1 like = 1 opinion on witnessing or being a spectator 😱
1. (Oh god so many likes already)
A lot of emotional processing is secretly a process of having your emotional experience witnessed by another. Witnessing is a pretty core kind of care.
A lot of emotional processing is secretly a process of having your emotional experience witnessed by another. Witnessing is a pretty core kind of care.
2. The feeling of ‘being seen’ is so core to the feeling of being loved, that it might actually be that the majority of what it is to love someone is simply to reflect them back to themselves.
3. The art of ‘holding space’ is to give someone the reason to trust that you are seeing them, will continue to see them, and will protect them from attempts to invalidate their experience as long as you are holding space for them
4. Not being seen by those we love and trust causes us incredible pain. In non-violent relationships, perhaps the biggest hurts come from one person not noticing or bothering to notice important things about the other.
5. Maybe intimacy could be defined simply as continual co-witnessing?
6. What might get in the way of us simply seeing another? Well, our own stories, for one. Being unable to set aside how we would experience the situation, or what this experience now means to us, means we subtly invalidate the experience of our loved one.
7. Ever watch two people have a fight, but it’s just both of their trauma responses talking? A big thing that gets in the way of cleanly holding space for someone is not having metabolised your own emotional experience in this area, meaning you’re just re-experiencing, not being.
8. A good mentor has done all of this, which is maybe why we instinctively look for elders in times of crisis; good elders have metabolised a tonne of their emotional experience and so can actually see you clearly.
9. This is not true of all old people by default! I think I believe people diverge, and either become better at holding space through having experienced and metabolised so much, or get worse because they cling to protective shells that have gotten stronger over time.
10. Been reading ma mate Pema Chödrön a lot recently; she describes compassion as being able to witness someone’s suffering without looking away. Actually a ridiculously courageous act when seen that way.
11. There is courage in witnessing; fear nudges us to control the situation or provide advice or aim at some outcome, particularly if it’s someone we love deeply. Courage is simply being there, wide awake, and not demanding it go any certain way for you.
12. Probably there’s an art to witnessing on a grander scale as well; the urge from marginalised communities to ‘tell our stories’ is likely a desire for others to see this particular, often painful experience.
13. Holding space is work! It’s tiring! Like seriously, hydrate yourself!
14. However, it’s also important to look at the deeper motivations you have for holding space for others, particularly if you ALWAYS find yourself in that role. It can be a deep strategy for being loved or needed that may not be serving you as much as you think.
15. Many of us (particularly women) have a part inside of us that behaves like a martyr, that subjugated all her needs to the needs of others in order to be loved; liked; admired. Holding space from this part can often lead to an emotional hangover; you wake up too drained after.
16. I’ve been playing with the idea of maintaining sovereignty in challenging situations, and it can, paradoxically, allow people to trust you more! If they know you can see where you’re at and tap out if you’re overextended, they can stop managing that themselves.
17. For many people (again, often women) it can be hard to let go and have someone hold space for them completely; they will always secretly be worrying about you and if it’s too much for you. Being sovereign over your emotions lets them relax and know you will take care of that.
18. Witnessing can also be damned important in group situations, particularly when something covert happens. Being able to tell someone ‘I saw that; your experience was real and you’re not imagining it’ lets them trust themselves and gives them an ally.
19. One of the most important tools powerful people/groups have is to shape the narrative; to include and exclude events. Being a witness to excluded events turns you into an ally for those who normally don’t have enough power to shape the story.
20. Also, you may notice that your ability to see things at all is shaped by your sense of power in a situation; if you feel very powerless it is easy to fall into perceiving only that which the powerful perceive. This is how cults and cult leaders thrive.
21. Never underestimate how easily our attention can be steered by fear if we are unaware of it; the practice of compassion in Buddhism is learning, patiently, how not to look away even in spite of fear.
22. It seems like witnessing is a key component of many somatic therapies, specifically @DougTataryn ‘s Bio-Emotive Framework. We are incredibly social creatures, and most of our deepest hurts are social.
23. At a basic level, to pay attention to something is to validate it. For many, it is better to be wrong, than unnoticed.
24. Our values tell us what to pay attention to. Check out the amazing work @edelwax has done in this regard with Human Systems.
25. Getting a tonne of people to pay attention to something is an art in & of itself. Difficult, because you can’t use the thing they would pay attention to to get their attention, but instead, a story, a symbol, a suggestion that it will help them be the people they want to be.
