Nervous System Safety & The Healing Power Of Being Witnessed

So welcome everyone and thank you,

Thank you for listening Before we go any further I want to offer you something A sentence,

A permission or perhaps even a medicine Just these words I don't know why this happened to you But I can hold this for you And let that settle for a moment Because I imagine,

I assume That if you have found your way here There is something you have been carrying Something heavy Something that perhaps you have tried to understand Tried to explain Tried to fix,

Tried to make sense of And maybe you are exhausted from all that trying So let me say it again I don't know why this happened to you And I am not going to pretend that I do But I can sit here with you I can hold space for what you are feeling And I can witness you Without needing you to be different Than you are right now So that's what we are going to explore together today The profound,

Ancient Deeply healing act of being held Of being witnessed And of having someone say You don't have to carry this alone Now we live in a culture that is obsessed with understanding So when something painful happens A loss,

A betrayal,

An illness,

An accident A trauma The first question we ask Is why?

Why did this happen?

Why me?

Why now?

What did I do wrong?

What's the lesson?

What's the purpose?

And these questions are not wrong They are deeply human The conscious mind wants to make sense Meaning closure It wants to create a story that makes the unbearable somehow bearable But here's what I've noticed Both in my own journey And both in journeys of people that I've worked with As a facilitator That sometimes the why becomes another burden Sometimes the relentless search for meaning Keeps us locked in our heads Disconnected from our bodies Disconnected from the present moment And disconnected from the very comfort that we need Now I can spend years,

Months,

Decades Trying to figure out Why my father was the way he was Why their mother couldn't love them the way they needed Why that accident happened Why that relationship ended Why my body betrayed me Why do I have this medical condition And so on and so forth And I've watched people literally exhaust themselves with these questions Not because understanding is bad But because sometimes The understanding never comes And I'll say this again Sometimes the understanding never comes Or it comes But it doesn't really bring the peace That they hoped for So what if just for the next few minutes Just for today We put down the question of why Not forever And definitely not because it doesn't matter But because right now In this moment Your nervous system might need something else first It might need to feel safe It might need to feel held It might need to know That someone is here Really here Without an agenda Without a fix And without the pressure to make it all work Now I want to share something with you about how we are wired as human beings And just take what resonates with you Because it changes everything About how we approach healing There's a brilliant piece of neuroscience Called the polyvagal theory And that describes how our nervous system Constantly scans for safety or danger Now this happens below consciousness So before you even think a thought Your body has already decided Am I safe here?

Is this person A threat or a friend?

Can I relax?

Or do I need to protect myself?

Now Your body is reading signals from the environment From other people's faces,

Voices and body language And it's making split second calculations About whether it's safe to open up Or necessary to shut down And here is what's crucial to understand When your nervous system doesn't feel safe The higher functions of your brain The parts responsible for insight,

Integration,

Meaning making They all go offline This is why You can know something intellectually And still not feel it You can understand really well That trauma wasn't your fault But your body still carries the shame You can read all the self-help books in the world But if your nervous system is stuck in survival mode None of that wisdom will land So what creates safety for the nervous system?

Many things But one of the most powerful Perhaps the most powerful Is the presence of another regulated,

Caring human being And this is called co-regulation So when you're with someone whose nervous system is calm and grounded Your nervous system picks up on that too And it borrows their regulation And it's literally your nervous system saying Oh,

This person is not panicking Maybe I don't need to panic either And we see this most clearly with babies and newborns An infant doesn't know how to regulate its own emotions yet And it depends entirely on the caregiver to co-regulate So when the baby is distressed And the mother holds it with calm The soothing presence The baby's nervous system learns Big feelings are survivable I am held And I am safe But here's the thing We never really outgrow this need And as adults we still need co-regulation We still need other humans to help us feel safe We still need to be held Not necessarily physically Though touch is powerful But held in presence Held in attention Held in the gaze of someone who sees us without judgment But something has gone wrong in our culture And again I'm only speaking from my experience and how I see the world We've been so uncomfortable with pain With uncertainty With grief With the messiness of being human That when someone shares their suffering We immediately try to fix it Have you tried this meditation?

You should see a therapist Everything happens for a reason At least you still have your health You need to focus on the positive What doesn't kill you makes you stronger And so on and so forth Now I'm going to say something that might sound strange Coming from a holistic therapist That premature solutions are a form of abandonment When someone is drowning in grief And the first thing we offer is advice We are not actually meeting them where they are We are managing our own discomfort We are saying in effect Your pain is too much for me Here is a solution so we can move past this And this may not be your words But this is the underlying message that I'm sending And the person who is suffering gets the message Unconsciously That their pain now is a problem to be solved They are too much They need to hurry up and get better Now we can also call this The tyranny of positivity The relentless cultural pressure to be okay To look on the bright side To find the silver lining And to turn your trauma into a TED talk And don't get me wrong Resilience is real Absolutely real And post traumatic growth is real Finding meaning in suffering Can be profoundly healing But it cannot be rushed But it cannot be forced And but it absolutely cannot come from the outside Healing happens in its own time And one of the most important things we can do Is stop rushing it In ourselves And in others So what exactly does it mean to hold space for someone?

