I heard it before I saw it – a sound I didn’t recognize, and cannot describe. Urgently, it pointed me out and up. Quickly, I leaned and looked.

Out a small window, above the 20-foot tree that stood there, a sizable object – a huge bird? – hurtled downward.

When it crash-landed onto an upper branch of the leafless tree, I stared up in shock at a rumpled, long-haired, gray cat I had never seen before. Its terrified eyes stared back at me.

Then, the cat shook itself. And as suddenly as it had appeared, it bolted down the tree and out of sight. I ran to another window with a more panoramic view. But my visitor from the sky had vanished.

I wouldn’t have seen any of it if I hadn’t ambled over at just that moment to stand in front of that small window. Holding cell phone in hand, I was talking to friend. She got an eyewitness account in real time of the cat that plunged from the sky.

A desperate leap?

Later that February morning, I walked out into our fenced backyard, still pondering the stunning scene I had witnessed. Rounding the side of the house, I looked toward the bare tree where the cat had landed. Taller than the house, the tree stood outside the fence.

Also in view, but inside the fence, stood another leafless tree, twice as tall. A good distance separated the two trees. Hmm.

About an hour before the cat landed in the 20-foot tree, I’d witnessed something else. It wasn’t stunning, or even unusual. But suddenly it seemed relevant. Out in the yard after feeding our two shepherd dogs, I had watched them run toward the 40-foot tree.

The last I saw, they were circling its base, eagerly looking up, barking and whining, wishing for all the world they could climb. Usually, that meant they had chased a squirrel up there.

And, oh yes! Once, I saw a squirrel make the impossible leap between those two trees.

Our dogs’ barking and whining had stopped soon after I re-entered the house. So I’d thought nothing more of it. But if they had chased a wandering cat up that tree, their silence afterward did not ensure that they or the kitty had moved on.

And if that cat had been stranded in that tree for an hour, with two tenacious dogs at its base, it may well have gotten desperate enough to try an Olympic leap to get away.

Distress not counted as real

That same morning: A doctor, whose name and work I did not know, published a Substack post that did not mention cats hurtling from above.

Two days later, the same friend who witnessed the cat episode by phone sent me a link to that doctor’s post. But not because of the cat. And not because of the specific focus of the post, which was overdose.

She sent it because of this phrase in the subtitle:

when there is no witness

She sent it because of the broader truth that author Vera Hart describes this way:

Prolonged threat paired with prolonged non response … teaches a person to stop reaching out. To stop expecting contact. To stop believing their distress will register as real to anyone else. And when that lesson is learned, the nervous system does what nervous systems do when they cannot escape danger. It searches for any exit it can find.¹

A crucial contrast

To begin, Hart describes a tragedy averted, after a despairing woman tried to exit from trauma by way of an overdose. When the woman’s body started rejecting the pills she had swallowed, someone close to her woke up to what was happening and chose action over avoidance.

“And in that simple act … a dysregulated nervous system received proof that it was not alone.” In that crucial moment: “She had been witnessed.”

Bravely, Hart tells her own story of sexual abuse in the workplace – and despair because she had no one to tell, who wanted to see.

With passion and insight, she explores the “simple contrast that has haunted [her] for years”: “The contrast between distress that is witnessed and distress that is met with silence.”

She says:

The difference between a person surviving and a person disappearing is frequently the presence of response … the presence of a human being who registers distress as real and responds to it.²

She affirms:

There is a specific kind of despair that comes from being unseen during danger … [especially] when that happens repeatedly … [Why? Because it is so destabilizing to lose] the felt sense of being accompanied.

Accompaniment … is the difference between a body that can return to baseline after stress and a body that stays locked in survival mode because it has learned there is no one to help it come down.³

A pattern of non response

In her post, Vera Hart defines “non response” this way: “the failure to witness distress in real time.”

Medically and also psychologically, she describes the way non witnessing both denies trauma and causes it. She states:

The question is whether your reality is repeatedly met with absence … a message the body receives as abandonment.

The impact is that your system learns, over and over, that distress does not invite connection. Distress invites distance.

If the pattern [of relating to another human] teaches you that fear is private, that pain is inconvenient, that your nervous system is an embarrassment, then the relationship … is actively training your body to survive without witness.⁴

Such a pattern tells the truth, for it reveals the non response you’re experiencing in real time from people you thought would affirm and support you.

But also, the pattern falsely predicts an inevitable future, for it whispers: “Everyone will refuse to hear or see you if you speak up about your pain and the truth as to what has caused it. You will be alone. And you cannot survive alone.”

Hart explains when and why we hear that whisper:

[When] the other person is physically present and psychologically unreachable. And when you live next to that kind of absence long enough, the psyche begins to experience it as a kind of quiet annihilation.

[In this situation:] [You] may stop bringing [your] inner world forward. Not because [you] have nothing to say. But because [you] have learned it will fall into a blank space and [you] will be left holding the echo.⁵

Longing for witness

All of that tells the one traumatized by abuse: “Your longing for witness [is] an embarrassing flaw.”⁶

Yet it is not wrong to want witness when someone’s behavior has devastated you. In fact, Hart writes, we humans were made “to have distress noticed and responded to.”

What’s more, liberation does not come by agreeing to be quieter, smaller, a shell of your true self.

