Why We Need Witnesses
The Shame of Loneliness
There’s something we don’t talk about enough when discussing loneliness. We often describe it as the absence of people, yet you can be surrounded by people and still feel profoundly alone - and this experience can elicit much shame.
What loneliness is really about, I think, is the absence of witnesses. Someone who sees you. Not the version of you that’s easier to be around. Not the you who’s holding it together. You.
We underestimate how much of human life is organised around this need. Children who are not witnessed, whose inner lives are ignored, misread, or treated as inconvenient, don’t just feel sad. They begin to doubt their own reality. They learn to edit themselves into shapes that are more acceptable, more legible, and more loved. They carry that editing into adulthood, often without realising it.
This is not a minor matter. In many respects, it is the central wound that brings people to therapy.
The shame that so often accompanies loneliness is worth pausing to consider. Admitting that we feel unseen, that we long to be known, touches something the culture has taught us to hide. We have inherited a story about self-sufficiency, about managing ourselves well and not asking too much of others. Within that story, the longing to be witnessed can feel like evidence of inadequacy. As if needing to be seen meant there were something wrong with us. There isn’t. It means we are human.
To be witnessed is not the same as being praised. A witness doesn’t tell you that you’re wonderful or that everything will be fine. A witness simply stays present with what is true for you, including the confusion, the grief, the contradictions, and the parts that don’t yet make sense. They don’t flinch. They don’t try to move you along. They let what is real for you remain so.
That quality of attention is rarer than it should be. Most of our conversations are really two people waiting for their turn to speak or subtly steering each other towards more comfortable ground. We are not taught to witness. We are taught to respond, advise, and fix.
There is an important difference between responding and witnessing, and the developmental psychologist Daniel Stern spent decades studying it. Observing mothers and infants together, he noticed that what settled and nourished a baby wasn’t simply being responded to; it was being attuned to.
A mother who claps when her baby claps is responding. A mother who sways with the same energy, rhythm, and emotional colour as her baby’s delight is doing something different. She is matching the feeling behind the behaviour, not just the behaviour itself. Stern called this attunement and argued that it is the mechanism through which we first come to feel that our inner lives are real, shareable, and worth having.
When attunement is absent or unreliable, something quietly devastating happens. The child learns that certain feelings, such as excitement, rage, neediness, and grief, don’t land. They go out, but nothing comes back. They begin to hide them, not as a conscious strategy but as a way of surviving the relationship. That hiding, begun so early, becomes the template.
The self that shows up in relationships, friendships, partnerships, and workplaces is a managed self. Careful. Watchful. Exhausting to maintain.
Therapy offers something specific here. Not friendship, not advice, not the warmth of someone who loves you and therefore needs you to be okay. Something more stripped back than that, a relationship whose entire structure is organised around one question: what is actually true for this person right now?
When that works, something unexpected often happens. People don’t just feel better understood. They begin to understand themselves differently. As if being seen by someone else finally makes it possible to see themselves clearly.
We are not meant to carry our inner lives alone. The idea that we should be self-sufficient, and that needing to be known is somehow a weakness, is one of the stranger cruelties of the culture we’ve inherited.
Needing witnesses is not a sign of neediness. It is one of the most human things.
Rory Singer
You can also read this post on our Substack journal, Unfolding.