Do Not Neglect The Needful Role of the Witness
Article Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Witnessing for Others
- ❤️ “positive” Witnessing for others ❤️
- Witnessing for yourself
- Witnessing the inner critic
- Witnessing the outer critic
- One take on why Witnessing matters
- Witnessing others, who will never know it
- Witnessing for others when you are the source of their harm
- Footnotes
Introduction #
Elsewhere I’ve mentioned “the role of the witness”, been sitting on this as a draft (in my head) for a long time.
I absolutely cannot move away from the phrasing:
Do not neglect the needful role of the Witness
I capitalize Witness, as this is a real “role”, and it’s needed.
The context when one finds themselves with this role is that of ‘witnessing mistreatment’. The mistreatment of you, or the mistreatment of someone else. Indeed, once the skill/context/landscape of this “witnessing” thing is sorted, you can provide this caring treatment for yourself, and for others. To be able to do it for yourself is to be able to do it for others, and to have the ability is to also find yourself with somewhat of an obligation. Also, once you’re able to Witness for yourself and for others, you unlock a cool next skill, which is ‘Witnessing the other when you are the source of harm.’
Witnessing for Others #
When one witnesses (observes) one person mistreating another, it’s like being made (unwillingly) a participant in someone else’s drama. So, sometimes there becomes an obligation to provide the ‘Witnessing’ service to others. At minimum, one can provide Witnessing to the victim of mistreatment, OR the perpetrator, if the victim is no longer available to serve. Here’s something I said to a kid once, after an adult was speaking very meanly to them:
No adult should ever speak to a kid like that. You don’t deserve to ever be treated like that. If I were in your shoes, I’d probably feel things like disappointment, fear, anger, confusion. That’s all on them, it wasn’t your fault, it in fact cannot be your fault, and it’s even more foul that they’re trying to convince you it is your fault.
Someone once basically saved my life, in high school, when they took me on a walk and told me “your dad is an asshole, he treats you terribly, you won’t always have to live in his house.” That was the first time that sentiment had been shared with me, and it re-made my view of the world. My parents recollection of me before and after the walk was “after hanging out with {person}, we have no idea what they said, but you were so much more relaxed and manageable after.” It was because I was given hope, and someone named the abuse.
To provide the Witnessing to the adult would look like this:
The way you were speaking to that other person is wrong. It was coercive, full of anger and meanness and control and fear. Treatment like that is never acceptable, in any way, and I think dramatically differently about you now, having witnessed what you just did, than I did before seeing this. Regardless of why you think it’s their fault, it is, in fact, not their fault, and you trying to excuse it makes your position worse not better.
Remember the abuser’s/supremacist’s syllogism:
That didn’t hurt. If it did hurt, it wasn’t on purpose. If it was on purpose, you deserved it.
This is why I don’t accept the language of ‘punishment’ or ‘consequences’ or ‘discipline’ anymore, btw. All of those are forms of an adult using their power and control to hurt a child/someone else, and are thus the exploitation of a power dynamic, thus abuse!. If you think punishing children is acceptible, you’re an abuser.🖕 Some people try to use ‘positive punishment’, AKA rewarding ‘good’ behavior, rather than punishing bad behavior abusing children. It still does the same thing. It’s a clear message to the child “You will receive love and affection and warmth and dignity and aid exclusively based on if I feel good about you in this moment.”
Abusers are resistant to having their mistreatment named. To my parents, I’m still the child they felt entitled to abuse. A time ago, I spoke with each of them. The me of today knows how to recognize and name coercive dynamics in conversations. Like “DARVO” (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender). My dad got in a huff when I interrupted his monologue about sky daddy and patriarchal ways of being (“men deserve to control women, children, and other men they see as lesser than them”), saying ‘if you cannot speak to me respectfully, I will end this conversation.’
He was, of course, clueless (or did he know it all too well?) to the dynamic that lead to him ETERNALLY TREATING ME WITH DISRESPECT CONTINUOUSLY FOR DECADES. The only times he didn’t treat me with disrespect was when we didn’t interact. He and I basically stopped speaking when I was 16, and that is not odd to him.
