Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on—unchanged and immutable—as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past.
—Bessel van der Kolk
Rosalie is a kind and lovely woman in her eighties who never fulfilled her dream of writing children’s books. Not because she had a hard life or couldn’t read or grew up in extreme poverty and needed to feed herself. She never wrote children’s books because, over fifty years ago, someone unintentionally made her feel bad.
I met Rosalie at a conference. During the few days we were together, I noticed her scribbling short stories and poems. When I asked her about it, I learned that she had always wanted to write and illustrate children’s books. When I asked her why she hadn’t created any books, she said she wasn’t good at drawing.
Surprised, I asked what she meant. She then went on to detail an event that occurred over fifty years prior.
Back in the late 1960s, while she was raising her young and growing family, Rosalie decided to start taking art classes. For as long as she could remember, she had wanted to write, illustrate, and publish children’s books.
One night during an art class with a handful of other people, Rosalie had an experience that ended her dream. After a particular drawing exercise, the teacher went around the room checking each student’s work. When he stopped at Rosalie, he grabbed her chalk and “corrected” her drawing.
During the sixty or so seconds that the teacher was drawing over her work, Rosalie felt extremely embarrassed. None of the other students had been corrected in this manner. All eyes were on her. This was all too painful for her to handle. In the emotional swirl of the moment, a thought entered her mind: I must not be very good at this.
Rosalie never attempted drawing again.
As I listened to her recount this experience, my jaw was on the floor. She was narrating this incident from fifty years ago as if it had happened just last week.
“So, wait . . .” I said, stumbling over my words. “After all these years, you’ve never tried illustrating your children’s stories?”
“No,” she replied. “I don’t have the native ability to draw.”
There was no emotion. From her perspective, she was stating cold facts. Reality. There was no convincing her. I tried on multiple counts during the few days we were together.
“If you had the ability to draw pictures, would you create children’s books?” I asked.
“It would be a lot of fun,” she replied.
Over the years, the thought to write and illustrate children’s books occasionally popped into her head. But almost immediately, that terrible art class experience and how she felt would come to her mind. The pain of that moment would be reignited and her imagination would immediately blank out. All the reasons why “now” isn’t the right time would pop up. This is what Steven Pressfield called the “Resistance”—a universal force that stops people from engaging in creative acts.
This resistance, born of trauma, is why before entertaining the idea or taking any action, Rosalie would stop herself.
The saddest part is that she still wishes she could illustrate children’s books but honestly believes she can’t.
When most people think of “trauma,” they imagine it only in its extreme manifestations, such as a diagnosed disorder like PTSD. Trauma is not limited to major, easily recognized events, though. Trauma, in a variety of forms, is part of each of our lives. It includes any negative experience or incident that shapes who you are and how you operate in the world. We have all experienced and have been, or are, impacted by trauma.
In this chapter, you’ll learn how trauma can and does shape personality. In fact, you’ll learn that rather than building the life we genuinely want, far too often we build our lives around our trauma. To avoid the pain of the past, we create a pseudo-personality rather than our desired one.
After learning how trauma shapes our lives and goals, you’ll learn how to process, frame, and overcome your trauma so your past doesn’t limit your future.
Dr. Jennifer Ruef is a professor of mathematics education. She has been training teachers on better ways to teach math for the past thirty years in the hopes of helping children realize they can indeed learn math. This is no easy task, and in fact is one of the biggest challenges US math educators face, because so many students suffer from “math trauma”—a form of debilitating mental shutdown when facing mathematics.
Math teachers, particularly in junior high and high school, have a really hard job. Most of their students genuinely believe they aren’t good at math and therefore give minimal effort or attention. At some point in a given student’s life, they had a bad experience with math that they internalized as an identity narrative—I’m not good at this. I don’t like this.
Math trauma manifests as anxiety or dread, and an incapacitating fear of being wrong, according to Dr. Ruef. Tragically, this fear limits options such as school and desired career choices for many people—not because they couldn’t do math but because trauma-induced fear paralyzed them.
