“I don’t know why this happened to you. But I can hold this for you.”
Let that sentence land for a moment.
If you’ve found your way to this article, chances are you’re carrying something. Something heavy. Something you’ve tried to understand, tried to explain, tried to make sense of. And maybe — after all that trying — you’re exhausted.
What if I told you that some pain isn’t meant to be fixed? That some wounds don’t need more analysis, more insight, more searching for the “why”?
What if some pain simply needs to be held?
This is what I want to explore with you today — the profound, ancient, and deeply undervalued practice of holding space. Of being witnessed. Of having someone sit with you in your pain without rushing to fix it.
As a somatic therapist and family constellation facilitator working with clients in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, and online worldwide, I’ve come to believe that this might be the most important — and most neglected — aspect of healing.
The Exhaustion of “Why”
We live in a culture obsessed with understanding.
When something painful happens — a loss, a betrayal, an illness, a trauma — the first question we ask is: Why? Why did this happen? Why me? Why now? What did I do wrong? What’s the lesson? What’s the purpose?
These questions aren’t wrong. They’re deeply human. The mind wants to make meaning. It wants to create a story that makes the unbearable somehow bearable.
But here’s what I’ve noticed — both in my own journey and in the hundreds of people I’ve worked with: sometimes the “why” becomes another burden.
Sometimes the relentless search for meaning keeps us locked in our heads — disconnected from our bodies, disconnected from the present moment, disconnected from the very comfort we need.
I’ve sat with people who have spent years — decades — trying to figure out why their father was the way he was. Why their mother couldn’t love them the way they needed. Why the accident happened. Why the relationship ended. Why their body betrayed them.
And I’ve watched them exhaust themselves. Not because understanding is bad — but because sometimes, the understanding never comes. Or it comes, but it doesn’t bring the peace they hoped for.
What Your Nervous System Needs Before Your Mind Can Heal
This is where the science of nervous system regulation becomes so important.
There’s a brilliant piece of neuroscience called Polyvagal Theory — developed by Dr. Stephen Porges — that describes how our autonomic nervous system constantly scans for safety or danger. This happens below consciousness. Before you even think a thought, your body has already decided: Am I safe here? Is this person a threat or a friend? Can I relax, or do I need to protect myself?
Porges calls this “neuroception” — a kind of unconscious perception. Your body is reading signals from the environment, from other people’s faces and voices and body language, and it’s making split-second calculations about whether it’s safe to open up or necessary to shut down.
And here’s what’s crucial: when your nervous system doesn’t feel safe, the higher functions of your brain — the parts responsible for insight, integration, meaning-making — go offline.
This is why you can know something intellectually and still not feel it. You can understand that the trauma wasn’t your fault, but your body still carries the shame. You can read all the self-help books in the world, but if your nervous system is stuck in survival mode, the wisdom can’t land.
So what creates safety for the nervous system? Many things. But one of the most powerful — perhaps the most powerful — is the presence of another regulated, caring human being.
Co-Regulation: Why We Never Outgrow the Need to Be Held
This is called co-regulation, and it’s one of the most important concepts in somatic therapy and trauma-informed healing.
When you’re with someone whose nervous system is calm and grounded, your nervous system picks up on that. It borrows their regulation. It says: “Oh, this person isn’t panicking. Maybe I don’t need to panic either.”
We see this most clearly with babies. An infant doesn’t know how to regulate its own emotions yet — it depends entirely on the caregiver to co-regulate. When the baby is distressed and the mother holds it with calm, soothing presence, the baby’s nervous system learns: “Big feelings are survivable. I am held. I am safe.”
But here’s the thing: we never outgrow this need.
As adults, we still need co-regulation. We still need other humans to help us feel safe. We still need to be held — not necessarily physically, though touch is powerful — but held in presence. Held in attention. Held in the gaze of someone who sees us without judgment.
The Violence of Premature Solutions
Something has gone wrong in our culture around pain.
We’ve become so uncomfortable with suffering — with uncertainty, with grief, with the messiness of being human — that when someone shares their pain, we immediately try to fix it.