Now it's become a bit of a buzzword now in wellness circles I need to hold space for my partner I need to hold space for my anger I need to hold space for my old memories But sometimes it gets watered down,

This word So let me share with you how I see this phrase Now holding space for someone Holding space can mean Being fully present with another person's experience Without trying to change it Fix it Minimize it Or take it away It means offering your attention Your full,

Undivided,

Compassionate attention As a gift As a container And as a safe anchor for somebody Or yourself It means allowing whatever is arising to be here The grief,

The rage,

The confusion,

The numbness The contradiction,

The mess All of it is welcome All of it is allowed It means staying grounded in your own body Regulated in your own nervous system So that your presence becomes a resource For that other person It means letting go of the need to understand Letting go of the need to have the answers Letting go of the subtle arrogance I know what you need And holding space is not passive It's not sitting there and doing nothing It's actually one of the most active things you can do Because you're actively choosing presence over reactivity You're actively choosing stillness over fixing You're actively creating a field of safety Through your own embodied presence In many ways This is the essence of what we do In family constellations work Now when I facilitate a constellation I am not directing the healing I am not making things happen I'm just holding a field Creating a container Where the deeper wisdom of the family system can emerge Where the hidden dynamics can reveal themselves Where what needs to be seen Can finally be seen And again and again and again What I witness is this That healing doesn't come from the facilitator It comes from the witnessing Something shifts when pain is witnessed When the excluded family member is finally acknowledged When the grief that has been passed down for generations is finally felt Or just when someone says I see you I see what happened And I'm not turning away Now let me take you a little deeper now If you're still with me Because I believe that for many of us Perhaps for most of us One of the deepest wounds we carry is the wound of not being seen Not being truly,

Deeply,

Unconditionally seen By the people who are supposed to see us Now for some of us this was obvious Our parents were absent or abusive Or caught up in their own pain That they couldn't be present for ours And for others it may have been more subtle Our parents loved us But they loved a version of us The good child,

The successful child The child who didn't cause problems The child who didn't cry And the parts of us that didn't fit that image They got pushed down into the shadows And they learned to hide Now this is what many call the inner child wound And it's profoundly connected to the experience of not being witnessed So when a child's experience is consistently not met When they cry and no one comes When they share their excitement and it's dismissed When they express their anger and they are shamed And when they have big feelings and they are told to calm down Or stop being so sensitive Something happens inside The child learns My feelings are too much My needs are a burden And I am not safe to be fully myself And that child That part of us that learned to hide Doesn't just disappear when we grow up It goes underground It lives in the body It gets triggered in relationships It shows up as anxiety,

As depression As addictive patterns,

As perfectionism As people pleasing As chronic disconnection from ourselves and from others So what does that wounded inner child need more than anything?

To be seen To be witnessed And to have someone say I see you All of you And you are not Too much Now I want to bring this into the body Because healing isn't just a mental process It's not just about insight or understanding Though those have their place And as we believe in somatic therapy,

Somatic healing The body keeps the score Every experience we've ever had Especially the ones that overwhelmed us The ones we couldn't fully process Gets stored in the body In the tissues In the nervous system In the way we hold ourselves The way we breathe The chronic tension in our shoulders or jaw or belly So trauma isn't just a memory It's a physiology It's a pattern of activation in the nervous system That keeps looping Because it never got to complete Now think about an animal in the wild A deer is being chased by a lion but escapes What does it do?

It shakes,

It trembles And its body literally shakes off the survival energy That was mobilized for the chase And then it goes back to grazing Nervous system reset Back to the baseline Now humans don't do this We override the shaking We push down the tears And we hold it together We tell ourselves to be strong and to move on And so the energy stays trapped And the cycle never completes So when we talk about holding space,

Remember We are not just holding someone's story We are holding their body as well We are holding the trembling,

The tears,

The shaking,

The sighing The breath that wants to deepen And the tension that wants to release This is why in my work I am always inviting people back into the body Back into the sensation,