I only reengaged with him when I needed to tell him he is not permitted to physically assault my child. It’s nauseating that this even needed to be stated, and yet desperately needed to be discussed.
And he accused me of disrespect. That was the ‘Reverse Victim and Offender’ part of DARVO. In that conversation he’d already denied, dismissed, and attacked. I was not giving in, in the way he’s used to people giving in to his bullying, so he escalated to calling me disrespectful, and threatened to stonewall, which is really projection of his own disrespect towards me. It’s innappropriate for a parent to expect their child to parent them (that’s actually abusive! it’s the exploitation of a power dynamic!) so I told him to get fucked. (slightly more gently than that, but only a little - I told him he deserves the treatment we all think persistent, resistant child abusers deserve. His self image is built on him thinking he’s a good person, so he seems uninterested in engaging with narratives that do not build on that.)
He dismissed every single one of my concerns, and I noticed him doing this reflexively for years. When my kid was an infant, and he tried to put words in her mouth (he does this to every kid he encounters, it’s disgusting, he makes the kid tell him that he’s the greatest. Literally.). I said “absolutely in no circumstances is it acceptable for you to put words in her mouth or tell her what to say.” his response was “yeah, whatever, i’ll pay for her therapy later.”
If we were in the same room, I would have perhaps slapped him. We were not, so I just got up (with my kid) and walked out. I cannot keep my kid out of his company, but I think she’ll be okay. I tell her that my parents beat children when they think they’re entitled to it, and while they promised me that they wouldn’t beat my kid, they are still at their core the kind of people that assault children.
Don, if you’re reading this, you probably already know (because I said it very, very clearly to you, repeatedly) that I have nothing but contempt for the ways you move through the world! Thinking about you makes me ill! Before our last phone call, I noticed how familiar the rising sense of dread was, in me, as we got closer to the time of the call. You spent your whole life making sure I feared you, so you could control me! “a fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom” you’d say, and because you thought you were god, you figured “a fear of the dad is the beginning of wisdom”, and you allowed yourself to emotionally terrorize, and you disconnected from me enough that it never actually bothered you, to terrorize your own kid. And you were good at terror, and bullying, and shaming. 🤮
<deeeeeeeep breath>
❤️ “positive” Witnessing for others ❤️ #
I forgot, upon the first pass of this piece, to mention the BEST case for Witnessing! There’s lots of needfulness around Witnessing harm and mistreatment, but the kind of Witnessing that is enjoyable for everyone is to Witness someone else, being them, and name something about it to them, others.
There’s so much obvious care and intentionality in how you did {such and such}.
You’re bringing focus, attention, persistence to {x}.
When I watch you do {such and such}, I notice it in different ways than I usually do, because {something about how they did it}.
There’s tons of this kind of energy that can be directed towards kids. Here’s a few typical statements I’ve made to my almost-four-year-old kid:
Wow, your feet have so much quickness in them.
You noticed that {such and such she commented upon}, from so far away? Wow. I wasn’t looking that far ahead at all.
Also:
You noticed the change in {tree, flowers, spot of grass, a place where something was growing and now something different is growing}? You remembered how it was before? I find that interesting.
How did you learn this? Did you notice it, or did someone teach you? You taught yourself? Wow. How cool to know that, teach it to yourself, and learn from yourself.
The way you do {something} has changed! Have you noticed it? I’ve noticed. It’s fun to watch!
I find you to be an interesting person. Do you find yourself to be interesting? Yeah? I’m thrilled to hear it. And you find yourself to be funny? You make jokes that you find funny? Wow. I’m a fan. Doing things because it’s interesting or funny to ourselves is such evidence of skill, interestingness, distinctiveness. You have great taste!
You balanced for such a long time against that hammock! And on one foot! I’ve never seen that before, have you done it before? Was that interesting to you? Was it tricky? [difficult to do]? It looked tricky from here.