“Have you tried meditation?” “You should see a therapist.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “At least you still have your health.” “You need to focus on the positive.” “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
I’m going to say something that might sound strange coming from a therapist who offers many different healing modalities:
Premature solutions are a form of abandonment.
When someone is drowning in grief, and the first thing we offer is advice — we’re not actually meeting them. We’re managing our own discomfort. We’re saying, in effect: “Your pain is too much for me. Here’s a solution so we can move past this.”
And the person who is suffering gets the message — often unconsciously — that their pain is a problem to be solved. That they are too much. That they need to hurry up and get better.
This is what I sometimes call the “tyranny of positivity.” The relentless cultural pressure to be okay, to look on the bright side, to find the silver lining, to turn your trauma into growth. And while resilience is real and post-traumatic growth is real, it cannot be rushed. It cannot be forced. And it absolutely cannot come from the outside in.
What It Actually Means to Hold Space
So what does it actually mean to “hold space” for someone? It’s become a bit of a buzzword in wellness circles, and sometimes it gets watered down. So let me share what I mean when I use this phrase.
Holding space means being fully present with another person’s experience — without trying to change it, fix it, minimise it, or take it away.
It means offering your attention — your full, undivided, compassionate attention — as a gift. As a container. As a safe harbour.
It means allowing whatever is arising to be here. The grief, the rage, the confusion, the numbness, the contradiction, the mess. All of it welcome. All of it allowed.
It means staying grounded in your own body — regulated in your own nervous system — so that your presence becomes a resource for the other person.
It means letting go of the need to understand. Letting go of the need to have answers. Letting go of the subtle arrogance that says, “I know what you need.”
Holding space is not passive. It’s not just sitting there doing nothing. It’s actually one of the most active things you can do — because you’re actively choosing presence over reactivity. You’re actively choosing stillness over fixing. You’re actively creating a field of safety through your own embodied presence.
The Wound of Not Being Seen
For many of us — perhaps most of us — one of the deepest wounds we carry is the wound of not being seen.
Not being truly, deeply, unconditionally seen by the people who were supposed to see us.
For some of us, this was obvious. Our parents were absent, or abusive, or so caught up in their own pain that they couldn’t be present for ours.
For others, it was more subtle. Our parents loved us — but they loved a version of us. The good child. The successful child. The child who didn’t cause problems. And the parts of us that didn’t fit that image? They got pushed into the shadows. They learned to hide.
This is what many call the inner child wound — and it’s profoundly connected to the experience of not being witnessed.
When a child’s experience is consistently not met — when they cry and no one comes, when they share their excitement and it’s dismissed, when they express anger and they’re shamed, when they have big feelings and they’re told to “calm down” or “stop being so sensitive” — something happens inside.
The child learns: “My feelings are too much. My needs are a burden. I am not safe to be fully myself.”
And that child — that part of us that learned to hide — doesn’t disappear when we grow up. It goes underground. It lives in the body. It gets triggered in relationships. It shows up as anxiety, as depression, as people-pleasing, as perfectionism, as chronic disconnection from ourselves and others.
The Body Keeps the Score: Why Somatic Healing Matters
As we say in somatic therapy: “The body keeps the score.”
Every experience we’ve ever had — especially the ones that overwhelmed us, the ones we couldn’t fully process — gets stored in the body. In the tissues. In the nervous system. In the way we hold ourselves, the way we breathe, the chronic tension in our shoulders or jaw or belly.
Trauma isn’t just a memory. It’s a physiology. It’s a pattern of activation in the nervous system that keeps looping because it never got to complete.
Think about an animal in the wild. A deer is chased by a lion but escapes. What does it do? It shakes. It trembles. Its body literally shakes off the survival energy that was mobilised for the chase. And then it goes back to grazing, nervous system reset, back to baseline.
Humans don’t do this. We override the shaking. We push down the tears. We “hold it together.” We tell ourselves to “be strong” and “move on.” And so the energy stays trapped. The cycle never completes.
