WITNESS vs VICTIM by Sergio Ocampo, LMFT, SEP
When we experience trauma in our lives, whether it be a violent encounter, emotional or physical abuse or early life adversity, our view on life changes. We become more withdrawn, disconnected, and for many, as if living outside of our bodies, and even our lives.
The effects of overwhelm upon the human mind and body can lead to a life lived isolated. The small joys of daily living, and even, significant life milestones can go unnoticed. Days become often drab and a muted; a life with no meaning, with no sense of purpose.
Worst of all, a person affected by trauma may begin to feel that their life not only has no meaning, but also not worth living. A person’s emotional pain mutes all other feelings to a point where escape seems the only way out. It is here that those suffering trauma begin to recur to daily coping mechanisms to avoid coming to overwhelm. This strategy can take many forms, such as strict control of routines, exercise, extreme physical experiences, drugs, alcohol, sexuality, etc.
Inevitably sufferers of trauma feel their free will taken away, having to always cope with the effects of their past. Indeed, free will feels taken away, literally ripped away, replaced by a sense of vulnerability and lack of full control. This combination creates, most often than not, the sense of being vulnerable, of impotence, essentially being victimized on a daily basis.
A person who has been traumatized falls a victim of these. However, it is when the individual fully identifies and embraces their traumatic past where trauma truly takes its toll.
Strongly feeling oneself a victim can, and often will, feel as unconditional surrender to feelings of shame and collapse.
What is frequently ignored is the sense of agency, of mastery that we all innately carry in us. It one’s internal life force that want to manifest and help heal us. It wants to step away from what has happened, and move towards something new, something better – and it is dying to emerge.
What would then be the opposite being a victim of our trauma? It would be to instead become a witness to our trauma.
So, what happens here? How is it different?
When we become a witness to our lives, and to all our experiences, we are able to separate them from ourselves as things that happen to us, not things that are us.
Instead of seeing our traumas as what we are, we then see them as things that happened to us and affected a part of who we are, but not all of who we are. This distinction is a fresh new mindset, a way to see our lives as composed of several parts. We can love a friend, yet not like their choice of clothing, or their choice of words. We love them regardless of the parts of them we find un-agreeable. Trauma is not much different. There is a part of us that feels sad, anxious, shamed etc. and there is also a part that feels love, empathy, and enjoyment of people and things in life, no matter how small these may be.
When we separate our traumas from the whole of our person, we can become a witness to it. We then can see how it has affected our lives. We can be a witness to how our personality is affected by trauma and how it impacts our lives as well as those around us. We can then begin to step away from being a victim of trauma—being captured completely by it—to mastery over it. It is here where recovery begins. It is where we begin to heal parts of us that don’t feel at ease and expand those that do.
We then step fully away from being a victim of trauma to being a witness to our trauma. We begin to heal, acknowledging our wholeness.
Sergio Ocampo specializes in the use of Somatic Experiencing and EMDR to help his clients resolve past difficult and overwhelming experiences