Sometimes a student may perform well on initial tests and assignments but still fear making mistakes or revealing weakness or incompetence to a teacher or parent. Those who shy away from challenging work, making mistakes, or revealing incompetence have what Dr. Ruef refers to as a “fragile math identity.” They are keeping up an appearance that, like thin glass, can be shattered with the slightest negative emotional experience. They avoid rather than pursue failure, and as such, the inevitable eventually occurs when they reach their skill cap and “fail.” For those avoiding failure, reaching their skill cap can be traumatic.
According to Dr. Ruef, the most common experiences leading to math trauma are being told you aren’t good at math by an adult, panicking over timed math tests, or getting stuck on some math topic and struggling to move past it. Without the help of a supportive teacher, mentor, or parent, the student gives up.
I can’t do this.
Pain and failure become associated with math. All imagination and interest toward math fades. A “future” involving math no longer becomes an option.
That’s the spirit of trauma. A hallmark of trauma is that it stops you from being psychologically flexible. Instead, you become rigid and fixed in your thinking. Hence, research has shown that individuals suffering from PTSD often score zero on imagination. Imagination is all about mental flexibility—seeing and believing different angles and possibilities.
When traumatized, you start thinking in black and white. Instead of seeing different perspectives and contexts, you focus exclusively on the content of what occurred.
I failed the test. I’m not good at this.
You believe your viewpoint is objective rather than just a single and limited perspective of an event or experience. This type of thinking creates what Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “fixed mindset,” which is the belief that you cannot change, grow, or develop in specific areas. It is the belief that your skills, personality, and character are “fixed” traits that are innate and unchangeable.
According to Dweck, the fixed mindset is an approach to life defined by the past. The opposite of a fixed mindset is what Dweck calls a “growth mindset,” which is the belief that you can change your traits and character. Having a growth mindset means your life is defined by the future and focused on what can change.
Because Rosalie defined herself by her negative interpretation and attachment to the art class experience all those decades ago, she has a fixed mindset about herself. As a result, she focuses on what she believes to be her “natural” or “innate” traits. In her mind, given her lack of art “genes” or “traits,” it is impossible for her to become a good artist.
Having a fixed mindset is a “premature cognitive commitment.” As various psychologists have explained, premature cognitive commitments occur without critically evaluating what happened. The commitment is emotionally based with little depth of evidence to support or justify it.
When people have a traumatic experience—even a small one—the emotions of the moment are enough to justify a new cognitive commitment.
I can’t do this.
I’m not worthy.
I’ll never have the life I want.
I should stay away from this.
In the case of Rosalie, she committed mentally to the idea that she isn’t good at art and therefore shouldn’t do it anymore: I don’t have the native ability to draw. This commitment was forged during a terrible emotional experience. She never questioned the validity or value of that commitment. Instead, she buried it and never spoke about it for years.
Research on both trauma and the fixed mindset shows that they each individually lead to an exaggerated fear of failure. The greatest fear of the fixed mindset, according to Dr. Dweck, is fully attempting something with everything you’ve got and still coming up short. If such were to occur, then you’d have to accept that you simply don’t have what it takes and should do something else.
People don’t want to deal with that kind of failure. It would make too big a mark on their identity, leaving them feeling like a total and utter failure. Instead of even trying, they convince themselves to simply go for something else—something less risky and more certain.
As the author Robert Brault said, “We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.”
It is not the obstacles between ourselves and our dreams that stop us. Rather, we are stopped by our commitment to the idea—to the identity—that we can never actually achieve our goals. That we don’t have what it takes. Instead of committing to what we truly want, we commit our time and attention to lesser goals.
We settle for a lesser future self. Our imagination, faith, and confidence to conjure and pursue a more exciting and powerful future self aren’t there. We become increasingly rigid about who we are and what we’re capable of. The past defines and drives our lives.
This is why making commitments about ourselves and our future should not be done while we’re in a traumatic or emotionally broken state. From that state, our decisions for ourselves and our future will be limited. Instead, we want to make our decisions and commitments while in a peak and heightened state—when our faith and expectations are high.
Some psychologists might argue that Rosalie made the right decision to abandon her dream of creating children’s books. Rather than disappointing herself with delusional goals, she was realistic. She didn’t have the skills or capacity to become a great cartoonist or illustrator. Thus it was better for her to be true to her “authentic” self.
