Holding, containing and bearing witness: The problem of helpfulness in encounters with torture survivors

A different description of trauma: a wider systemic perspective—a personal insight

“…For many families we act as a witness to their realities, witnessing the impact of the Troubles, much of which still remains invisible to the rest of the population. Blackwell (1997) describes this as "The essence of holding … is the reliability of our presence and our recognition of who the person is and what they feel" (p. 83). Others in the systemic field have discussed the value of therapeutic witnessing in their work.…”

Promoting Psychosocial Well—Being in Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Young People in the United Kingdom

“…All this activity usually happens in an unnoticed way, if the right conditions and circumstances can contain the disruptive potential of the primary loss of home. Blackwell's (1997) contention is that containing pain is hard, and some of the muck sticks in an uncomfortable fashion. (Papadopoulos 2002, p. 33) This reappraisal of a type of positive frozen watchfulness allows the sense of agency referred to by Blackwell & Melzak (2000) to be present from the outset.…”

Family therapists in trauma‐response teams: bringing systems thinking into interdisciplinary fieldwork

“…This wisdom is important as we create space for surviving victims to process what many experts refer to as 'shattered assumptions' (e.g. realizing that the world is not a safe or fair place) (Catherall, 2002;Janoff-Bulman, 1992;Shapiro, 2002;Walsh, 2007) and create new meanings and interpretations about events on their own and with their loved ones (Blackwell, 1997;Herman, 1997;Reilly, 2002;Weingarten, 2004). For example, a child with whom we worked in New York City was able to move forward in her grief as she constructed a personal narrative with others about her father's death that framed his familiarity with the World Trade Center towers as having enabled him to save the lives of more than a thousand people who would have otherwise perished (Boss et al, 2003).…”