saturday, another onlooker, 60-year-old nurse Mary Foltz, said it was a metaphor for the Trump administration.
“I think there’s a lack of transparency — and that’s just the epitome of it,” Foltz said. “This is a meme.”
There’s a sense of quiet mystery in tarot. That’s why during my reading last week, it was more peculiar than disruptive when a dancer hopped on a table to lay at a 90-degree angle and jet her feet in the air.
Despite said activity, the tone was contemplative, and moments later, as I was being asked to describe the colors and mood of a Ten of Swords card, I was tapped on the shoulder. After a gesture to follow, I was handed a lantern.
The way I swayed the light would now dictate the performer’s movements. We may not have been dancing, but it was close. Melancholic and intimate, the performer (Haylee Nichele) silently guided me to become comfortable in my discomfort, to sit with the evening’s themes of longing, loss, confusion and impending grief.
Sam Alper’s Bill, foreground, and Haylee Nichele’s Constance in Koryn Wicks’ “You Must Be Here for the Reading,” an immersive tarot show.
(Daniel Kleen)
“You Must Be Here for the Reading,” running through June 20 at North Hollywood’s After Hours Theatre, is part theatrical and dance performance, part tarot reading and part cocktail hour. It’s also personal, led by two actors who encourage the attendees to open up, to complete poems and to generally tune into their vulnerability.
The 60-minute show, partly scripted and partly improvised, comes from the mind of Koryn Wicks. Trained in dance and choreography, Wicks’ day job is in themed entertainment while her personal projects explore the immersive space. They’re theatrical works that experiment with audience interaction. “You Must Be Here for the Reading” is no different.
The setup: Collectively, our group of eight has arrived at a tarot reading, only the famed reader we are there to work with, Constance, performed by Nichele on the night I saw, never arrives for her assigned role. We know her fate, but her partner, Sam Alper’s Bill, who nervously attempts to carry on with the performance in her absence, does not.
From there, “You Must be Here for the Reading” becomes a show heavy on audience participation. There are scripted, story-specific beats, but the cards pulled — and the tales they tell — is, of course, randomized.
Sam Alper as Bill, an unsuspecting tarot card reader in Koryn Wicks’ “You Must Be Here for the Reading.”
(Daniel Kleen)
“I knew that I wanted the audience to be the primary drivers of the tarot reading,” Wicks says. “I knew that I wanted the host to not be a tarot reader and there to be some sort of event that made it so the audience would have to take the reins and read the tarot.”
In turn, “You Must Be Here for the Reading” works for both those who are novices to the space as well as those who are more experienced. During the pre-show, guests can explore tarot books and uncover slips of paper hidden in them that prompt us to answer questions or complete poems — the latter will figure into the performance. A worksheet given to us asks us to interpret some core tenets, as well as to enter the reading with a question we would like to explore.
The show then focuses on how each attendee’s desires, concerns or lived experiences shape the perception of the reading.
“What’s drawn me to tarot is the way it’s built on symbolism and the way that symbolism is embedded in the collective unconscious,” Wicks says. “I think it’s really fascinating that we have this artifact that has this ability to give us insight into a lot of shared experiences. When I’ve read different books about tarot, or had my cards read by different people, there is an openness to interpenetration.
“The assignment I gave myself for this piece,” Wicks continues, “was to create an experience in which you had a group of people coming together and going through the process of defining the symbolism and meaning of the cards in real time.”
And yet the show also pulls from Wicks’ background in dance. While Constance never shows for the reading, her presence is still felt, often hovering or circling around the table with movements designed to interpret the tone of the reading. She’s a ghostly presence, the gracefulness heightening the somber emotions of the night. Though she and Bill never interact directly, much of the dance seeks to explore their unseen bond. At times, Constance may call on various audience members to act as a dance partner.
Koryn Wicks, creator of “You Must Be Here for the Reading,” an immersive tarot performance in which audiences are tasked with deciphering their own cards while a melancholic story unfolds around them.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
“I really believe that one of the most beautiful things art does for us is remind us that we are not alone,” Wicks says.
Immersive art allows for a sense of participation, which Wicks hopes will increase one’s appreciation of dance.
“Dance is an embodied art form,” Wicks says. “There is science that shows that some of the enjoyment from watching dance comes from imagining yourself moving. In North America, a lot of people haven’t had an experience or education with dance, especially not concert dance. Then we ask them to sit in a dark auditorium in a small chair and not move to enjoy it. I found through my research, both practical and academic, there is something to inviting audiences to participate in dance that allows them to derive meaning from it.”
‘You Must Be Here for the Reading’
While there isn’t enough time in the show for everyone to have a one-on-one experience with the dancer, watching an audience and cast member attempt to get in sync with each other underlines the night’s themes of connecting. Ultimately, that’s the space where the show resides. “You Must Be Here for the Reading” uses tarot as a means to bring some structure to our often disconnected lives.
“It stands in contradiction to our current historical moment,” Wicks says of the show. “It’s very anti-AI. It’s asking people to sit with books and to find little seeds and not necessarily pursue solutions or puzzles. It’s asking us to connect, sometimes with strangers.”
I kept my question that I brought to the reading secret, but I found the show provided a hopeful answer. Not because the cards offered a solution. Instead, they provided a community.
Sunday Puzzle
NPR
hide caption
toggle caption
NPR
On-air challenge
Every answer is the six-letter name of a world capital, in which I’ve changed the first and last letters. You name the capitals.
Ex. VASSAL –> NASSAU (capital of the Bahamas)
1. CONDOR
2. ROSCOE
3. PUBLIC
4. SAVANT
5. ZANILY
6. DRAG UP
7. ETHENE
8. TARSAL
9. TUSCAN
10. NONACT
11. I AGREE
12. [7 letters:] CALLING
Last week’s challenge
Rearrange the letters of NECESSARY MISPRINT to spell a familiar phrase.
Answer: Sic semper tyrannis.
Winner:
Judy Alexander of South Burlington, Vermont.
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from listener Michael Pickard. Name something in 10 letters that’s found in a kitchen. Drop its sixth letter to name something on a keyboard. Then drop the new word’s fifth letter to name something no one wants to get. What words are these?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, June 18 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
-
Boston, MA2 minutes agoGaskin: When people stop believing City Hall is listening
-
Denver, CO5 minutes ago
After venue drama, Melat Kiros makes her case for a ‘new generation of leaders’ in Congress | Rocky Mountain PBS
-
Seattle, WA10 minutes agoFirst Seattle World Cup match Monday: What to know about getting around
-
San Diego, CA17 minutes agoSDSO seeks public input on the future of Vista Detention Facility
-
Milwaukee, WI20 minutes agoBrewers expected to promote No. 4 prospect Pratt for MLB debut
-
Atlanta, GA25 minutes agoAll About Zephyr Southern Brasserie, a Stylish French Arrival for Centennial Yards — Resy | Right This Way
-
Minneapolis, MN32 minutes agoMinneapolis police searching for missing 10-year-old
-
Indianapolis, IN35 minutes agoHow Fever guard Sophie Cunningham stays ready in crunch time
