When No One Is Watching
In this piece for Substack, Susan Holliday explores the value of ‘witness’ in a world which prizes being seen more highly than the experience of seeing
So much happens when no one is watching, perhaps because no one is watching Robert Bly
I am walking through the cobbled streets of my old university town in the early hours of Sunday morning, heading for a bridge over the river Cam. In a couple of hours, a throng of visitors will break this spell of night and send the whispered secrets of ancient walls scuttling back behind the mask of day. In this unwatched hour, the sentience of trees, grass and birds feels palpable. It’s as though I have stumbled into a space between worlds in which all manner of dramas and stories have been unfolding under cover of darkness.
Reaching the other side of the river, I notice a heron standing motionless in the shadow of a creek. Oblivious to the venerated splendour of King’s College Chapel which glorifies the sky beyond, his attention to the moment is absolute. Holding both bird and chapel in a single line of sight, I am touched by the sense that there is no hierarchy of worth here. Both are perfectly made. Both have their place in the grand scheme of things. The chapel, a historical icon recognised worldwide, seen by thousands every day. The heron, with its short life already half-lived, hidden in a creek, rapt with the intensity of seeing. Any moment now the bird will fly away. He will vanish into thin air. And no one will know he was ever even here.
So much happens when no one is watching, perhaps because no one is watching.
When no one is watching, the earth turns. She drops her bounty quietly like dew onto the lawns of our lives, without clamour for recognition or reward.
When no one is watching, night creatures disclose the darkness through the exquisite sensitivity of noses and ears.
When no one is watching, a billion drops of water pass over our heads in unrepeatable patterns of cloud and sky.
I am here for a college reunion. Forty years have passed down river under the soft stone of footworn bridges since I left this place as a history graduate. Filled then with seeds of promise and potential, I had my whole life ahead of me. This turning back now to look at the road I have travelled has left me unsettled, my dreams last night haunted with fragments of memory and an acute sense of turning points in my life that have defined who I’ve become. Shards of ostensibly friendly questions from my peers at the formal reunion drinks and dinner last night have disturbed the comfort of my present, with the acuteness of their inquiry.
What do these four decades of existence actually amount to? How have I made my mark? How does my life trajectory stack up compared to my peers? What have I done with this one precious life?
When all is said and done, what really matters? Profile. Reach. Status. Wealth. Progeny. All of these markers were discreetly woven into our reunion encounters yesterday, as though we were each secretly applying a shared matrix of accomplishment to map lives of infinite subtlety and unfathomable significance. Looking back as I am right now (literally looking over the water meadows known as ‘the Cambridge Backs’), I find myself asking: how do I want to account for myself?
I could tell you the truth as you will find it in diaries and maps and log-books. I could faithfully describe all that I saw and heard and give you a travel book. You could follow it then, tracing those travels with your finger, putting red flags where I went.[i]
I could tell you about my early career, with its vertiginous rise to positions of responsibility and influence, first in the advertising industry and then as Head of Corporate Fundraising for Save the Children. I could tell you that I rubbed shoulders with captains of industry and royalty in the corridors of power. But this flurry of flags suddenly vanishes in my early thirties and the trajectory of my life goes underground. Disappears. Without a trace. The truth is that everything that really matters to me has happened since my disappearance.
* * *
Becoming a psychotherapist is a bit like entering holy orders. Everything happens behind closed doors. For nearly three decades, my professional life has played out in an unwatched space, sealed by bonds of confidentiality and care. Whilst the impact of this work is evident to me in countless moments of personal revelation and transformation within the enclosed space, the true reach of each therapeutic encounter will never (can never) be traced, measured, or attributed. All I know is that each witnessed life ripples healing across a whole system. Partners, children, friends, colleagues are all affected, in unfathomable ways, now and possibly for generations to come.
I’d like to be able to tell you that the transition from limelight to shadows was planned, that I made a conscious decision to take the road less travelled. Perhaps you might imagine a kind of Icarus fall. An ungainly dive headlong into the sea. In truth I just spent a few years in the wilderness. I travelled. I studied photography at Camberwell College of Art. I fell in and out of love. A friend suggested that talking to someone could help me find my direction. That’s when I reached out to a psychotherapist for the first time. The rest, as they say, is history.
Looking back now, I acknowledge a hidden part of me which knew, even in the depths of my bewilderment, that I had been trying to flourish in an environment that simply didn’t suit my essential nature. I was like a shade-loving plant exposed to the full glare of the sun, a nocturnal creature blinking in the headlights of fast cars and neon lights. In time I began to understand. I was meant to be somewhere less exposed, more intimate, where my sensitivity could be an asset and not a disability. I just had to step away from who I wasn’t. And in the end, who I am found me.
* * *
In an age defined by its preoccupation with being seen, I find myself looking the other way. As a psychotherapist, and as a photographer, what interests me is the experience of seeing. Turning my back on the shrapnel of sound bites that assail us, I shut my door and offer my undivided attention to another person. Of course, I have my blind spots. Sometimes I miss what’s right in front of my nose. But I try to cultivate a depth of seeing which takes me beyond the ‘maps and log-books’ that profess to chart each human story. I look beneath the surface. Between the lines. Towards the hidden depths of uncharted space.
