One of the many functions of a therapist is to bear witness to you as a client. This function is, on the one hand, very obvious in that the therapist is clearly an audience to your self-expression, while on the other hand, the witness function is quite subtle. The subtle aspects pertain to the deeper purpose of having a witness in one’s life. Ideally, what influence can it have for a client in therapy to receive consistent and receptive witnessing from a therapist over time?

The answer I would like to suggest will benefit from a short description of one major development in the field of Clinical Psychology. In the years after World War II, a psychoanalyst named Heinz Kohut began to question his Freudian training, mostly because it wasn’t working very well with his clients. He looked for a more effective way to regard his relationships with them and eventually came up with a new model that took the name Self Psychology.

One of its key ideas is that our earliest years are naturally a time of deep narcissism and our development into mature mutual relationship with the world and others requires that our early narcissism receives a good reception from our caregivers. The best reception is for our caregivers regularly to meet our need for recognition and celebration by them. According to Kohut, when our natural narcissism receives that kind of favorable response, it later transforms into adult ambitions and ideals that align with the world. Otherwise, our development suffers.

On first blush, it is therefore often a corrective measure for a therapist to witness a client warmly and consistently. That seemingly simple action by the therapist recreates a long lost opportunity for many clients to receive the kind of good reception that inner growth originally required, but did not properly receive. Receiving it now, although belatedly, many clients will successfully reconnect to the original thread of their stunted development and move it forward into the present as rediscovered goals, dreams, and abilities. They will reclaim their aliveness.

That benefit of witnessing by the therapist would, in itself, be enough to sell me on the service, which is not actually as simple as it seems to the onlooker. It requires a deep ability from the therapist fully to be there for someone else. Therapists must have their inner world sufficiently in order such that none of the therapist’s personal baggage or bias overly interferes in the witnessing function to obscure or misdirect it. If it were easy to provide that kind of reception, original caregivers would not drop the ball so often in the first place. Nor would there be so many poor therapists.

Meanwhile, in those wonderful cases where the witnessing shines, its deeper purpose has its first fighting chance to enter the relationship also. The deepest benefit of consistent, favorable witnessing is that clients may eventually internalize that treatment as a way to treat themselves. They may take the witnessing that was originally outside them in the therapist and move it inward as a new and reliable aspect of the personal self. According to Kohut, many key advances in supporting oneself derive from this natural process of internalizing support originally provided by someone else. I am simply bumping this idea forward to include witnessing as its most refined application.

How might you benefit from an increased ability to witness your own experience with greatly reduced or even zero reactivity at times? What might you see about yourself and your life that otherwise eludes you whenever you react too strongly to connect the chief dots, not to mention the more subtle ones? Might you find out more readily how you get in your own way, especially under stress? Might you learn there are clear and consistent patterns of behavior and emotion that conspire to regular experiences of suffering in your life? The witness comes to see these connections, offering first freedom from them based on greater awareness. The witness gains choice by the very act of witnessing well and witnessing clearly. Yes, you can get a witness, and thereby become one as well.