This is why somatic approaches to healing are so powerful. We’re not just working with the mind — we’re working with the body, where the trauma actually lives. And the body needs to know: “I am witnessed. I am held. It is safe to let go.”
Intergenerational Trauma: The Burden That Was Never Yours
Sometimes — and this is what I see so clearly in family constellation work — the pain we’re carrying isn’t even ours.
We inherit more than genes from our ancestors. We inherit their unfinished business. Their unprocessed grief. Their unexpressed rage. Their survival strategies. Their traumas.
This is what’s called intergenerational trauma — and the science on it is now substantial. Trauma can be passed down through generations, encoded in our nervous systems, shaping our lives in ways we don’t consciously understand.
You might carry anxiety that originated in your grandmother’s experience of war. You might carry a fear of scarcity that goes back to your great-grandfather’s poverty. You might carry grief that belongs to a baby who was lost, or an ancestor who was excluded from the family, or a trauma that was never spoken about but lives on in the silence.
And here’s the thing: you cannot heal what you cannot see. And you cannot see what is not witnessed.
In family constellation therapy, we bring these hidden things into the light. We give them a place. We say: “I see you. I see what happened. You belong to this system. And I honour your fate.” And something extraordinary happens. The weight lifts. Not because we’ve solved anything — but because we’ve witnessed it. We’ve given it a place in consciousness.
Learning to Hold Yourself
Here’s the beautiful thing: the more we experience being held by others, the more we learn to hold ourselves.
Self-regulation isn’t something we’re born with. It’s something we learn — and we learn it through relationship. Through co-regulation. Through being held by someone who is regulated themselves.
So if you didn’t get this as a child — and many of us didn’t — it’s not too late. You can learn it now. Every experience of being truly witnessed, truly held, builds that capacity inside you.
And eventually, something shifts. You start to become your own holding presence. You start to offer to yourself the witnessing you once needed from others.
Imagine this: You’re going through a hard time. The old patterns are triggered — the anxiety, the shame, the feeling of being too much. And instead of abandoning yourself, instead of going into self-criticism or numbing out, you do something different.
You put a hand on your heart. You feel your feet on the ground. You take a breath. And you say to yourself — to that scared part, to that wounded inner child:
“I don’t know why this is happening. But I’m here. I’m not leaving. I can hold this with you.”
That’s it. That’s the practice. Not figuring it out. Not fixing it. Just staying. Just being. Just holding.
An Invitation
So let me leave you with this.
Whatever you’re carrying right now — the grief, the confusion, the shame, the exhaustion, the questions that have no answers — you don’t have to figure it out.
You don’t have to understand why it happened. You don’t have to find the silver lining. You don’t have to be further along than you are.
You just have to let yourself be held.
By others, when that’s available. By yourself, always. By the ground beneath you, the air around you, the mystery that holds all of life.
I don’t know why this happened to you. But I can tell you this:
You are not too much. Your pain is not a problem to be solved. You are worthy of being witnessed exactly as you are.
And somewhere — maybe in this moment — there is a presence that is holding you. That has always been holding you. You just have to let yourself feel it.
Work With Me
If this piece resonated with you and you’re looking for support on your healing journey, I offer somatic therapy, family constellation sessions, and holistic counselling — in person in Dublin, Naas, and Newbridge, and online worldwide.
Sometimes we need more than words on a screen. Sometimes we need to be held in the presence of another human being who can witness us without trying to fix us.
If that’s what you’re looking for, I’d be honoured to hold that space for you.
Get in touch:
🌿 blissfulevolution.com
🌿 familyconstellationseurope.com
About the Author
Abi Beri is an Integrative Holistic Therapist, Somatic Practitioner, and Family Constellation Facilitator based in Ireland. He offers sessions in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, and online globally, supporting clients through nervous system regulation, inner child healing, ancestral patterns, and trauma-informed somatic therapy. His work integrates psychotherapy training with body-based and holistic healing modalities to create safe, compassionate spaces for deep transformation