For many, looking into the uncharted (unwatched) creeks of our lives is to be avoided at all costs. The very word ‘depth’ conjures up a lifeless ocean trench, a place of no return beyond the reach of light. We imagine a dismal shadowland, heaving with hideously deformed creatures of the psychological night. In recent times we have given this unseen dimension of human experience a fearful name. ‘The Unconscious’. Then, to keep the ‘deep’ safely out of sight, we have invested countless millions in a way of life laced with distraction. Dazzled by larger-than-life drama, we cease to see beyond the surface of our own incomparable experience. Unseen, we discount our lives as unremarkable, commonplace, featureless. Like our oceans, these vital depths risk becoming dumping grounds for toxic waste.
We look away perhaps for fear of discovering an interior wasteland. Our disregard reveals that we have lost faith in the existence of a wellspring at the heart of human experience, a source of emotional nourishment and personal truth that is alive moment to moment, in all of us. For human nature is not self-evident. It has an unseen dimension which is the fulcrum of life. In our depths, beyond the shadowlands of childhood wounding, lie the nursery grounds of being, where seeds of possibility wait to be quickened into life through the warmth of our attention. Unwatered by curiosity and wonder, the very source of our aliveness risks drying up. This desiccation erodes not only the experience of those who are unseen, it also withers our experience as instruments of seeing.
Disconnected from the vital intelligence of our hearts we look to things, mountains of things, to replenish the void in our being. We plunder the natural world around us to fill the bottomless pit within. Our myopia, it seems, is costing us the earth.
* * *
Where we have understood the value of psychotherapy as a space in which we are seen, we may have overlooked its most fundamental contribution, as a space in which we learn how to see. Shielded from the glare of constant visibility, we enter an unwatched space. Away from the glare of curated perfection, we are safe to explore and to challenge, to flounder and to fail. Removed from the arena of toxic comparison or envious attack, we are safe to encounter the treasure of our distinction. It becomes possible to experiment with shining.
So much happens when no one is watching. Perhaps because no one is watching. Except that of course, in therapy, someone is watching. Held in the undivided gaze of the therapist, the person who longs to be seen becomes a seer, capable of seeing herself. Learning to see into the human heart is a fundamentally relational process. It takes place in the space between two people. The experience is intimate and powerful. So powerful, that it invariably transforms both of us. There is no one-way Lazarus miracle here. As Jung reminds us:
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.[ii]
Two by two we spend time away from the flood. In this intimate arc of encounter we explore ways of seeing more tenderly, more particularly and more completely. This deeper vision takes us beyond diagnosis and cure. What we’re after is illumination (to shed light on our inner worlds), revelation (to reveal the fullness of who we are) and inspiration (to breathe life into dulled and desiccated selves).
At its best I believe that therapy is akin to painting, to playing an instrument, to speaking a poem or performing a play. Like these, it has the potential to lift us, both seer and seen, towards a quality of vision which is equivalent to art, in that it opens us up to the richness, vitality and truth of all that lies hidden beneath the surface of our existence.
For the Greeks, the hidden life demanded invisible ink. They wrote an ordinary letter and in between the lines set out another letter, written in milk. The document looked innocent enough until one who knew better sprinkled coal-dust over it. What the letter had been no longer mattered; what mattered was the life flaring up undetected... till now.[iii]
Standing here in the early hours, gazing out at the iconic view of King’s College Chapel, I feel a kinship with the heron, tucked away in the shadow of the creek, unwatched and unremarked. I recognise the more tangible achievements of many in my cohort of graduates. I honour the visible accolades of accomplishment in which they stand, like the chapel there for all to see. I confess the invisibility of my professional life does trouble me from time to time. Dark arrows of comparison puncture my sense of significance and worth. I wonder if I have lived up to the promise of those early years at Cambridge. Yet in my heart I know that across three decades I have sprinkled coal-dust over many hidden lives, rekindled the original flame with its gift of vitality and purpose. It’s just that the consequence, the significance, the reach of these intimate encounters vanishes from my sight at the end of each therapeutic journey. The men and women whose lives have been revealed behind closed doors ‘fly off’ into their futures. You would never even know they’d been here. Except I do. Because my seeing of them has altered me.
Witness to the hidden life, over many years of encounter, I have been opened, enriched and touched in ways I find almost impossible to describe. Beneath the surface of troubled lives, I have discovered ecologies of feeling as intricate as coral reefs and walked in landscapes of human experience as irreplaceable as our rain forests. Yet when I first tell someone that I’m a psychotherapist, I often encounter the response ‘how do you sit with all that depression?’ The question assumes that the men and women who step into my practice room are all grey and featureless, that my seeing of them might resemble a walk through a desolate landscape on a dull winter’s day. Have you any idea, I want to reply, just how much richness, intelligence and beauty surfaces from the depths of every human being, if you just know how to look.
‘To witness fully’, writes Ursula Le Guin, is to be ‘the altar of the thing witnessed’[iv]. As a psychotherapist and as a photographer, the practice of deep witness has opened me to an experience of communion every bit as profound as the sacrament of chapel.
Notes
[i] Winterson, J (1990). Sexing the Cherry, Vintage.
[ii] Jung, C. G (1933). Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Kegan Paul.
[iii] Winterson, J (1990). Sexing the Cherry, Vintage.
[iv] Le Guin, U.K (2016). ‘Contemplation at McCoy Creek’, Late in the Day: Poems 2010-1014. P M Press.