26. The importance of witnessing is also why we fight about representation in Hollywood. Everyone knows that everyone knows (common knowledge) that what is seen by everyone (I.e. Hollywood films) is good, right, just etc.
27. To give a platform for a lot of people to witness something is to legitimise it. Which is why we scramble to take down terrorists’ media and manifestos.
28. (Ok my current target is 68 boy howdy)
It’s interesting that we have different words for watching and seeing. Like watching = spectating, and seeing = witnessing. This gives us an idea of how involved the observer is in the situation.
It’s interesting that we have different words for watching and seeing. Like watching = spectating, and seeing = witnessing. This gives us an idea of how involved the observer is in the situation.
28. Weirdly, I’ve notice that in emotional witnessing, the more spacious/less assertive you can be in the situation, the more you actually can change it. Some finite/infinite games shit here.
29. Probably something weird happened when we invented film/recorded video - now for a time, we can pretend that the observer doesn’t exist, or at least have an impact on the events being witnessed.
30. In reality, witnessing always changes things. TV cameras changed the Vietnam War. Twitter changed the Arab Spring. Mobile phones changed the relationship between police and African-Americans.
31. An event everyone witnesses changed the relationships between the people in the group. An event everyone knows everyone witnessed is the definition of common knowledge (á la @KevinSimler’s excellent posts on the topic).
32. Cultures and societies change through the accumulation of common knowledge.
It is not enough for everyone to experience it; they must know that everyone else did, and that everyone knows everyone knows they experienced it.
It is not enough for everyone to experience it; they must know that everyone else did, and that everyone knows everyone knows they experienced it.
33. What was metoo? A common knowledge explosion. The only thing that changed was collective witnessing, and yet that change changed...a lot.
34. Social media algorithms fuck with our societies because we can’t be sure of what is common knowledge and what is not. In a church sermon, you can visually inspect who is present. On a newsfeed, how do you know who saw the same thing as you?
35. This means it is easy to think someone else saw the same thing as you (overgeneralising) or that nobody shares your experience (alienation) - or both at the same time.
36. The core of apologising is deeply seeing how the other person is hurt, and having that actually matter to you.
We can tell when that shit is faked.
We can tell when that shit is faked.
37. Musing out loud - how could group level apologies work, and work well? Reconciliation seems like a difficult art.
Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to the indigenous people for the Stolen Generations - for some, meaningful, for others, hollow.
Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to the indigenous people for the Stolen Generations - for some, meaningful, for others, hollow.
38. @alifeofmovement swooping in with some insight bombs I can pillage here. I’ve definitely felt a shift from ‘steering my life’ to ‘watching my life unfold’ in the past ~12 months.
39. Ok some more - on being a spectator.
The concept of spectatorship is that we can observe an event without changing it.
This is bullshit.
The concept of spectatorship is that we can observe an event without changing it.
This is bullshit.
40. Maybe if we pretended events existed in isolation, you could pretend that being a spectator didn’t change an event. But who watches feeds back into what is shown next.
41. This conceit (that we call the fourth wall) lets us in modern society do all sorts of ridiculous things in the name of spectacle, of fiction.
42. In reality, the fourth wall is an agreement between two groups of people that one is ‘players’ and the other ‘audience’ and that we pretend only the ‘players’ have influence on how the scene plays out.
43. For a while all of modern art held this conceit, and we as a society forgot that the audience had entered into this agreement at all. We forgot that this was a contextual agreement for each time and place and started calling the scenes of the players ‘objective’.
44. Objective? What the hell is that?
Another way of calling something objective would be to say:
‘Only certain people can be players, acting certain scripts, and we’ve conveniently occluded the fact that this rule/game is voluntary, and that the audience agreed to this too.’
Another way of calling something objective would be to say:
‘Only certain people can be players, acting certain scripts, and we’ve conveniently occluded the fact that this rule/game is voluntary, and that the audience agreed to this too.’
45. People’s’ perceptions of a lot of big stories - science, government, fiction, media, religion - hinges on them forgetting that they agreed to take a spectator role, and spectator is only one of many roles they could in reality play.
46. Luckily, smartphones and the interactivity of social media have started to break down the conceit of spectatorship in my lifetime. Even kids understand they are both the watched and the watchers.
47. BURNING MAN! I remembered to write about Burning Man.
Burning Man has a ‘no spectators’ rule, and this sets the tone for the entire culture of the place.
Burning Man has a ‘no spectators’ rule, and this sets the tone for the entire culture of the place.