Gosh, I could say so much more. Witnessing, to others, distinctive or interesting things about them, is sometimes an empowering, affirming, helpful energy to direct towards others.
A possible hope I have, for someone reading this, is simply for the person to know that we, as people, hold tremendous power with words, simply by verbalizing observations. Sometimes we can provoke incredible outrage, and frustration, interpersonally, but our words can be just as effective towards promoting peace, integration.
A big thing for Eden that I name and witness is her observation and awareness of herself and things happening around her.
I thank Eden all the time for keeping herself safe. When she falls, she’s skilled at using her arms to keep her head from hitting the ground. The last time she fell while running, she scraped her palms, elbows, and knees! and her head didn’t touch the ground, even though she fell flat. Even as she was crying as I picked her up, and I was getting bandaids, it wasn’t “oh you fell you poor thing” it was “wow, Eden, I see how forcefully you pushed the ground with your arms, and how strongly you moved your neck, to protect your head. Thank you for keeping yourself safe! I noticed that I felt scared when I saw you fall, at first, but I noticed you kept your head so high in the air and away from the ground - you kept yourself safe. Did you notice that too?”
She so often affirms that she’s being intentional about protecting her head. She’s got great instincts, and I tell her often how much I notice her instincts keeping her safe.
Or something like:
Will you use your eyes and ears, while we’re walking, to help us be safe? If you hear a car engine, will you let me know? (if she’s in the jogger, and I’m jogging, she can possibly hear a bit better than I can, since I’m running, so I’ll ask her to help participate in maintaining our collective safety).
I also note that we’ve got great skills for crossing roads. Sometimes she’s on foot or on her striker bike, and she always waits for me before crossing a road - she knows I like to go into the road first, and then she starts crossing as quick as she can, and once she’s started crossing, crosses it as quickly as possible, finishing it a bit before I do, minimizing her time in the street.
I see other parents who obviously don’t quite trust their kids (maybe for good reason, maybe not) around roads, and are constantly issuing commands and anxieties near roads. This isn’t needed at all with Eden. She is so aware of keeping herself safe, she doesn’t actually want to be in roads, and has great situational awareness. She notices if she can hear engines, she notices sightlines and obstructed sightlines, etc. She notices if it seems like drivers are paying attention, if they look like they notice her/us or not.
I comment on all of this. The first time she said “that person didn’t see us” I said “whoa! You were looking at them in such a way, you could tell they were not looking at you?” “yeah!” “wow, some adults don’t even do that, and don’t know that they could be doing that. What skills you have!”
So much for kids. It’s easy to Witness with adults, too. For instance, I spend a bunch of time climbing, I spend time with others who climb, it’s easy to note, kindly, the appreciable things others do while climbing:
The way you did that move looked really smooth this time
You were so fast through that sequence
When you went to that hold, you hit it perfectly. No readjusting the position or the grip. [compared to the last time, where they got three fingers on instead of 4, or readjusted or hit it with an open hand position and then adjusted to a half or full crimp]
I am sometimes drained by climbing with people who seem to practice exclusively ‘wrong spotting’ with their own climbing. Every time they pull onto the wall, when they step off, they have a laundry list of errors or evidences of their inadequacy. It’s not my favorite thing. My approach is to notice what went well, or what was interesting, or something that is different from a prior go. There’s always something here available to comment upon, instead of “gosh, you’re such a shitty climber”. People rarely call others shitty climbers, but they often call themselves a shitty climber. Sigh.
Also, besides commenting and making an assessement or a judgement, one can also ask the person their own observation of something! “Did that feel different than the last time attempt? Did you try something different? Yeah? And it seemed {better/the same/worse}? Cool!”
Witnessing for yourself #
Sometimes, the person that needs the witnessing isn’t someone else, but it’s us.
Witnessing the inner critic #
Sometimes, during a given day or time, the worst thing you hear is something you seem to have said to yourself. This is very evident in climbing communities, for instance. People will casually unleash devestating criticisms of themselves for making a mistake, or not doing something that’s already pretty difficult and challenging.
