One of the best ways to support people going through a traumatic experience is to tune into being in the same space with them.
We need to work very hard to take out own biases out the picture and just be willing to listen to where someone is coming from; not make assumptions about how they are going to be; not project our own stuff onto them.
We need to just sit with people. One of the most important gifts we can give someone is the willingness to sit with them in their pain.
Most of us come into the helping professions with a desire to make things better. We’re compassionate people; we care; we don’t want to see people hurting and we learn whatever skills we can in order to help people not to have to hurt so much.
But it’s not our job to take away pain.
It’s our job to help people heal themselves and to provide a safe space in which they can do that. And that requires us to sometimes be able to sit with people while they’re in their pain and not give into the helpless feeling that we have and feel as though we have to fix it. In reality, a pain that’s shared is one that diminishes over time.
We are not superheroes and we cannot save the world. We can’t make the trauma go away, but we can help people find the internal strength to integrate this experience in a way that becomes healthy for them and helps them become stronger.
There’s a book I love called, Strong at the Broken Places, by Linda Sanford. She talks about the concept that when a broken bone heals, it is often stronger at the place in which it was broken. And people may sometimes experience that also. When they are broken in some way, they may actually become stronger as they heal.
Hope Makes Healing Possible!
Patricia Sherman, Ph.D., LCSW
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