Here I Am: On Dignity & Why I Stayed

By Marc D. Richter, LICSW, LADC

After years of sitting with pain—on both sides of the therapy room— I reflect on what keeps me grounded in this work: the quiet courage of my clients, the redemptive power of presence, and the kind of beauty that’s revealed, not erased, by suffering.

Dignity is the quietest form of courage I know. It doesn’t depend on circumstances, appearance, or even composure. It’s what remains when the scaffolding of pride, certainty, and control collapses. It lives in the space between breaking and healing—that fragile, flickering place where a person still insists, I am here, and I still matter.

I’ve come to recognize it in many forms. In therapy, it’s the client who can barely speak through tears yet keeps showing up. It’s the person who’s been humiliated, addicted, or abandoned but still reaches for understanding instead of disappearing into bitterness. Dignity hides inside the smallest gestures: the deep breath before honesty, the willingness to face what’s real, the simple act of coming back again.

For many who come to me—especially those in recovery—the process begins with stripping down all the puff and armor that once kept them alive. Sobriety demands surrender: letting go of illusion, of control, of pride. That surrender isn’t weakness; it’s a courageous act of faith. My work is to help them hold on to their dignity through that unraveling—to remind them that courage still lives underneath the collapse.

When I think about that kind of courage, I often return to the word Hineni. In the story of Abraham, when God calls his name, he answers, Here I am. I’ve always loved that phrase, not as dogma but as posture—a declaration of presence, humility, and readiness to face what is real. I hear echoes of it every day in my office: people, through tears or exhaustion, whispering their own version of I’m still here.

I’ve always been drawn to heavy films—the ones that don’t “let you off the hook.” Stories like Only the Brave, Aloft, and Shelter don’t flinch from the rawness of life on the edge, yet they still find tenderness there. They remind me that pain isn’t the opposite of beauty—it’s part of the same fabric. Beauty isn’t separate from pain; it’s revealed by it.

When I watch actors like Jennifer Connelly, I’m reminded that strength doesn’t always look like control. Her characters inhabit sorrow and endurance in the same breath—fragile and fierce at once. In Aloft, she treats pain as something elemental, like weather: it doesn’t need fixing, only witnessing. That’s the kind of strength I admire—the strength to stay open in the storm.

I think that’s why, after COVID, when I nearly walked away from therapy, I found my way back. Telehealth had kept people technically “in care,” but I felt the soul of the work slipping away. The screen flattened everything—the pauses, the gestures, the quiet oxygen of presence. I lost a patient during that time, a man who drank himself to death. I still believe that if we’d been in the same room, if I could have seen the tremor in his hand, the pallor in his face, something might have been different. That loss hollowed me.

For months, I thought about leaving. I was tired of working through glass, tired of the illusion that a face on a screen could substitute for the weight and warmth of real encounter. But eventually I came back to the office—to real chairs, real air, and the subtle choreography of two people sharing a room.

And in that return, I rediscovered what I loved about this work: the creativity of presence, the improvisation of empathy, the intimacy of listening with your whole body. Being face to face reminded me that therapy isn’t about fixing—it’s about staying. It’s about bearing witness to another person’s truth and helping them rediscover their own worth.

The decision to stay was, in its own way, an act of dignity. It reminded me that even when the world narrows, we can still insist on being human.

I think about a best man speech I once gave my brother—about not being afraid of the vulnerability of pain, about how embracing both the ugly and the beautiful is what makes a relationship real. Most people spend their lives trying to edit out the hard parts, but it’s the whole fabric—the beauty and the abrasion—that gives life its texture.

That’s what I hold onto in this work. Therapy, like life, isn’t about conquering suffering. It’s about accompanying it, shaping it, learning from it. It’s about staying in the room, facing what hurts, and remembering that when truth meets compassion, it can still cast light enough to see by.