This kind of thinking suggests we should build our life and goals to match our innate personality and talents. If you’re a square peg, then stop trying to fit yourself through round holes—even if those round holes are the opportunities or future you genuinely want for yourself.
It’s not surprising, then, that personality is often the by-product of trauma. As trauma expert Gabor Maté, MD, says, “What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.”
On my daughter’s tenth birthday, our son Logan came to my wife with a sliver of glass stuck in the heel of his foot. Lauren got the tweezers and Logan panicked. She told him to leave the glass in as long as he wanted and come back when he was ready to have it taken out.
He left relieved to have avoided the dreaded tweezers and tried enjoying the party. But with the glass in his heel, he couldn’t run. The other kids were running around and playing. Even getting in the pool was too risky. He had to walk on the outside edges of his feet awkwardly, slowly, and painfully.
He wanted to play.
He returned, humbled and reluctant, to have the glass removed. It was a painful twenty seconds, but afterward, Logan was able to get on with the party.
This event reminded me of Michael Singer’s book The Untethered Soul, in which he describes a person who is accidentally pierced in her arm by a large thorn, causing electrifying pain with the slightest brush. She leaves the thorn in her arm, instead of going through the pain of taking it out.
Yes, she avoids the intense pain of removing it, but there is a cost to this decision: In order for her to live with the thorn in her arm, she must ensure that nothing touches the thorn.
She is no longer able to sleep on her bed, because there is a chance she can roll over and touch the thorn while asleep. To cope, she creates a device to sleep in that ensures her thorn remains untouched.
She loves playing sports, but she fears that the physical activity of sporting may hit the thorn and cause excruciating pain. So she develops a pad to wear that protects her arm from contact. Although this pad is uncomfortable and limits her ability to perform well, at least she can play the sports she loves while also protecting her thorn.
This woman ultimately alters every area of her life to ensure that nothing touches her thorn. From her work to recreation to relationships, she’s constructed a new life and environment to free herself from the troubles of her thorn.
Or has she?
Rather than creating the life she truly wants, she continually settles for lesser goals in order to avoid pain. In turn, she forfeits the personality she wants and develops one that is nothing more than a coping style.
You may not have a single thorn that changes your life to such an extreme extent, but all of our lives reflect thorns and bits of glass. Our thorns are emotional. They are the painful experiences—both in our past and future—that we’re avoiding.
Our true and authentic self isn’t who we currently are. It isn’t our limitations. Instead, it is our deepest-held aspirations, dreams, and goals.
Rather than facing our fears, and rather than facing the truth, we avoid them.
Rather than creating the life we want, we build the life that allows our problems to exist unresolved.
Rather than becoming the person we want to become, we stay the person we are.
Rather than adapting our personality to match our goals, we adapt our goals to match our current and limited personality.
I always wanted to be better, wanted more. I can’t really explain it, other than that I loved the game but had a very short memory. That fueled me until the day I hung up my sneakers.
—Kobe Bryant
In psychology, a refractory period is the amount of time it takes to emotionally recover and move on from an experience. Small frustrations, such as getting cut off on the road or getting in an argument with your spouse, may take a few minutes or hours to recover from. Some events, though, may take months, years, or even decades to let go of. Indeed, some events are never outgrown.
Becoming psychologically flexible enables you to shorten the length of refractory periods—even when really painful or difficult experiences happen. You become psychologically flexible by being in touch with your emotions but not completely absorbed by them. You hold your thoughts and emotions loosely as you actively pursue meaningful goals.
In professional basketball, players don’t have time to get upset and discouraged if they miss a shot. They may be disappointed or embarrassed when they miss, but ultimately, they need to get back in the game and stay both attentive to the moment and committed to the goal of helping their team win, regardless of how they are feeling.
If they linger on the emotion of the missed shot, they won’t be able to operate fully on the court, which creates more problems for themselves and their team. If they emotionally attach to what happened, they may avoid taking the shot next time out of fear or negative expectation. They’re then stuck in the past rather than acting as their future self.
The less you hold on to mistakes or painful experiences, the better you’re able to adapt to what the situation requires and perform in order to achieve your goals. What happened in the past doesn’t impact the next thing you do, or stop you from being entirely present in this moment.
The more psychologically flexible you are, the faster you can let things go. The less psychologically flexible you are, the longer you hold on to even small things.
