It’s all great to talk about needing to resolve, and help others resolve, trauma but that’s much easier said than done. Working with a traumatised person to help them face, feel, and process what has happened to them in a way that helps them heal and move on from it is extremely complex and requires specialised expertise and training. Something that, unfortunately and surprisingly, even many psychologists and psychiatrists have never been trained for. However, being unable to do all of that, does not mean we, lay people, are unable to do anything.
What a person who carries unresolved trauma – or who experienced something that has the potential to cause trauma – needs most of all is someone with whom they feel safe enough to express what they experienced, including all their complicated thoughts, feelings, and emotions. This is both very simple and for many people very hard to find. Especially, because if a person has been traumatised they are likely to find it harder to trust other people or feel safe with them.
To be able to support someone in a situation like that, there is a need for capacity building in holding space. Holding space means to be with someone, to listen to them openly without judging or trying to fix or find solutions, without trying to comfort or reassure. Just listening and acknowledging what is being shared and the validity of the person’s experience. This, like many things regarding trauma, is both simple and not easy.
When we see someone who is distressed, for most of us the impulse is to try to make things better, to fix, solve or at the very least try to distract the person into temporarily feeling better. All of this is done with good intentions, with the goal to help someone. However, to the person sharing their difficult experience, it may feel as if you are not really hearing what they are saying, as if you are minimising their experience, or as if there is something wrong with them for feeling the way they do and expressing this. In other words, despite the best intentions, the message received is: don’t express this, it is not right or safe, just put it away. This is a risky message, because suppressing what comes up in the wake of a potentially traumatic experience is what is likely to make it traumatic.
Alongside our good intentions, there is another reason why we often prefer to fix or comfort, rather than simply listen to and witness someone’s distress. It makes us feel very uncomfortable ourselves to feel so helpless in the face of the suffering of someone we care about. This is a difficult feeling to sit with and many people are unable to tolerate it. In turn, this leaves them unable to hold space for someone else. To be able to hold space for another person, we have to be able to hold space for ourselves, to accept and sit with our own emotions and feelings, the difficult ones as well as the joyous ones. For many of us, learning to do so, requires some processing and healing from our own triggers or traumas – sometimes ones we were not aware of yet.
To be able to move beyond the trauma wall, learning to hold space for someone is essential. It should be part of the basic training of any social worker, health care professional, educator… essentially anyone working with people in any way. Ultimately, it is something that should be part of the primary and secondary school curriculum, to ensure it is taught to everyone.
But since we cannot do everything all at once, I will start by advocating the inclusion of learning to hold space in the curriculum of social work qualification programmes. While continuing to hold space for the people around me when they need it.
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