The Extraordinary Relational Power of Witness and Withness in Relationships

Witness and Withness in Relationships

Kevin and Laura invited me into their lives eighteen months prior to help them navigate the high levels of reactivity that once dominated their conversations. In this final session of marriage counseling, the themes of witness and withness that had emerged for several months became solidified in their reflections.

Laura began to express an awareness of how Kevin’s anger activated parts of her story that predated their marriage. Her story is one in which angry men become violent men. Kevin learned to attune to his own experience of anger by noticing where he felt the anger in his body and what the anger was actually trying to tell him. For the first time in their 26-year marriage, Kevin saw that his anger was setting off an ineffective cycle of communication.

Both of them had their own internal work and formation to do, and they knew this work would continue long after marriage therapy ended. But together, each learned to bear witness to the other’s pain and offer withness without trying to fix the other person.

Why We Default to Fixing Instead of Presence

We commonly turn toward rational solutions when facing difficulty. If we hear of a person at our church in the hospital, we often immediately create or look for the meal-train to provide food. Or maybe young parents are stressed out because their sweet angel babies are now toddlers who are pushing boundaries. Parents of older children tend to pile on with unsolicited advice.

In either of these cases, rational solutions can be helpful. However, only paying attention to the rational solutions and ignoring the experience of the person facing difficulty circumvents part of our nature that most resembles the image of God we bear. We, as human beings, are “fundamentally relational, reflecting the relational nature of our triune God.” ¹

From Embodiment to Meaning

Written into the core of our human nature is the upward motion from embodiment to meaning. We receive the world, especially other humans, through sensing in our bodies before our brains begin to interpret and make meaning. Curt Thompson, MD, psychiatrist and co-host of the Being Known Podcast, often reflects that first we sense and then we make sense of what we sense.²

If a young dad is trying to learn how to parent a toddler, advice from another dad might be helpful. But advice alone will likely bypass what the body is sensing. Another response might sound like, “I see how difficult this is. I can see how much you love your child, and I want to be with you.” In that moment, the second dad bears witness to the first dad’s pain and offers withness through solidarity rather than a quick solution.

A Lived Example of Witness and Withness in Marriage Counseling

In the beginning, Kevin would come in and vent for the first fifteen minutes of the session about how he only needed to let off steam about a co-worker earlier that day. He could not understand why Laura reacted so defensively when he wasn’t even talking about her. As I turned to Laura, she was making herself as small as she could be in the corner of the couch they shared in my office. I invited Kevin to notice how small and defenseless Laura appeared. Before he spoke, I asked Laura to reflect what she was noticing in her body.

“Fear, isolation. I feel my shoulders trembling and my gut clenching,” reflected Laura.

“When was a time you felt this way before,” I asked.

After a long pause, and through tears and a clenched throat, Laura muttered the words, “I feel like I’m back in the bedroom closet hiding from my mother’s boyfriend who was beating her.”

The room was deafening with silence.

Kevin’s posture softened. “Is this the way you feel every time I come in the house ranting about work?”

Laura could only nod her head, “yes.”

In the course of marriage therapy, Laura would also seek individual trauma-focused therapy. She learned how to do her own work. Kevin also sought additional therapy to learn more about his anger. Now at the conclusion of this season of marriage therapy, the couple is able to be authentically themselves with each other through witness and withness.

Practicing Witness and Withness in Everyday Relationships

Offering witness and withness has an extraordinary power in relationships. Withness and witness change the atmosphere in a room. Defenses relax. Postures soften. Nervous systems find regulation. You don’t have to be a counselor, pastor, or elder to offer witness and withness to others. Here are some ways you can develop witness and withness in your own personal relationships.

Do your own work. In the dad advice scenario above, the dad offering advice without solidarity is doing so out of his own anxiety of being a dad. In order to offer witness and withness, we must first be aware of what we are experiencing in the moment we learn of another’s pain and suffering.

Be quick to listen and slow to speak. We have lost the art of listening in our culture. We don’t have time to sit and listen to what others have to say. We are always on to the next topic in our heads or task on our lists. When we practice slowing down and gazing into another person’s eyes, we are able to see the image of God in them. As we listen and do our own work in the moment, we begin to curate a space where witness and withness can thrive.

Value experience over solutions. When we go first to solutions, we ignore the beauty of our gift of humanity to experience first and make meaning second. This, as with the other two suggestions, takes many repetitions over time. It can be a slow work, but as we work to build the skill of offering witness and withness in our relationships, we unlock a depth and beauty that makes every conversation much richer and valuable.

Witness and Withness as Posture, Not Technique

Though I’ve offered a few bullet points that might make it sound like witness and withness are skills to be developed, I long for these to be more invitational. It’s less about technique and more about posture. Less about fixing someone’s problems, and more about seeing others as unique reflections of the image of God they bear. 

Witness and withness alone are not solutions to broken relationships. Rather, they are postures that curate formation and healing in the presence of others.

Footnotes

1. Hall, T.W. and E.L. Hall, Relational Spirituality: A Psychological-Theological Paradigm for Transformation. 2021, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. ↩︎
2. Sweeny, P. and C. Thompson, Being Known Podcast, in S4E5 Trauma and the body: “Then the Lord God formed the man…” [Audio podcast episode]. 2022. ↩︎

Image Credits

• Featured Image: Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
• Photo by Dương Hữu on Unsplash