Rosalie still remembers her art class the same way she did nearly fifty years ago. Her memory of the experience hasn’t changed or been recontextualized. Because the context of that memory hasn’t changed, the meaning of the experience hasn’t changed. As a result, Rosalie still sees the teacher who hurt her feelings as rude, and she still sees herself as lacking the potential to create art. None of these elements of the experience or her memory have changed.
If, however, she had flexibly moved forward from that event rather than attaching to it, she might have learned to illustrate her own stories. She might have produced dozens of books that have been read by many children. Over time, her memory of that experience would have changed in meaning. She might even have forgotten about the experience altogether. It might not have held enough meaning to be worth remembering, let alone become identity-defining.
When a person remains stuck in an emotional refractory period following a difficult experience, they continue seeing and experiencing life from their initial reaction to the experience. Therefore, day after day, they continue reconstructing the emotions of the experience. They don’t regulate and reframe how they see and feel about the event.
Trauma becomes a rut.
As the author Dr. Joe Dispenza states:
If you keep that refractory period going for weeks and months, you’ve developed a temperament. If you keep that same refractory period going on for years, it’s called a personality trait. When we begin to develop personality traits based on our emotions, we’re living in the past, and that’s where we get stuck. Teaching ourselves and our children to shorten the refractory period frees us to move through life without obstruction.
You’re only as sick as your secrets.
—Alcoholics Anonymous
Trauma is an interpretation of an experience tied to a severely painful emotion. However, experiences that become traumatic don’t necessarily need to continue that way. Although an initial reaction may be highly negative or debilitating, all painful experiences can be reframed, reinterpreted, and ultimately used as growing experiences.
In order for painful experiences to be growing experiences rather than debilitating ones, you can’t bottle up and internalize the pain. You can’t have a “fragile identity,” wherein you avoid mistakes or getting feedback. You need to face your emotions personally and be willing to share them with others. By facing your emotions and experiences, you change them.
That day over fifty years ago when Rosalie experienced her trauma, she went home and told no one about it. She bottled up her emotions and kept them private. She made a rash judgment about the experience and never got help reframing it. She quit on her goal. And that’s why it was traumatic.
Dr. Peter Levine, a renowned trauma researcher, said, “Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”
Rosalie didn’t have an empathetic witness. She didn’t have someone listen to her trauma and help her to reframe it.
Emotions are difficult to express for anyone, especially painful emotions. And like so many others, Rosalie kept her pain to herself and committed to a lesser future. She didn’t have someone to help confirm the idea that she could do it, that her desired future self could be real. She didn’t have a coach or mentor to help her push through the pain of a single “failure” or roadblock and continue advancing toward her dreams. She didn’t even have a friend to help her rethink that art class experience.
“Maybe that teacher didn’t mean to make you feel bad?” a friend might have told Rosalie over lunch. But that conversation never happened.
As is the case with many painful experiences, they are bottled and made secretive. Consider the statistics of a much worse form of trauma: sexual abuse. Research shows that up to 90 percent of sexual abuse survivors don’t report the abuse.
The more painful the emotional experience, the more likely we are to bottle it up and internalize it. And with this emotional bottling comes a premature cognitive commitment and fixed mindset about who we are. Rather than emotions expressed and reframed, the past becomes something too painful to think about. The avoidance of that pain can create a lifetime of addiction in attempts to numb oneself to both the pain of the past and the pain of pursuing a desired future self.
An empathetic witness could have helped Rosalie alter her experience and even helped her express how she felt to the art teacher. Doing so would have been an incredible act of courage. It might have completely changed Rosalie’s life. She might have discovered that the teacher had no intention of causing her pain. She might have seen him differently and totally reframed the meaning of that event. She could have come to see him as a caring instructor who only wanted her to succeed. And even if it turned out that he did have limited views of her, she might have come to realize the truth of Eleanor Roosevelt’s words: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
But she never had any of these conversations or transformational experiences. And as a result, she is still defined by her initial response. She’s spent the past fifty years convincing herself of the truth of her experience and confirming the bias that came with it.
One exciting thing, though, is that during our few days together, Rosalie’s mind showed signs of expanding. Simply talking about that event, reframing it in her mind, and focusing on her desire to write and draw for children seemed to have an impact.
And for the first time in fifty years, Rosalie drew a picture. It was only a first step, and the process of healing a lifelong trauma will continue to take time and effort, but Rosalie was able to take that initial step simply by having an empathetic witness.
Contrast Rosalie’s struggle with her trauma with my wife’s journey of overcoming hers. During her first year of college, my wife married a man whose goals and ambitions matched hers exactly, but unbeknownst to her, he harbored extreme anger and struggles with addiction.
Just weeks after they were married, he hit her for the first time. She lived in her hometown just miles from her parents but didn’t speak up. She was in shock from the experience and also afraid of her parents’ potential judgment. Maybe they’d be disappointed in her for her husband’s behavior. Or maybe, maybe, they’d be disappointed in her for not dealing with it herself. Those were her thoughts in the emotional shock of her trauma.
She kept everything secret. She tried to be “strong.”
Three years later, living across the country, what had begun as occasional abuse had escalated to daily rampages that left permanent scars.
Much later, when Lauren had left that relationship and she and I were dating, we decided to do some couples counseling in preparation for marriage. During therapy, the counselor told me that Lauren’s prior marriage would be something I’d deal with the rest of my life. I should expect to trigger her at any time, and I’d need to be empathetic and patient.
Lauren didn’t believe what the counselor was saying. She had already decided to not let the labels of “divorced,” “abused,” or “victim” follow her. Her former self and trauma weren’t going to define her future self. Anyone who meets her today would never believe she spent years living in quiet fear surrounded by emotional and physical abuse.
She has faced these issues and dealt with them, head-on and completely. She spoke openly with counselors, friends, and family, and with herself through her journal. She intentionally spoke about her trauma when in safe and uplifting environments. In this way, her memory of her trauma was changed and influenced.
She pulled the thorn out.
Her trauma transformed into incredible growth.
She’s no longer controlled by the abuse.
Her future self calls the shots.
Her past, and all the pain involved, happened for her, not to her. Her view of that period of her life is one of gratitude and peace, not resentment. She’s forgiven her former self and her ex-husband.
When others approach her and ask how they can help family and friends in situations similar to hers, she always answers with the same response: Listen to them, ask good questions, never judge, and never advise. These are the key principles to being an empathetic witness.
An empathetic witness is what we all need to flatten whatever trauma we face. As the renowned therapist Lynn Wilson said, “It is this honest connection between two human beings that, in the end, makes what we endured together understandable and meaningful.”
Lynn would know. In 1991, she coauthored a book called The Flock: The Autobiography of a Multiple Personality with her twenty-six-year-old client, Joan Frances Casey, who had been so traumatized that she developed twenty-four different personalities in an extreme case of multiple personality disorder. Through deep and committed work and the healing connection between the two of them, and with Lynn as the empathetic witness, Joan’s profoundly fragmented self healed into a cohesive and singular one.
Until the day Lauren left her abusive situation, she had never considered that she would actually do so. The abuse had become so routine that her mind had turned off the reality of the situation. She didn’t feel a fight-or-flight instinct; she was simply frozen. But on that day, she went to her sister-in-law’s house for a short vacation. That is where she met her empathetic witness, Natalie.
Although Natalie had never met Lauren before, she was quickly able to see her trauma and began listening. She asked Lauren questions Lauren had never thought to ask herself before. Natalie was interested in Lauren and never judged her. Lauren quickly learned to trust Natalie, and after they spent a few days together, Natalie stayed up one night and wrote a narrative in Lauren’s words. It had none of Natalie’s thoughts, opinions, or judgment. Only Lauren’s own words, held up to her like a mirror.
When Lauren read this narrative, she was in complete shock. It was clear to her that she could never go back. Not back to her husband, and not back to being that person.
She was done.
She called her dad on the spot and read Natalie’s narrative to him. He booked a flight immediately and together they packed up her belongings.
It is never too late to find, or to be, an empathetic witness to trauma. In fact, if you’re serious about transforming your life, you need to surround yourself with a whole new cast of friends, mentors, and supporters. You need people you can talk with openly about your struggles.
You need people who can help you get to your own next level. Otherwise, you’re going to hit some emotional experiences, bottle them up, and plateau or decline as a person.
