Therapists As Vital Witnesses
"Finally, I had given him something. I could bear witness to an event of extraordinary importance to Paul. I, and I alone,could testify that a great man deemed Paul Andrews to be significant. But the great man had died years ago, and Paul had now grown too frail to bear this fact alone. He needed a witness, someone of stature, and I had been selected to fill that role."
Our clients oftentimes mistake an eclipse of the sun for a night of perpetual darkness, seeing no light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. An eclipse of the sun is an experience rare enough to be scary and utterly disorienting, even if its occurrence is foretold. And humanity always manages to maintains its collective sanity and equilibrium in the face of a total eclipse, not only because she has learnt to predict its occurrence but also because she knows that it is invariably a passing phenomenon, no matter its cosmic totality and intensity.
Isaac Asimov, in his timeless psycho-cosmic short story, NIGHTFALL, convincingly illustrated the hypothesis that in the absence of the foreknowledge of an unusual and rare cosmic event as well as the accompanying certainty of its permanence, majority of humans would lose their mental balance when total darkness of the unexpected kind descends upon their known world.
This is in fact what many experience when an unexpected catastrophe strikes their hitherto peaceful and predictable existence. It feels like an eclipse of the noon in perpetuity.
I recently learned that in such paralyzing situations, the best and the utmost role a therapist can play is that of a stable and a stabilizing force. By being invariably present and available, the therapist becomes a much needed anchor of predictability as clients struggle to outlast the event that has completely shattered their previously known reality.
The therapist cannot and should not seek to 'solve' or 'alleviate' the client's suffering, but rather strive to be a living witness to what is perhaps the most alienating and disorienting experience in their client's life. A witness, in this sense, is someone who reliably and closely, for a brief moment in time, accompany us on a difficult journey without themselves being a partaker. This has a profoundly stabilizing effect on the suffering client who perhaps only comes to fully realize and appreciate this witness role at the tale end of their ordeal. They're often gratified to know that there's at least one person who fully and patiently witnessed their struggle in their darkest moment. Someone who intimately knows and shares their greatest story of triumph. There's nothing as experientially invalidating as when someone went through a great ordeal without the benefit of a single living and compassionate witness.
The idea of a witness is also relevant in another sense. I have come to recently begin to imagine whether it is possible for a healthy mind to ever seek therapy. What could be the basis for such a well-functioning mind to seek therapy? Well, there's no real account of a therapy with someone who is by all measure healthy and functional. The one account I do found was in a fiction written, not surprisingly, by a masterful therapist. Yalom has an overactive imagination which he had to carry from the realm of the real to that of fiction. In his collection of short stories about therapy, he presented a case of a client who though having not what is technically termed 'presenting complaint' sought therapy nonetheless. And it turned out that he needed nothing but the one chance to exhibit his life before a respected audience of one in the hope that he might get a much needed validation of his experience. He needed another witness of note after the one who formerly played that role in his life passed away.
We greatly underestimate this role of a perceptive witness as compared to an intrusive meddler who seeks to alter, improve, and suggest. And the more healthy the person who seeks therapy, the greater the likelihood that what they need is a perceptive witness rather than a consummate healer. It is the role of a witness not to guide or instruct or suggest, but to listen and watch, to see and understand, and to be capable of being affected without breaking the therapeutic boundary. When we have lived a life that is defined by a great or an improbable story of endurance or suffering or achievement or loss or persecution or self-denial or sacrifice, our spirit yearns for an airing or a display of this personal tragedy or melody if it mustn't wilt of existential claustrophobia.
A true, stable, and reliable witness is sometimes hard to find among our network of friends and family. This is where a therapist can step in. And when therapists come across such rare clients who come not with a presenting complaint but with a presenting need, they, like the fictional Yalom, in the short story referenced above, must be capable of admitting their error of judgement while quickly shifting their clinical mental frame: "Im accustomed to helping folks with problems. That’s what therapists do. So one can easily see why I made that assumption".