Sometimes when I hear it, I’ll interrupt, with something like:
if you just said about me, what you just said about you, we’d all be agreeing that that’s super rude. Right?
There’s always agreement. The person totally agrees that if they said about me, what they just said about themselves, it would be wildly inappropriate.
my model of that critical voice is that it’s not ‘you’, but it’s the internalized voice of an emotionally immature caretaker, often some combination of parents and/or teachers.
So, it’s not you picking on you, it’s someone else using your brain to pick on you. And my obligation to myself is to name that dynamic when I see it happen, because I’m familiar with that thing, this ‘toxic inner critic’.
Sometimes I’ve asked for the name of a parent, and the next time the person says something rude to themselves, I’ll say “Shut up, Marsha” or “Shut up, {name they gave me}”. It’s good for a laugh, and really lands the point that maybe that self-shaming voice isn’t actually us, it’s really something that belongs more to a toxic parent.
A lot more could be said about this. Often it’s hard to treat others much better than we treat ourselves. If someone close to us is endlessly harsh to themselves, it’s a bit of an ill omen for how they might sometimes treat us. Regardless if you need someone to treat themselves better, it’s nice to not neglect the needful role of the witness
Witnessing the outer critic #
Now, sometimes the harsh things are indeed being said by other people. The parent IS on hand to say the thing, or a partner IS on hand, dishing out the bad things.
The stuff I tend to be attuned to is the Gottman’s ‘four horsemen of the relationship’, with one more that I added:
- Defensiveness
- Contempt
- Criticism
- Stonewalling
- Dismissiveness
(I added dismissiveness, it’s a similar energy as defensiveness)
If you are being mistreated, and you imagine yourself Witnessing yourself, that can ameliorate the damage, a little. It can reduce the uncertainty and fear. Thinking “They should not treat me like this” and “I don’t deserve this” are powerful thoughts, if you’ve been conditioned in the opposite direction.
Evangelicalism conditions people, via the motif of ‘the violent atonement’, to think it’s reasonable to be treated terribly. I’d argue evangelicalism creates abusers by ladening every single participant with a giant, strangling burden of shame, then tells them that if they control themselves and the world around them tightly/rightly enough, they can have some temporary reprieve from the shame.
I tell my kid “isn’t it interesting, that some people think that sin is a real thing?”
This is very close, by the way, to how evangelicals teach themselves to hurt their own kids:
If you do something ‘bad’, I will punish you. That punishment is an expression of my love, so if you are hurt by it, please know that it was you hurting you, not me hurting you.
My mother would say “this hurts me more than it hurts you” as she would proceed to dis-attune from me and beat me, until my obviously sensitive self was completely broken. What a bitch. Maybe it wasn’t a disattunement, I don’t have a single memory of her ever actually attuning to me, so that disattunement was just her default way of being. She would do it with a flat, cold affect, and there would be words afterwards like “this is evidence that I love you”, and she would demand hugs, again, with a disattuned, flat, cold, dead affect. 🤮
I wrote about this extensively elsewhere, and have quoted much from a book about the ritualized assaults of adults against children
No one in my life Witnessed to me that this was mistreatment; that was a task left to a grown adult me, at 30+ years old, to witness to myself my own experiences. Eventually, the role of the witness became a way that I cared for myself in the midst of really unfortunate dynamics with others.
One take on why Witnessing matters #
Here’s a quote from The Verbally Abusive Relationship, discussing why some different people can experience the same form of harm, and only some of them adopt the attributes of this abusive way of being. (‘abuse’ being synonymous with a belief in power over, controller/controlled dynamics)
I remembered this book having a section about the role of the Witness, in the child’s life, having a protective effect from the mistreatment, by naming to the victim dynamics of the situation.
CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES OF THE ABUSER
Now, let us look at the origins of the abuser’s behavior. The typical abuser also grew up in Reality 1, where Power Over and dominance prevailed, and hence so did verbal abuse. Also, as was the case with the partner, many of his feelings were neither validated nor accepted. However, unlike the partner, he had no compassionate witness to his experience. Without a compassionate witness, he could conclude only that nothing was wrong. If nothing was wrong at all, then all his painful feelings must not exist. Automatically he stopped feeling his painful feelings. He closed them off from awareness as one would close a door. And he did not know what he suffered.