Molehills can become mountains if you don’t have an empathetic witness to help you process and reframe your experiences. A true empathetic witness encourages you to decide what you can do to move forward.
Courage is always required to face the truth and move forward in your life.
Courage transforms trauma.
Encouragement facilitates courage.
Getting encouragement from others in your life helps you act courageously yourself. This is why you need encouraging people in your life.
Often, it is incredibly small and simple acts that can have the biggest impact on our lives. For instance, Rich Beverage was a key empathetic witness in my life, someone who encouraged me when I was down. At nineteen years old, I had given up on my goal of serving a church mission. Rich, a former church leader, reached out to me and took me out to lunch a few times. It was a small gesture, but incredibly impactful. He helped me realize that my mistakes and circumstances shouldn’t stop me from taking action on my future. His encouragement helped me courageously make the decision I’d almost lost hope in.
In a 2019 interview, TV personality Lisa Ling explained the importance of having a team of people around her to do the work she does. She hosts the CNN show This Is Life, which is radically raw and open. Ling often interviews people with profound emotional pain and struggles. For example, she once interviewed a seventeen-year-old girl who was sold into commercial sex exploitation at age eleven. During the interview, this girl said that at that age she would regularly call police officers, begging them to arrest her so she could have a safe place to sleep.
This is just one example of countless, painfully real conversations Ling has. The aftermath, as was the case with the seventeen-year-old girl, is that Ling and her small team are left sobbing and crying together, due to the overwhelming reality of the interviews and stories. As Ling recalled:
She ended up having to console me because I had just been so overwhelmed with grief, and after that interview, my team and I, we just kind of like huddled together and just, we all cried together. Again, this is five men and me and we just had to let it out. It was just so devastating. . . . Having these teams who are with you along the way has really been my salvation, because if I were alone doing this, I don’t know that I would have been able to survive all these years because it is so emotionally taxing, but having these people by my side—and, really, my team consists of the most sensitive, incredible people, men and women—has been what has gotten me through all of it.
Ling is doing powerful, important, and emotional work. She is smart because she knows she couldn’t handle what she’s doing on her own. She has a group of empathetic witnesses to help her through.
If you’re serious about seeking growth in your life, you’ll need a team of empathetic witnesses around you as well. You don’t need to be doing the level of emotional work that Ling is doing. All growth toward big goals and important work is emotionally taxing. Don’t go it alone. Have a team you can huddle around when you’re fried, torn, burned out, scared, or broken.
If you’re going to create a powerful future, you’ll experience an intense amount of failures, heartaches, bad days, and pain along the way. You need a team of empathetic witnesses. You need people who encourage you to keep going—people who encourage you to dream big and encourage your work when others don’t understand.
David Osborn is a highly successful entrepreneur and real estate investor. He’s worth over $100 million. He attributes much of his success to a small group of “accountability partners.” These four friends have regularly gotten together for over a decade to support and hold each other accountable.
One of the things they do as a part of their regular get-togethers, which often take place in exotic environments around the world, is read their “One Sheet” to each other. On this One Sheet they have all of the important and intimate metrics of their lives on open display. Financially, they share their net worth, income, how much they have recently given to charity, amount of passive income, and so on. There are also exact numbers on body fat percentage, muscle mass, and other health and fitness levels, including blood work. They even provide metrics for their personal life, such as their rated level of happiness personally and how they rate their relationships with their spouses.
In addition to openly sharing exactly where they are numerically in all the key areas of their lives, their One Sheet reveals how much those numbers have changed over the previous year and where they want them to be a year into the future.
It takes courage to be honest and “naked” with others. Osborn and his “tribe” see accountability as the most powerful force in the world. They are empathetic witnesses, coaches, and accountability partners for each other, and they attribute much of their success—which all four have experienced rare and high levels of—to their accountability group.
Your “team” should include many different members. I remember when I started working with my financial advisor. It initially felt weird being so honest about my finances. I felt insecure about where I currently was. But my advisor helped me think differently about money. He helped me clarify my goals and set up amazing systems to achieve my goals. He’s just one member of my team. But he’s been an empathetic witness.
The bigger my future self becomes, the more empathetic witnesses I need in my circle to help me get there. As leadership expert and author Robin Sharma has said, “The bigger the dream, the more important the team.”
