Author Archives: Kelly Nenezian

As a therapist, I often go home what magic happened in my office. How did I make a difference? How do my clients get better? How do I help people heal?

I remember hearing once in a training we are “healing witnesses”. I really could not understand what that meant for the longest time. I have given a lot of thought and research into these words as I watched clients come in and out of my office for all kinds of reasons and somehow get better. I am a scientific minded individual with a research background. I don’t like theories, I like to know facts. So how can being a “healing witness” make such an impact?

As babies, we are the most emotionally regulated, we will ever be. We cry as we need, scream as we need, love fully, and even get angry in order to get our needs met. Something happens a long the way that causes us to start to question our body’s natural regulatory system. We stop crying, getting angry, loving fully, and in some sense really living. Oftentimes, we become afraid of ourselves emotionally and can’t seem to understand why we are drinking, smoking, over eating, under eating, hiding in our house, playing video games for 16 hours a day, unable to function in relationships, and so many other negative adaptive strategies. According to Brene Brown, we are the most addicted, obese, and medicated adult cohort in American history. From what I have learned, the very basic reason is we stopped letting our body do what it knows to do in order to process and regulate emotion.

Our bodies are intricately designed to help us “cope “and process with emotions. The issue is we don’t like feeling. We don’t like being uncomfortable. At some point someone (usually our caregivers) tell us that feeling is bad. For some reason feeling is off limits, dangerous, and we should avoid it at all costs. They don’t do this maliciously and don’t say it verbally in many cases. It is often done non-verbally and they do it because they need us to get things done. We are taught at a young age that being productive is far more important than our feelings. Dr. Alexander Lowen said it best, “The modern individual is committed to being successful not being a person. He belongs rightly to the action generation whose model is to do more but feel less”. So, we do things to release chemicals in our brain that stimulate happiness and when that wears off, we are right back where we started. However, we went to work, picked up the kids from school, cleaned the house, and did everything on our to do list. But are we happy?

Being a “healing witness” means I help people reclaim their already installed regulatory system. I provide safety, comfort, encouragement, understanding, and space for someone to feel fully. This is a lot easier said than done, of course. Oftentimes, we are talking about people breaking through years and years of conditioning in order to allow themselves to feel comfortable feeling again. Some of you reading this are probably like “oh no, no way, not me….” Feeling is hard but to me just existing in life is harder.

For more related information watch Brene Brown’s TED talk here: