Be Honest and Bear Witness

Like most of us, I've had conversations where I've been talking about something that is disrupting me or causing some issue in my life. At some point in the conversation I can feel myself begin to give disclaimers or statements that soften the emotional blow of what I'm sharing. Each sentence seems to be attached to a statement that downplays the pain that I have experienced.

I tend to end these encounters with all-encompassing statement like, "it's really not that bad" or "it's going to work out." I might start making excuses for the person who might have hurt me or I make myself responsible for more of the issue than I should. More commonly, I may end these conversations apologizing for burdening the person I'm sharing with, with my story and unnecessary baggage I just brought into their life.

Why do I do this? Why do we do this? Why do I feel the need to soften the hard things that have happened in my life?

Those questions could be answered in many different ways, but for me, one major reason is because I don't want the hard things in my life to be true. There is so much power in admitting that something hard has happened. If I'm honest about trauma in my life, that would make me a victim. If I've been wounded by someone and I admit that, I'm accepting that I've been hurt which could make me feel weak. The reason that feels most present for me to avoid my own pain is that if I admit I've been hurt, I would also have to admit that I need help and I hate feeling needy. When I have needs and ask for them to be met, I immediately feel like a burden and I hate that feeling.

Unfortunately, my attempts at suppressing and ignoring only get me so far. According to Dan Allender, "You can't heal what you don't bring to the surface and acknowledge." This quote makes my skin crawl. Both because it feels so true and because it comes into tension with the parts of me that so desperately want to hide and ignore all my pain.

I've recently been struggling with the invitation to be a witness to my own pain. The first step in my journey of owning my pain is being honest about it with myself. It's deciding that I don't have to hide it anymore. It's believing that when I accept the hard things about my life, they begin to lose their power. Allowing myself to remember painful stories from my past and have those stories wash over me and bring the emotions back up that I've pushed down for years.

The next step is sharing these stories, and the pain, with another person that feels safe. Inviting someone else to bear witness to my pain and allowing them to really see me and all my wounds. Judith Johnson says, "When we bear witness, we lovingly give our attention to the other without judgment. When we allow another to bear witness to us, we give ourselves the freedom to be known." The question that I feel in myself and I would imagine others would have is how does sharing help?

Telling these painful stories can't change them. We unfortunately can't play revisionist history and change stories from the past. We can't time travel and stop abuse from happening or avoid the car crash we were in. We can't keep our loved one alive that died and we haven't grieved.
The power in being genuine about our pain and bearing witness to it is that it can decrease the weight of those memories. They won't disappear but they just might lose some of the control that are having over you. When we are totally honest about pain, we can bring healing. When we try to push pain down, it doesn't change or go away, it actually just waits to come back up again and it typically comes out sideways.