In this way he closed the door on a part of himself. He became inured to Reality 1. And, just as Hitler modeled his behavior after that of his brutal father, so, too, the abuser modeled his behavior after his childhood abusers. He became adept at verbal abuse.
Without the knowledge of his feelings of what he suffered-he could not experience empathy and compassion and so could not cross the threshold into Reality II. This reality was now behind closed doors.
The absence or presence of a helping witness in childhood determines whether a mistreated child will become a despot who turns his repressed feelings of helplessness against others or an artist who can tell about his or her suffering. (Alice Miller, The Untouched Key, 1990, p. 60)
Since the abuser feels justified in his behavior and seems to have no comprehension of its effects, we can assume only that he is acting out his repressed feelings and is, therefore, acting compulsively. Abusers seek Power Over because they feel helpless. The helpless, painful feelings of childhood that “must not exist” and “must not be felt” do exist and, if not felt, are acted out.
A long time ago in the abuser’s childhood, he closed the door on these feelings. To survive in childhood he could do no less. His feeling self, nonetheless, lived on behind closed doors. This feeling child within was, psychologically speaking, locked away in a tomb of agony.
The longer the child within is unrecognized, the more enraged it becomes, and consequently, the more rage the abuser acts out. Alice Miller tells us
As long as this child within is not allowed to become aware of what happened to him or her, a part of his or her emotional life will remain frozen, and sensitivity to the humiliations of childhood will therefore be dulled. All appeals to love, solidarity, and compassion will be useless if this crucial prerequisite of sympathy and understanding is missing. (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good, 1983, p. xv)
Typically, even though the partner tries to explain to her mate what bothers her, the abuse continues. Appeals to the abuser’s compassion are fruitless, because the abuser is not empathetic. As Alice Miller points out, a sympathetic and understanding witness to a child’s suffering is a crucial prerequisite to empathy in adulthood. Without empathy, the abuser cannot be sensitive partner’s anguish.
To me, the difference between abuse and mistreatment is partially up to how it’s received. Is the ‘victim’ aware of the mistreatment, able to label it as such, and properly blame the perpetrator, and able to express anger protectively if needed? Great. That’s mistreatment.
Conversely, if the victim is told that they are at fault for the mistreatment, in fact that they deserve it, or that it’s not bad, or that they don’t deserve to be upset about it, or that getting angry about it will make things worse, so they turn off the part of them that is experiencing the harm, that’s abuse. (please, see, again, the entire evangelical framework of ‘spanking’ as definitionally abusive, because of how perfectly it conforms to this physical abuse + emotional control dynamic)
Witnessing others, who will never know it #
so, Witness to others, mistreatment.
I’m pretty angry at a bunch of people in my life, who saw and became complicit in the mistreatment, by failing to Witness the mistreatment. Not just when I was a kid, or many years ago, but in more recent years. If I queue someone up well-enough for them to respond appropriately, and they still shit the bed/fail to witness, I’m more likely to lump them in as willingly/unwillingly complicit in the bad things.
But there are many other people, or systems, I have beef with. Some of them are dead, like Robert Moses. Others are normal people helping really terrible systems hum along. I think the solution is for those people to be able to Witness all this stuff to themselves and others, and then maybe they become practiced in malicious compliance with whatever system they’re stuck inside of?
This relates to my beef with european-american supremacists. (I don’t use the phrase ‘white supremacy’ or ‘white supremacists’)
A big part of european american supremacy lies in the power of ignoring and withdrawing affective connection to others. That book Conflict is not abuse, a few times touches on the power move that is refusing to discuss something with someone. That’s the move of someone trying to get more power, or it’s the move of someone with more power already, simply deciding on the outcome. I learned how effective this particular tactic is with Donald and Miriam - with both of them, as they tried to DARVO their way into a conversationally secure place, and I evaded it, they both eventually blocked me via the channel we’d been communicating, because now that I have a kid I have given myself permission to speak directly with my parents about decisions they made towards me.