Liberation is the moment you stop calling your own nervous system wrong for wanting to be held.⁷

And true healing begins:

When your distress is met with presence instead of disappearance. When your inner world is mirrored rather than minimized.⁸

[That is:] The moment another person reflects back that your internal state exists and makes sense. That you are not crazy for feeling alarm. That your perception is coherent.⁹

What I witnessed

Another person – just one – can make a world of difference. Someone who truly, deeply, unflinchingly, acknowledges the trauma that has gutted you – and delights in the person you are.

As Hart testifies, even an animal – a pet – can start the process.

And today, the stunning juxtaposition of Hart’s article and a stray cat’s trauma leaves me thinking: Maybe that can work reciprocally too.

For in the moment after I watched that cat plummet into the top of a bare tree, I stared into its eyes. It stared into mine. And a lot happened in those few seconds.

→ That kitty’s stressed-out body and terror-stricken eyes witnessed to me of the trauma that led to its plunge.

→ My mind had no idea what had happened. Yet instantly, my eyes acknowledged what they saw: Oh, kitty! You have been SO traumatized!

→ And then, I saw something else, not in the cat’s eyes, but in the fact that it sat on that branch – battered, stunned, but alive. I didn’t yet have language to describe it. Ah, but I saw it: True survival. Liberation. Refusal to be erased. And my eyes bore witness to that too: Oh, dear one! You made it through!

→ And then, suddenly, the stunned cat knew it too. It broke eye contact, looked around, shook itself – and bolted down that tree and on its way.

When there is no witness

Two days later, as I read and cried over and reread Vera Holt’s article, I pondered again my stunning encounter with a stunned cat. By then, I had an inkling as to the backstory of its plunge.

And now I had more insight into my own backstory and the stories of so many others traumatized by abuse – then traumatized again by: Avoidance. Silence. Silencing. Absence.

All of which left me pondering two questions.

When there is no human witness to our distress …

• Can we make a witness appear?
• What about God? Where is he?

Learning not to obsess over the non-witnesses

No, we cannot make anyone else bear witness to our distress. Ah, but how relentlessly we may try.

Alternately (or subsequently), we may succumb to the insidious whisper that tells us, “You have only one option if you still want belonging: Shut up. Keep your head down. Go along.”

Thus, obsessing over the non-witnesses:

• We may keep beating our heads against the next wall, and the next.
• We may keep shrinking ourselves and losing ourselves.

Instead of either, Vera Hart urges us:

• “Look clearly.” Learn to recognize what is (and is not) presence, witness, response.
• “Stop using your life force to persuade someone to witness what they keep refusing to see.”¹⁰

My testimony? It took me a long time even to begin to see clearly. But once I did, I found: Seeing and walking in truth is an ongoing process. And it really does set you free.

I still have to remind myself at times to stop pleading with someone determined not to see – even if the pleading is happening only in my mind. It still surprises me to discover who is willing to see and who is not. And oh my yes! Taking this step liberates too.

Learning to delight in our unseen Witness

As with any grief, the pain of trauma ebbs and flows. When the pain is acute and people have forsaken us, it may feel like God has too.

Jesus knows that feeling. One the cross, he felt it – and he expressed it. Yet even when God does not appear to be anywhere in the picture, he has highly creative ways to show us:

Never will I leave you;
never will I forsake you. (Heb. 13:5)¹¹

My most recent experience of that?

On a day when I had just asked, “Lord, are you there?” he took me to the exact spot I needed to stand, to witness a miracle of sorts – a miracle of survival and connection. He sent a cat from the sky – and a friend who believed my wild story and then passed along insights from another person, that got to the heart of it all.

God who sees my distress

This Lord created people. He created us to need each other. To see each other. To love one another. He created us to listen to each other with compassion, to befriend the forsaken, to embrace the truth. He can bring a human being into our lives as witness when we cannot find one anywhere around.

And even when no human witness comes forward, he loves us more than any person could. He himself defends the forsaken. He wants the hurting to know: You are not alone.

He doesn’t force himself on anyone. Yet he offers his love to everyone. And he says to the unheard and unseen:

My dove, hiding in holes in the rock,
in the secret recesses of the cliff,
let me see your face and hear your voice;
for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely. (Song 2:14 CJB)

Even when God does not appear to be anywhere in the picture, he gives us grace to look into his eyes with the eyes of our heart – and to know: He sees my distress. He sees me overcoming.

Through his Spirit, through his Word, through another human being, or maybe even a frazzled cat – he affirms, guides, encourages.

And each time our hearts receive the hug in his eyes, our Lord’s witness propels us forward. Into true survival. True belonging. Liberation. Refusal to be erased.

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Image by Linn Kuyay on Unsplash

See also

• Earthquakes, trauma – and silences that erase
• Defender of the forsaken – this is God
• God who sees me
• God who teaches us his ways
  
  
• Shunning in the church
• Toxic church? Healing promise: Real belonging
• You have circled this mountain long enough

Footnotes

1. From Substack post by Vera Hart MD PHD, “Overdose Is Not About Drugs: It is about what the nervous system does when there is no witness,” Part Two. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this post are from this article. Bracketed text within quotes is mine, added for clarity. ↩︎
2. This quote and those just above it are from Hart, Part One. ↩︎
3. From Part Three. ↩︎
4. From Part Five. ↩︎
5. From Part Six. ↩︎
6. From Part Nine. ↩︎
7. From Part Nine. ↩︎
8. From Part Nine. ↩︎
9. From Part Six. ↩︎
10. From Part Nine. ↩︎
11. See also Deuteronomy 31:6; Matthew 28:20. ↩︎