The Importance of a Compassionate Witness in Trauma Healing

And Why Emotional Processing Matters

On Feeling our Emotions…

“When we are not working so hard to keep our feelings and traumatic memories out of conscious awareness, we feel more real. We feel more connected to ourselves.” -Dr Arielle Schwartz 

Accessing and being with our full range of emotions helps us to feel more ALIVE. In the past, we likely suppressed our feelings and truth for our own survival when it wasn’t safe to feel or express them because we had no tools or safe people to guide us or be with us. But when we can finally feel safe to witness the painful things, we also have more access to our aliveness and joy.

Trauma can be seen as dysregulation in the nervous system that hasn’t been fully released or completed. “Unsupported emotion is all it takes for an event or time period to be experienced as traumatic,” The Center for Emotional Education. When we experience an emotion that doesn’t feel safe, our nervous system will enact a survival response… If we never get the message that this emotion is safe, the nervous system never completes it’s survival response.

We want to feel these things in a slow and modulated way, over time, so as not to overwhelm our system. All of those bodily experiences that occur when we think of the original trauma, (the jitteriness, the catch in the throat, the accelerated heart beat), are our access point to what didn’t get to be expressed. So we must work with the bodily sensations wisely. This means, we don’t want to do too much too fast, and we must respect each individual’s window of tolerance or capacity to be with sensation. We want to ensure that when we approach feeling sensations, we are not experiencing too much too fast or putting too much pressure on ourselves to be with things we don’t yet feel safe or that we are not yet ready for.

Why do we Need Help? (and Safe People)

“The body still emerges in the here and now with whatever is left unprocessed in the there and then.” -Dr. Arielle Schwartz 

When we are left alone with our feelings and no one helps us make sense of it in the moment, the overwhelm of that stays with us. And we are left with trauma. "The key factor in recovering from trauma as a child is that there was at least a single adult that took an interest in the inner world and experience of that child. Who listened, who helped them... A compassionate companion who was willing to show up and see that a child is a person who has their own thoughts, fears, worries, hopes and dreams. They are believed, validated and supported. And when a child has that person, their likelihood of them coming out of those adverse events with greater resilience (and that's physical resilience, less health problems, emotional, psychological, mental... all of those layers) is strengthened by just that one person," Dr Arielle Schwartz.

When trauma occurs and nobody validates it, nobody witnesses it, nobody says that really happened to you and that was bad and that was wrong… we can think “did that even happen, and do I even exist? Is what I’m feeling inside valid?” This can lead to dissociation. It’s so important to be able to express our emotions as they occur and as they come up and to feel safe to do so. “A big part of what we do therapeutically is go back with the client and revisit unwitnessed events and provide this shared experience with a compassionate companion where we can validate the reality of their experience,” Arielle Schwartz

Therapeutic Relationships Heal

“Healing happens because of the relationship, not because of what you say to your therapist. Freud called this special relationship the therapeutic alliance.” -Susan Kuchinskas

While receiving support here or there is certainly helpful, it is in the ongoing relationship with a safe person where we will find the most healing and reorganizing. Therapeutic Relationships actually rebuild the oxytocin response. Oxytocin is the hormone involved with building feelings of trust, connection, safety, and bonding. If we did not learn secure attachment with a safe person growing up, we may have a weak oxytocin response, where we find it difficult to easily connect or feel good in our interactions with others. This can actually be reshaped in time through compassionate witnessing. And this isn’t just a nice idea, chemical and structural changes actually occur in the client’s brain from this co-created emotional alliance. “This attunement between the two gives the client's brain a new model for healthy self-regulation, a pattern it eventually makes its own,” Susan Kuchinskas.

Also, neuroscience has shown that the form of psychotherapy or intervention is less important than the reliability of the relationship to provide a nurturing space where the patient can practice new ways of feeling emotions safely, experiencing that their systems can come down after an arousal and experience calm and connection once again. Experiencing these digestible doses of emotional safety that they missed or didn’t get enough of with a trusted other actually repairs the damaged systems of the brain.

This can lead to better, more fulfilling connections for the client and a willingness to engage in the world as they begin to see life through a new, safe and social lens... “Eventually, this kind of psychotherapy can actually retrain the brain, making new connections and replacing the habit of fear or isolation with the ability to turn to others in order to share joy and soothe pain. The oxytocin response becomes a familiar friend.”