I view the greater united states as a colonial army with a nation attached. ‘Whiteness’ feels like supremacy to me. Capitalism is just slavery rebranded, cops are deputized slave patrollers, and they still have the same energy, and should be treated however you think deputized slave patrollers should be treated.
Lots of modern white femininity is icky to me, because it smells like chattel slavery.
Witnessing for others when you are the source of their harm #
A cool skill that gets unlocked with Witnessing is you can use this same idea for when you act wrongly. Out of entitlement, or the expectation of someone else’s obligation or submission to you. It means when someone is reacting as if they were hurt by you, you can gently, easily receive the reaction. A tiny, simple example:
A time ago, I was walking with my kid in the sun, she was in her stroller, she put a hat on, and the brim was folded in a way that looked like it might be uncomfortable. I started reaching to unflip the brim, and she put her hand up, and said clearly, “don’t touch me”. A few moments later, I reached down and tried again to fix the brim. She immediately swung her hand behind her, and said with force and passion and anger, “I told you not to touch me!”
I was shook! My gosh, she was right. So I said:
Gosh, Eden, you’re totally correct. I heard you, I could have respected your boundary, but instead I felt entitled to disregarding it! I felt entitled, I acted entitled, and I violated a boundary. I shouldn’t have done that, I wish I had not done that, and if I find myself in a similar situation again in the future, I will not do that. You’re right to be angry with me, I appreciate your anger and the way you responded. Thank you for all of it.
Or something like that. Do you see how I Witnessed for her the mistreatment that I’d just done to her?
To contrast, I could have denied that anything wrong had happened. “What’s wrong? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Or dismissed it: “Oh, stop crying, it was no big deal, I was just adjusting your hat.”
Or reacted with fear of her anger, and offered a fake/misgrounded apology: “Oh, no! Don’t be upset, I am so sorry! Sorry sorry sorry!”
Or reacted with avoidance, and not responded to her, acting like I didn’t see that she was angry. Delivering silence, icyness, emotional withdrawal, dis-attunement.
Or punished her for displaying anger at me: “Hey, don’t be mad at me! I am your parent, it is not wrong for me to do things like that. You should say ‘thank you’!”
It’s easiest in relationships to get established a baseline of ‘we expect fair treatment by default in all directions, not out of obligation, but something like peace within ourselves + love for others (in general) and the others, in particular. The above story with my kid around her display of anger would have been different if until now, I’d made a habit of dismissing or denying or avoiding or punishing or withdrawing, without ever Witnessing the mistreatment. And if someone says sorry, but keeps doing the same thing, the words eventually lose their weight.
I tell Eden that she deserves fair treatment from everyone, and if it’s not what she gets, it’s reasonable to name it and resist the unfair treatment. So, of course, sometimes I expect to receive those energies, because when it happens, when I treat her with an entitlement I didn’t even notice that I had, I would HOPE she names it and resists it, with me. I resent that my own parents attacked me for displaying dissatisfaction with how they treated me, when they were functionally committed to a regime of emotional subjugation. They thought I was fundamentally bad, thus they needed to squelch my displays of anger and grief. It took a lot of energy, on their behalf, to suppress me, and wasted a lot of our lives together that could have otherwise been spent in a real, peaceful harmony.
In reality, people are fundamentally good, and can be, deserve to be, treated fairly. Just because a person out there happens to be someone’s child does not entitle that person to treat them in a dehumanizing, paternalistic way. To treat kids in a dehumanizing way is to set them up to expect more dehumanizing treatment from others, AND to deny them opportunities to experience healthy, reasonable boundaries. (Like, not being hit, not being verbally assaulted, not being shamed, yes, but what about being also given hugs, being given affirming words based on real decisions and dispositions, being delighted in? laughing with someone, rather than laughing at them.)