In addition to seeking empathetic witnesses in your own life, you can and should seek to be the empathetic witness that others around you so desperately need. You can expect that pretty much everyone you know has bottled-up emotional pain. In the words of university president and religious leader Dr. Henry Eyring, “When you meet someone, treat them as if they were in serious trouble and you will be right more than half the time.”
Any experience or perspective can be transformed through compassionate conversations. Research shows that when empathetic listening is done well, mutual trust and understanding occur. It must be done in a safe and collaborative environment where both parties are heard, and where both parties ultimately create a new shared past and future.
When being listened to in an empathetic and loving way, the speaker hears themself talk and gains clarity about their problem. They become better equipped to find a resolution. An emotional burden is lifted, and they feels less stressed and confused. Their self-esteem and self-awareness increase.
Being an empathetic witness is about being interested, not interesting. Empathetic listening can’t be done in haste. It must be done out of love. Even if you will never truly understand where the other person is coming from, you need to want to understand. When done correctly, the listener’s core motivation is to understand and encourage.
Time is allowed for each person to open up and process their perspectives. Solutions or advice are not presented, at least initially. Instead, open-ended and sincere questions are asked. When the questions have been answered, the listener continues asking for more information and insight, with questions like:
“Can you explain more for me?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Why was that part so important?”
“Have you given up on the idea of a better future?”
“What positives have come from this?”
“How will your future be different because of this?”
“What can you do now to move forward?”
“How can I help?”
After the other person has spoken, you rephrase or repeat back what they said to ensure you’ve heard correctly. Then ask for more. Your questions are real and genuine, based on deep and connected listening.
Trust is everything in relationships. Don’t attempt to build trust in haste. Once it is built, anything becomes possible. Once it is destroyed, even the simplest of things can become insurmountable.
Transforming trauma is ultimately about rebuilding trust. When trust is lost, so are confidence and hope. Rosalie needed to trust herself enough to pursue a difficult goal.
When confidence and hope are lost, the future is gone and the past becomes of utmost importance. Trauma shatters imagination. Trust and confidence are the foundation of imagination and the possibility for change.
Trauma can happen in any relationship. People will make mistakes. Apologies must come and forgiveness must be granted to move forward. But it must happen together. Neither party’s perspective of the past is objective, but rather subjective in meaning. The memory of the past must be created together, through empathetic and loving understanding.
Any trauma can be transformed. The past can be changed. Even in relationships that seem stuck and are disintegrating.
Trauma is at the core of who we are as people. If we transform it, we can become unstoppable in what we’re trying to accomplish. If we don’t transform our trauma, then our very lives become its by-product.
A cornerstone of trauma is that it is isolated, internalized, and then avoided. The initial emotional reaction—which is negative, painful, and likely paralyzing—becomes the filter through which the memory is stored.
Healthy memories change over time. A growing person continually has a changing past, expanding in meaning and usefulness.
In order to move on from painful experiences, you can’t avoid them. You need to face them. Writing down and organizing your thoughts and emotions in your journal is essential and powerful. You can get your thoughts and feelings out of mind and onto paper. By facing your emotions and negative experiences, you change them.
Still, you need an outsider’s perspective to help you reframe your experience. As the saying goes, “You can’t read the label from inside the jar.” An empathetic witness, someone who isn’t trying to give you advice, but is altruistically sitting with you and listening, can give you the space to openly express your feelings. In this way, your feelings are free to be transformed. A professional counselor is a good option for an empathetic witness.
If you have any negative or painful experiences you’ve yet to transform, it’s time to find an empathetic witness—hopefully many. It’s time to transform your trauma and past. It’s time to move beyond your initial reaction and become psychologically flexible. Reach out to someone you trust. Be as honest as possible in sharing your story and experiences.
Also, openly and honestly describe your future self, your true desires. Be open to share about the potentially “lesser goals” you’ve been pursuing or living as a by-product of your trauma.
Finally, if there are important people in your life who need forgiving, or need a deeper connection from you or by you, then go and have those conversations. You’ll be shocked by how quickly the feelings of the past will dissipate and change. It will feel like you’ve just come up for breath, and you didn’t realize how suffocated your life had become.