48. ‘People are more agenty at Burning Man; in front of your eyes they become real actors playing alongside you, rather than melting into a background of non-player characters.’
autotranslucence.wordpress.com/2018/09/05/ana…
autotranslucence.wordpress.com/2018/09/05/ana…
49. There is something that happens when money is exchanged, that rarely happens when it isn’t - people begin to see whatever they paid for as a product, and not something they’re in relationship with.
50. So walking around a festival paying for things can make you feel entitled and separate; and actually diminish your experience.
51. Sometimes you get a better experience of something doing shitty unpaid work on it than being a customer.
52. I’ve experienced this with events; some of the best ones I’ve been to let you do a volunteer shift in exchange for a discount; even if you don’t need the money it’s often worthwhile to do because then you become part of the story rather Han just watching it.
53. At DWeb Camp this year people took turns to serve the food, and everyone washed their own dishes - and this one little thing did more for bringing people together than any rousing speech could have.
54. When I run events, I think a lot about the design of the physical spaces and how that sets up the agreements between people; how it defines the relationships between presenters and audience.
55. Look at this setup. It’s just screaming ‘you’re not one of us!’
And this has been the default for, idk, hundreds of years at least.
And this has been the default for, idk, hundreds of years at least.
56. I have basically nothing interesting to say about it, but I keep hearing from people more in the know than I that the most exciting work in theatre these days is happening in immersive theatre, where the boundaries between actor and audience are deliberately blurred.
57. Good immersive theatre I’ve been recommended - Sleep No More in NYC, and a handful of Tupperware parties in California. There are probably way more things I’m unaware of.
58. Another artform that destroys the actor/spectator dynamic is games. Here, the understanding is that as a participant, you have input into shaping how the game goes.
59. (However, the communities that have built up around Twitch streamers do seem to have put the spectatorship back into gaming, so I dunno.)
60. In a game, the person who has the ‘magic stick of objectivity’ is the game designer. And we pretend, like they do, that they are omniscient and omnipotent and kind of top-down design the game.
61. (As an aside, if you see the word ‘designer’ in someone’s job title, too often this is shorthand for ‘we pretend this person has the magic stick of objectivity’, hellloooooo UX design)
62. ‘Mechanism design’ has this conceit too. ‘I will observe all the participants in the system, impartially, and then design for all of their maximal welfare’.
63. Lol.
Guess what? They’re just as partial and subjective as the rest of us. And hiding this fact is unlikely to do us good (because it worked so well for movies, and games, and policy...oh wait).
Guess what? They’re just as partial and subjective as the rest of us. And hiding this fact is unlikely to do us good (because it worked so well for movies, and games, and policy...oh wait).
64. This idea that one can observe a system impartially without being a participant in it...I just want to take the idea and rip it up and stamp it into tiny pieces with my boots.
👏OBSERVATION 👏 IS 👏 PARTICIPATION
👏OBSERVATION 👏 IS 👏 PARTICIPATION
65. @glenweyl wrote a great critique, partially of this mindset in ‘Against Technocracy’
66. One summary of the insight of postmodernism could be this:
We pretended that the perspective taken by creators of important things was ‘objectively right’. Turns out that is just a way of defending that perspective from others.
We pretended that the perspective taken by creators of important things was ‘objectively right’. Turns out that is just a way of defending that perspective from others.
67. Which perspective you look from determines what counts as important, and what counts as true.
68. We (the keepers of the dominant narrative, anyways) thought of ourselves as right, when actually what we were was ‘powerful’.
69. The perspective we look from doesn’t make us right from all perspectives. In fact, we should be skeptical that looking from one perspective can capture all the important stuff about a system at all.
70. If individuals have emotional and cognitive blindspots where we hide things we’re afraid or ashamed to look at, society has civilisational blindspots where we refuse to acknowledge that one view has been suppressed in favour of others for no other reason than power dynamics.
71. Alright, @vgr decrees these things end today. So, some basic opinions:
When holding space for someone else, less is more. Seriously, shut up. No, more than that.
When holding space for someone else, less is more. Seriously, shut up. No, more than that.
72. I’m a pretty strong believer in the idea that our intentions and beliefs can influence people even if we do not believe we are acting upon them consciously. So if you are ‘holding space’ but internally yawning you can bet your bottom dollar that they can tell, and it hurts.
73. It is much better to refuse to hold space for someone than to do so without good intentions or attention on them. Doing so degraded trust.
74. OTOH, some people have so few emotional resources that half-assig it with all you’ve got is probably actually the best thing for them.
