In the middle of recounting daily violence, Shawn pivots to a small story: he kept falling asleep in second grade because he was up until 3 a.m., and his teacher took his desk away and made him stand, assuming he was being bad. Joe finds it striking that out of all the abuse, this is what surfaces — not another beating, but the experience of not being seen.
“When I’m working with people through their traumas… if they were seen, something changes, but the not being seen in it causes just as much pain.”
Being seen is itself protective. The kids who make it through best, Joe notes, often just have someone who says, “I see where you’re at. How can I help you?” The absence of that — the teacher who didn’t ask, the mother who didn’t save him — is not a footnote to the trauma. It’s a second layer of hurt that has to be felt and processed in its own right.
So healing isn’t only about the central events. There are the ancillary hurts — everyone who failed to show up, everyone who looked away — and “all of that actually has to be processed” for a person to stop living as though the trauma were still happening.
Related Concepts
- Trauma controls you until you feel the hurt underneath it
- Don’t make hurt into weakness — witness the strength
- Seeing parents’ terror dissolves resentment
- Abuse creates either the endurer or the perpetual victim
- Believing you’re bad perpetuates the trauma cycle
- Anger is the doorway from endurance into buried sadness
- Both people in a fight want to be seen