Being Truly Seen: How Attunement and Presence Heal Trauma

I was on a hike as a teen in the mountains near where I grew up. At one point I sat down unzippied my backpack to drink my water, when suddenly my stomach sank. I had the feeling someone was there, as if someone was watching me. I looked around, but saw nothing. My mind convinced me it was nothing, I stood up and began to hike. It wasn't until some miles walked, some time had passed, that I saw a mountain lion perched up high above on a ledge, above the rock I had been sitting on. I reflected on the unsettling feeling that I had experienced earlier sitting on that rock. The feeling my rational brain had dismissed. My body picked up, on what my mind could not.

MOMA, The Artist is Present

In 2010, Marina Abramović sat in a chair at the Museum of Modern Art for 736 hours in front of strangers. As clinicians during training to become fully licensed therapists, we sit for over 3,000.

There's something remarkable about how "The Artist Is Present" distills therapeutic attunement down to its barest elements: presence, sustained gaze, silence, no words exchanged and still produces the intense emotional responses we saw: people weeping, people transformed just by sitting across from someone who was fully there, with them, witnessing them.

Across from Abramović , one at a time, strangers took a seat. No words were exchanged. No touch. Just two people, facing each other, for as long as the visitor chose to stay.

People wept. Not occasionally, repeatedly, unpredictably, often within moments of sitting down. Some had rehearsed what they might feel. None of them, it seemed, were prepared for what actually happened.

What strikes me is that both experiences of the lion's gaze and Abramović's hit the same ancient circuitry. Being looked at, really looked at, triggers something in us long before conscious thought catches up. Stephen Porges' concept of neuroception describes exactly this: the nervous system is constantly, unconsciously scanning for cues of safety or danger in another being's presence their stillness, their intent, the quality of their attention. What made the lion so unsettling wasn't that I sensed it coming; it was the opposite. I'd walked right past it, unaware, and the danger had been entirely one-directional the whole time . It saw me long before I ever saw it, and I only found out by accident, glancing back at exactly the right moment. Neuroception doesn't ask "is this a predator or a person." It asks something more primitive: what is this gaze going to do to me?  but the lion was a reminder that sometimes the gaze is on you long before your own nervous system catches up.

That's what made both experiences so disorienting. In the mountains, I was seen by something whose attention meant I might be prey. Vulnerable in the oldest, most literal sense. In front of Abramović and in the therapy room, strangers are seen by something whose attention meant nothing except I am here with you and I want nothing from you. Same raw exposure of being witnessed. Radically different answer to what that witnessing was for.

That kind of attention is rare enough to be disorienting. And when it finally arrives, it seems to reach past whatever we usually keep composed and organized the version of ourselves we maintain for other people straight to something underneath that doesn't have language yet. Grief that was never named. Loneliness that had no occasion to surface. The simple, overwhelming relief of not having to perform.

This is not so different from what happens, sometimes, in a quiet room between two people in a therapeutic relationship: therapist and a client. There are moments when nothing needs to be said, and the silence itself becomes the intervention. Not an empty silence, but one held by someone fully there, fully attentive, asking for nothing. In that kind of silence, the nervous system seems to recognize something before the mind catches up: it's safe now. You don't have to hold this alone. And that recognition can move through a person like water finding a crack quietly, and then all at once. It's an experience one will never have through Chatgpt, or any other AI machine relationship. It relies on something much more human than that, it relies on instinct. It relies on connection. It relies on real empathy Those moments where our body tells us the truth in the story, and over rides the rational mind's own protective lies. Sometimes therapy is about what is being said, but some times it is very much about what is not being said, and what is surfacing in that silence.

I think what the lion taught me, long before I had language for any of this, is that being seen is always a small act of exposure, and the whole difference between vulnerability and safety comes down to what the other set of eyes intends to do with what they see.