75. I wish there was a ‘young men’s Camp for Feeling Your Feelings’ because holy shit have I shepherded a tonne of male friends + lovers through the valley of ‘Human emotions and connection 101’.
Rewarding, but that shit gets tiring for the shepherd when that’s all they do.
Rewarding, but that shit gets tiring for the shepherd when that’s all they do.
76. There’s a fine balance when holding space for someone between using your experience of countless others to guide your responses and seeing them as a unique individual you cannot predict. Skilled space-holding probably needs both at the same time.
77. If you find yourself needing a lot of emotional space holding (I.e. during a crisis) for the love of god brainstorm multiple people to ask and ask the people you do have for backups if your resources are limited.
78. Your friends who are good at holding space are always the ones asked, and it can be overwhelming and often the people best at holding space are bad at noticing when it is too much for them.
They care until they collapse.
They care until they collapse.
79. When going through a rough time recently, I was surprised to find it difficult to seek out help from my happiest friends. It was easier to seek support from a friend with anxiety, or romantic problems, because there was this sense of cameraderie; being in the same boat.
80. It -is- possible to hold space for your own emotional processing, although trickier. Journaling, Gendlin’s Focusing and probably Bio-Emotive can be done alone.
81. I believe it is worthwhile to practice seeing suffering; especially in the people who impact us the most. Many people don’t want to look at the suffering of their parents, siblings, bosses; particularly when it hurts them in some way.
82. On spectating: in a practical sense, being a spectator often makes us lose track of our bodies. But our bodies often are the most interesting participants in watching something. Bringing awareness to bodily sensations while e.g. watching a movie is fun!
83. (Be forewarned, it might make you way more emotionally sensitive. I don’t see this as a bad thing, but YMMV)
84. There’s probably a role that is diminished in contemporary society that is something like ‘interpreter’ or ‘guide’ - like a sports commentator who can watch the action with us and tell us all what it -means-.
85. It’s likely that certain authors, priests, and maybe journalists played this role in the past. Nowadays, we beg for these characters but we all partially trust different ones who all give different interpretations.
86. Different interpretations is good! But there’s something game-theoretically lost when we cannot be certain that an event that we saw and we know others saw will be interpreted by the others in the same way as us.
87. This is kind of what the fake news trope is getting at. The actual facts have only ever been relevant for what they say to us about ourselves and about our society; the real important bit is the story, the why.
88. All we know is no one has the same why, and many of us are suspicious that a good-enough why even exists at all (they probably do, but we have a confusing relationship to them right now).
89. Oh, a minor rant about space design - as an audience member, you will have my more loyal attention if you give me escape routes. Speeches are risky things to give your attention to, because many are bad, and forcing me to sit through one guarantees that I won’t.
90. Audience spaces should have permeable membranes! Firstly, for impatient people like me who refuse to get trapped in auditorium seating.
91. Secondly, for people who have children, or people who are sick or get sensory overwhelm. Forcing everyone to have the same attentional stamina ensures you only get single able-bodied attendees.
92. I have been curious about why conferences focus so much on speeches for a while. Seems like it is more for the speakers than participants? It’s a weird default that often ends up in exhausting and boring event design.
93. People want to be heard, probably more than they want to listen. They listen to be polite, so that one day they can be heard.
94. (Fuck it I’ll do 100)
The corollary to this is that people who actually get deep pleasure out of listening are highly, unusually, completely valued by circles that discover them.
The corollary to this is that people who actually get deep pleasure out of listening are highly, unusually, completely valued by circles that discover them.
95. (The same goes for friends, lovers and spouses - if someone is in high demand but you can’t understand why, maybe they love listening to people?)
96. I guess I see listening (and its physical corollary, paying attention) as an archetypically feminine art, and it is hideously mismatched with most big incentive systems we see today.
97. The closest things I can think of to society valuing people who pay attention are valorising talk show hosts, curators, and things like Esther Perel’s new couples therapy podcast.
98. As it becomes easier for people to try out new artforms, I wonder if we will see more ‘space holders’, public protectors of vulnerability, and more people famous for their compassion.
99. Good listening amplifies what it attends to, which is why it can be so easy to forget that it is there.
100. But society is filled with people right now who feel misunderstood, neglected, and forgotten, and so we seem to be deeply craving collective and interpersonal ways of being seen and witnessed - in our joy and in our suffering.
Whew! 100 is so many! Thank you @vgr for your unusual prompt and for the bunny encouragement signs throughout this threadapalooza season.
