Enlightened Witness

Enlightened Witness is a term Alice Miller coined to describe a person who supports an abused individual by showing empathy and by helping that individual understand his or her history. My first therapist played that role for me. He helped me realize that my childhood was everything but easy and pleasant. After he had listened to many of my stories of how my parents had treated me, I distinctly remember him saying to me: "Your childhood was really shitty." I teared up when he said that, because for the first time in my life I found confirmation for something I wasn't really aware of, or didn't want to acknowledge to myself. It was painful to hear, but experiencing that pain, feeling it probably for the first time in my life after decades of repressing these feelings, was also liberating, and crucial in my overall healing process. I could never really see and admit to myself that the emotional abuse my parents had inflicted on my was serious. Here, for the very first time, was a person who did see that, believed in what I had to say, and confirmed to me that in fact, robbing a child of its emotional needs, was indeed serious. Most recently, my wife played the role of such an Enlightened Witness to me, and I will be forever thankful, because she literally saved my life with her empathetic and truthful words.

I went through a depression (and I am using the past tense deliberately here, because I no longer am depressed) that lasted about 3 months. It started when, confronted with the daunting task of analyzing my dissertation data, I felt overwhelmed, unable to accomplish this task, and it reached its peak only a few days ago, when my new boss charged me with a task, which in his view would require 16 hours of daily work over the coming 2 weeks. This whole period of depression was accompanied by suicidal thoughts, and these thoughts became more serious as I slipped deeper and deeper into the depression. I did not make an actual attempt but for the first time I did some serious research on the internet about the various ways one could end one's life, and I became more and more determined to do it once I would identify a method that would cause me relatively little suffering. Over several weeks, my last thought before going to bed and my first thought waking up in the morning evolved around this topic.

Even though I knew from my past experience with depression how important it was for me to gain access to my true feelings, to allow these feelings in the present in order to avoid and/or get out of the depression, the stronger my depression became, the less I could find a way to tap into these feelings. It was as if a wall stood between me and these feelings, and it kept growing day after day. It even got to the point where I no longer cared. I knew what I had to do, but the wall presented itself as an insurmountable obstacle.

In my desperation I decided to go a counseling center that provides its services free of charge. After meeting with an intern counselor I felt even worse. I didn't sense much empathy from him. His main concern was to prevent me from committing suicide, but not because he really cared, but because he was concerned about his and his organization's reputation. He kept asking me: "So when you go home tonight, will you kill yourself?" "When you drive by a pharmacy, will you go in and buy sleeping pills?" Had I answered these questions with "yes", he would have made sure I that I would be hospitalized to cover his ass. In fact, he even mentioned that as a possibility. He then got me an appointment with a psychiatrist. I told him that I was against taking antidepressants because they only contribute to further mask and cover up our true feelings, but I agreed to the appointment probably because I felt so desperate at that point. The next day I went to see the psychiatrist, who by the way was in no position to help anyone for he was an emotional train wreck himself, cold and distant. After his assessment he concluded that I am not a candidate for medication. I was somewhat surprised, but in light what happened between my meeting with the intern counselor and the psychiatrist the next day, it was not that surprising after all.

As I came home that same day I had seen the counselor, I sat on the living room couch, staring at the television which was turned on. My wife came home, and I decided to tell her what was going on with me. I had tried to hide how I was feeling from her, but I couldn't do it anymore. She listened to me as I told her about my desperation and my thoughts of committing suicide. I don't remember exactly how our conversation took this direction, but she started pointing out that whenever I am confronted with some task in my life that I consider too difficult, too taunting, or impossible for me to accomplish, I get depressed and I give up. As she continued to speak about how this lack of self-confidence and self-esteem directly result from how my parents treated me - for instance, by putting me down whenever I had shared a personal dream or goal, by constantly criticizing me when I had failed to do something a certain way (like getting a bad grade in school, not performing well in sports), by not praising or acknowledging whenever I had done something well - I started sobbing like a little boy. There was a flood of emotions that ran through by body and mind, and again, it was a situation where someone else had confirmed to me the hardships of my childhood and adolescence, which I was incapable of seeing and feeling. I knew all these things as facts, or events that had occurred in my life, but I couldn't feel how painful and agonizing they were, how helpless and lonely they made me feel when I was little. My wife's empathy and her reminding me of how I had been treated, suddenly opened up these gates that had prevented these feeling from surfacing, that prevented me from feeling how hurt I was and how hurt I still am.