Safety Series: “I Needed to See My Pain in Somebody Else’s Eyes” - Why Trauma Needs to Be Witnessed
There’s a moment in one of Gabor Maté’s recorded lectures that stops time.
A woman in the audience stands to speak. She’s trembling with emotion, sharing the conflict she’s carried for years. In her former life, she was a group counsellor working with men in prison — men who had done the most horrific things imaginable. At the time, she says, she felt purposeful. But now, with distance, she feels something else: disgust. Shame. A kind of moral confusion. She questions whether she was complicit in something she doesn’t want to touch.
And then she shares a moment she can’t forget.
She asked one of the worst offenders — someone whose actions had shocked even other prisoners — “Why did you do what you did?”
And he replied,
“Because I needed to see my pain in somebody else’s eyes.”
The room goes silent.
You can feel it through the recording.
That statement lands like a stone in the chest.
It doesn’t excuse what was done.
But it reveals something essential about human suffering:
Trauma wants to be witnessed.
Every human being — regardless of history, background, or behaviour — shares three core needs:
To be loved
To be connected
To be validated
When those needs go unmet — especially in childhood — something breaks inside us. And what breaks is not just our sense of safety in the world… but our sense of self.
Because children don’t blame the world.
They blame themselves.
When no one validates our pain — when no one says “I see you, this shouldn’t have happened, this is not your fault” — the nervous system has to make sense of the overwhelm in the only way it knows how:
By internalising the pain as a statement about who we are.
No one came.
So it must be me.
I must be too much.
I must be unlovable.
I must be wrong.
I must deserve this.
These become the silent beliefs that run beneath the surface of our lives. The “I am” and “I’m not” statements that shape our relationships, our self-worth, our nervous system states, our ability to receive love or feel safe in stillness.
They’re not just thoughts.
They’re identity.
And they don’t come from the original pain.
They come from being alone in the pain.
This is why witnessing is so powerful.
Because it disrupts the aloneness.
It creates a moment where the body can say: “Maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe I’m not broken. Maybe I was just alone with too much for too long.”
Validation is not about agreeing with someone’s narrative.
It’s about honouring their experience.
It’s about letting their nervous system feel what it never got to feel in the moment —
That someone sees me, feels me, and isn’t afraid of my pain.
That is co-regulation.
That is polyvagal safety.
That is repair.
When someone else can hold the pain with us — not fix it, not interpret it, but simply be there with it — it begins to metabolise. We can finally feel it in a way that doesn’t overwhelm us. And more importantly, we can start to rewrite the story we wrote about ourselves.
We begin to challenge the old, inherited truths.
Instead of “I’m unlovable,” we glimpse “I was never shown how to receive love.”
Instead of “I’m bad,” we begin to feel “I was never validated in my goodness.”
Instead of “I’m broken,” we feel “I’ve carried more than I was ever meant to.”
And the nervous system listens.
It breathes a little deeper.
It doesn’t have to fight or flee anymore.
This is what I offer in my psychotherapy sessions — not just strategies, not just insight, but a space where your pain can finally be seen. A space where the old “I am” statements can be gently challenged. Where you learn to witness yourself with the same compassion you were never offered.
Because being witnessed is powerful.
But learning to witness yourself — your pain, your patterns, your past — with presence and compassion?
That’s where true safety begins.
You no longer need to perform, explain, or carry it all alone.
Your nervous system doesn’t need to keep proving your worth or hiding your hurt.
It just needs one thing it may never have had before: a safe space to be seen.
And if this article touches something in you… if you recognise yourself in these words,
Then maybe this is your moment to begin.