Back into the breath Because the body may hold the key to the release that you are seeking And the body also needs to know I am witnessed I am held And it is safe to let go Now if you are still here Let me expand this frame even further now Because sometimes And this is what I see so clearly In Family Constellation's work also The pain that we are carrying in our bodies Is not even ours We inherit more than just genes from our ancestors We inherit their unfinished business Their unprocessed grief Their unexpressed rage Their survival strategies Their traumas And this is what's called intergenerational trauma And the science on it now Is irrefutable Trauma can be passed down through generations Encoded in our nervous system Shaping our lives in ways We don't consciously understand So you might be carrying anxiety that originated In your grandmother's experience of war You might carry a fear That goes back to your great-grandfather's poverty Or you might carry the grief That belongs to a baby who was lost Or an ancestor who was excluded from the family Or a trauma that was never spoken about But lives Lives on in silence And here's the thing You cannot heal what you cannot see And you cannot see what is not witnessed You cannot heal what you cannot see And you cannot see what is not witnessed So much of what we carry stays hidden Because it was never acknowledged The family secrets The things that were too painful to talk about The people that were just erased from history From our family history So in Family Constellations We bring these hidden things to light We give them a place And we say I see you I see what happened You belong to this system And I honour your fate And something extraordinary happens The weight lifts Not because you've solved anything But because you've witnessed something You've given it a place in consciousness So when I say to you I don't know why this happened to you I really mean it Because sometimes the why goes back generations Sometimes the why is tangled up in family dynamics That no one ever spoke about And sometimes the why is simply beyond our capacity to understand If a child is born with a disability You cannot explain the why And that's okay We don't always need to understand We just need to be held Now I want to offer you something If any of this has resonated with you If any of this is bringing a little bit of calm As you apply it to your own lives Now this is not a meditation It's more of an invitation An experience of what it might feel like to be held Now you can close your eyes if that feels comfortable You can keep your eyes open You can soften your gaze Either way,

Wherever you are Just let your attention now turn inwards We don't even want the thoughts to stop Feel your body exactly as it is right now Not as it should be Not as you wish it were But just exactly as it is now Notice where your body makes contact with the surface beneath you The chair The floor The bed And just let yourself feel supported now You don't have to hold yourself up Something is already holding you And now I want you to sense or imagine That there is a presence with you An awareness with you Not a particular person Unless one comes to mind naturally Just a presence A warm,

Steady,

Compassionate presence That is completely here for you And this presence is not trying to fix anything This presence is not asking you To stop your thoughts It's not asking your anxiety to go It's not asking you why this happened to you It's not asking you why that happened to you Nothing The presence is not trying to fix anything It's just present with you It's not judging anything It's not asking you to feel better also Or be different It's simply here witnessing you Witnessing your physical pain Witnessing your emotional pain And witnessing anything else that you are experiencing in this moment Now you can take your left hand Put it on your chest And now receive these words from the same presence The presence says to you I don't know why this happened to you But I can hold this for you You don't have to carry this anymore I don't know why this happened to you But I can hold this for you You don't have to carry this anymore I don't know why this happened to you But I can hold this for you You don't have to carry this anymore Now just notice what happens in your body When you let those words in Maybe something softens Maybe something tightens Maybe there are tears Maybe there is numbness All of it is welcome All of it is allowed You don't have to do anything with this Just let yourself be held Now If your eyes were open You can just let the world come back to focus Just see now If you carry some of that sense of being held with you Now As we witnessed holding ourselves Here is the beautiful thing The more we experience being held Being held by others The more we learn to hold ourselves Self-regulation is not something we are born with It's something we learn And we learn it through relationship Through co-regulation Through being held by someone who has regulated themselves So if you didn't get this as a child And many of us didn't You can learn it now Every experience of being truly witnessed Truly held Builds that capacity inside of you And eventually something shifts You start to become your own holding presence You start to offer yourself the witnessing You once needed from others Just imagine this You are going through a hard time The old patterns are triggered The anxiety,

The shame,

The feeling of being too much And instead of abandoning yourself Instead of going into self-criticism or numbing out You do something different You put your hand on your heart You feel your feet on the ground You take a breath And you say to yourself To that sacred part To that wounded inner child in you I don't know why this is happening But I am here I am not leaving And I can hold this for you That's it That's the practice Not figuring it out Not fixing it Just staying,

Just being,

Just holding And then as you practice this You may see a shift As you learn to hold yourself You become capable of holding others Not from a place of rescuing Not from a place of fixing But from a place of presence Compassion and capacity When a friend comes to you in pain You don't immediately jump to advice You don't breathe You ground yourself And you just offer your attention as a gift When your partner is struggling You don't try to make it better right away You just stay present You let them have their experience And you say,

I am here I am listening You don't have to handle this alone When your child is overwhelmed You don't dismiss their feelings Or rush them to calm down You become calm first You become grounded And just hold them with your presence Until their nervous system can borrow your regulation This is how it spreads This is how we heal Not just ourselves,

But each other And this is how we break cycles That have been passed down through generations One moment of genuine witnessing at a time One act of compassionate presence at a time And one brave choice to stay When everything in us wants to fix Or flee So let me leave this with you Whatever you are carrying right now Grief,

Confusion,

Anxiety,

Shame Heartbreak,

Exhaustion The questions that have no answers You don't have to figure it out You don't have to understand why it happened to you And you don't have to find the silver lining in it You don't have to bounce back from your pain tonight And you don't have to be further along than you are You have to just let yourself be held By yourself first,

Always By others when that's available By the ground beneath you By the air around you And the mystery that holds all of life Once again,

I don't know why this happened to you But I can tell you this Your pain is not a problem to be solved You are not too much And you are worthy of being witnessed exactly as you are And somewhere maybe in this moment There is a presence that is holding you That has always been holding you You just have to let yourself feel it Thank you for being here with me today May you be held May you be witnessed May you know deep in your bones That you are not alone Thank you very much for listening And Namaste