Where do you feel safe? For me, it is not in my husband’s arms, it is in his heart. It is in a deep knowing that he will hold me there and that he feels me there even when I am not immediately in his presence. That with him I can take deep breaths and breathe in the love and affection he provides. The safety. What must it be like to have never had this feeling?
I didn’t have this feeling consistently before him. I trusted me, and I took care of me because that is what I learned to do as a child. Children who don’t feel “seen” by their parents often have an emptiness that grows with them as they move into adulthood.
What if you have carried this feeling with you for years, and now here you are, sitting in a therapist’s office, trying to “open up” and share your trauma history and heal from past abuse? How do you learn to trust the person who is supposed to be helping you, the one who is sitting across from you saying they will be with you in your journey, who holds you gently in their heart, looks at you with knowing eyes, and talks to you about your worth? The one who says they won’t judge you even before you share your most painful secrets?
As a therapist, when I sit with someone who has never felt seen, I ask myself, “Why do I know you? Why can I feel you? What is it about your pain that is also mine?”
We all have parts of ourselves we wish we didn’t know, parts we say to ourselves, “That’s not me” or, “Who is that person?” We reject these needy, angry, or acting-out parts of ourselves in the same way they were rejected by the very people who were supposed to hold us fiercely in their hearts and minds: our parents.
We tell ourselves, “If they couldn’t love me, those people who bore me in their bodies, how could anyone else?”
And then we give up trying to explain these ugly secrets to ourselves, to others. We hide them, lock them away in the attics of our minds, put them in files, into containers, send them away. When an experience is too much for the minds of children to bear, this can happen in a fraction of a second.
And then we give up trying to explain these ugly secrets to ourselves, to others. We hide them, lock them away in the attics of our minds, put them in files, into containers, send them away. When an experience is too much for the minds of children to bear, this can happen in a fraction of a second.
Later, as adults, we may berate ourselves for this. But children cannot handle the types of trauma or even harsh words from a loved one the way most adults can. They crack more easily.
Other times, forgetting doesn’t come so easily or quickly. We have to focus our attention on trying to forget. Eventually, the more parts of ourselves that are hidden, the more we reject and disavow ourselves of them, the larger and more intense they grow. Sometimes they develop a life of their own.
When parts of the self develop their own life, memories, experience, belief systems, and values, when they have their own sets of thoughts and feelings about experiences, they are so separate we call them “alters” or “self states”—parts, in other words. These parts are out of our awareness or just on the other side of it. Dissociation should be thought of not as mental illness but rather mental injury, born out of the anguishing kind of pain that comes from feeling empty or from being filled with rage, feeling unloved, unwanted, used. You feel unrelatable and unknown, even to yourself. Getting to know these discarded parts of the self can be scary.
I know you likely will not trust me, that you may not be able to bear looking into my eyes. That it will become more painful as you get to know me and start to expect me to be there. That just when you think you are starting to feel hope, you will become the most terrified you have ever been. Because you will have finally been seen. And while you have waited your whole life for this, it may very well be more petrifying than you imagined.
That is why I will forever be in debt to you, the person in therapy—for allowing me to see into your eyes, your past, your most feared parts of the self. I will wonder to myself why and how I know you, why you are in my life, and how it is I can “feel” your presence. I will remain separate from you and yet walk beside you for a time. I will try to be a vessel worthy of your sorrow.
The preceding article was solely written by the author named above. Any views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the preceding article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment below.
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