Watcher or Witness: Who Holds Your Healing With You?
We’re often reminded that healing is our responsibility—that it is intimate, internal, and ultimately something no one else can do for us. The notion that healing must be done alone ignores the fact that much of our wounding occurred in relationship—and so, too, must much of our restoration.
Healing rarely unfolds in isolation. It happens in therapy sessions, in walks in solitude, in moments between friends, and in the support of family. It happens when our support system is willing to hold space without needing to fix or evaluate. It arises in moments of reflection, in conversations that allow for contradiction, and in environments where safety is not conditioned on composure.
And yet, for many of us, spaces that allow for that kind of healing are rare. Most of the time people play a part as the good samaritan but cannot actually hold space or comfort. True support, however, is not performative—instead, it offers companionship, patience, and respect for the pace and shape of another’s path.
Healing, then, is not a solitary pursuit but a shared process that depends on being met with presence rather than pressure, and on finding spaces where one can unfold without being measured.
There’s a Fine Line Between Support and Surveillance
For years, I carried my pain in silence. I didn’t speak of what hurt, because I thought resilience meant to silently overcome the pain and “come out of it ahead.” I buried it, smiled through it, convinced myself that healing meant keeping it together. God forbid I share what was in my heart, what was hurting my soul, what made me feel human.
Eventually, the silence became unbearable—and I swung the other way. I began to overshare, not to gain some sort of pity or have people feel sorry for me, but because I didn’t want to suffer in silence. So often when we reach the other side of hard times we hear people say: “oh I just wish I knew, I would have been there,” or “you shouldn’t have suffered alone.” We post things like suicide awareness phone numbers, but when people actually show us their pain, we recoil and ask them to seek help. For me, I hit a hard time after I became pregnant with my daughter, and for three reasons I was very explicit about my experience: I wanted to document my experience, I wanted to show people it was safe to be authentic and real, and finally, I wanted to see if people were who they said they were. On all three, I failed miserably. I reached into the void of social media, hoping someone might sit with me, not to fix, but to be with. I wrote long captions. I posted my tears. I tried to make visible the weight I had carried invisibly for years.
And—there were a few who reached out—people who I hadn’t spoken to in years, but those who were closest to me? They were the worst. They watched—but they didn’t witness. They lurked. They gossiped. They said, “I’m concerned about you” with tones that made my body flinch.
And I realized: I was not being supported—I was being surveilled.
Witnessing vs. Watching
There’s a quiet but crucial distinction between being seen and being observed—between presence and pressure, between connection and control.
A watcher, even with the best of intentions, often needs your healing to happen on a schedule. They may not say it directly, but their presence begins to shape your behavior. You find yourself editing your story, skipping over the messier parts, trying to look more “okay” than you are—because their eyes feel more like assessment than acceptance. To be watched is to feel a subtle tightening. You may hear words like “I’m just worried about you,” but the undertone carries something else: the need for you to shift, to shrink, to resolve your discomfort so that theirs can ease.
A witness is different.
A witness does not come with an agenda. They do not need you to arrive at clarity or move through pain quickly. They are not measuring your growth against a timeline or quietly tallying your setbacks. They come to sit beside you to honor your process, not to shape it. They understand that healing is not linear and that holding space is not the same as holding solutions. A true witness listens with their whole self—not to respond, but to reflect your wisdom back to you. They don't interrupt your pacing or try to place their fingerprints on your process. They trust you to know when and how to move, and in the meantime, they simply remain.
This kind of presence is rare—it makes room for truth, for release, for the kind of transformation that only happens when we are allowed to be as we are—without performance, without shame.
In a world that often teaches us to package our pain or speed through it, being witnessed—not watched—can feel like a profound relief.
We Learn by Watching—So We Mirror What We See
Our dominant sense is sight, which means we learn much of what we know about how to be in the world by watching others—by absorbing the cues we’re shown, not just the ones we’re taught. We mirror what’s modeled, even when what’s modeled is misaligned with what we truly need.
And when what we see most often is curated resilience—healing wrapped in performance, pain hidden behind poetic platitudes, and people moving on before they've moved through—we begin to internalize the idea that this is what healing is supposed to look like. Quick. Quiet. Aesthetic.
We start to question our own process. We wonder if our grief is too loud, our confusion too long, our emotions too inconvenient—so we tell ourselves we’re fine when we’re not. We learn the right language—say the affirmations, use the “positive” reframes—even when our bodies know we’re not being honest.
And slowly, without meaning to, we lose access to our own truth. We rush ourselves through discomfort, not because we’ve found peace, but because we’ve lost permission to linger.
Eventually, the ache doesn’t go away—it just goes underground. We stop reaching for support not because we don’t need it, but because we’ve stopped believing it’s available. We stop feeling, not because we’ve healed, but because we’ve adapted—because numbing starts to feel safer than not being met.
Discerning Witness From a Watcher
When you’re in a tender time—whether you're navigating grief, uncertainty, deep transformation, or the quiet unraveling of what no longer fits—it can be difficult to know who truly stands beside you and who merely stands nearby.
So when you’re unsure of someone’s place in your healing, pause and ask:
Does this person hold my story with gentleness, or do they approach it like a puzzle to solve, dissecting it from a distance?
Do I feel spacious enough to be unfiltered, or do I find myself rehearsing my pain in ways that sound more acceptable, more digestible?
Am I welcomed into deeper processing, or am I subtly nudged to speed things up, to “get over it,” to reassure them I’m okay?
Do I feel truly held in their presence, or do I simply feel watched—like a situation being managed rather than a person being met?
The people who deserve a place in your healing circle are not the ones who fix, hurry, or interpret your pain through the lens of their own discomfort. They are the ones who can sit with the uncertainty and be with you in any state you’re in, just to be a stable presence.
Being Seen
You do not have to bare everything to be seen, nor must you withhold your truth to remain safe. The path between silence and oversharing is not about how much you disclose—it’s about whether you feel met in your honest experience.
There is a quiet kind of discernment in knowing who can hold your story without needing to reshape it and who can stay present without requiring you to bypass healing.
You are allowed to choose your spaces with care, to seek companionship that feels like presence rather than pressure, and to name what kind of support you need without apology.