When Presence Meets What Could Not Be Met
I keep returning to the quiet power of the other.
Not the other as remedy or solution, not the one who knows what to do. But the other as presence. As witness. As someone who can stay close enough and steady enough, that something long held at a distance, no longer has to be faced alone.
There are regions of our inner life that cannot be met directly by awareness. Not because awareness is lacking, but because those regions formed in moments when there was too much, too fast, and too overwhelming to be held. They were not avoided out of resistance, but out of intelligence, out of care for survival.
To bring light there prematurely can feel violent. The system recoils, the heart closes, and the body remembers what it cost to stay present the last time.
In these places, healing does not arrive through insight or illumination. It arrives through gentle and repeated contact.
And so the other becomes an anchor, a living point of reference. Not as authority, not as guide, but as a co-regulating presence. A nervous system meeting a nervous system. A heart attuning to another heart. Through this quiet companionship, the inner world begins to sense that it’s no longer alone with what once felt unendurable.
Without this relational ground, terror can surface. The fear of overwhelm. The fear of being overtaken by what was once too much to feel, too much to name, too much to stay with. Alone, the system tightens. It braces. It turns away again, not out of unwillingness, but out of care.
But when there’s a steady presence of another holding this space, something in the body recognises safety before the mind understands it. The breath eases. The edges soften. What was previously avoided, necessarily so, can begin to approach the light of awareness slowly, indirectly, without being forced.
This is not about being fixed. Nothing here is broken.
It’s about being met in the spiritual heart, in the wider field of wholeness that holds both our most tender pain and our deepest knowing without asking either to disappear. The other does not take the pain away. They do not resolve it or reframe it. They remain present as life meets itself in a place that once felt impossible to enter.
And in that remaining, something profound happens.
What could not be touched alone is now touched together. What once had to stay hidden can begin to reveal itself, not as a problem to solve, but as a part of life asking to be included.
This is how wholeness remembers itself. Not through force or transcendence, but through relationship. Through the simple, sacred fact of being met.
— —
Today is mine and Martyn’s 19th wedding anniversary, and this writing, written two days ago, feels especially alive for me now.
He has been that presence again and again in my life. I have lived the healing nature of the other through him, not as an idea, but as a lived reality that has met me in places I could not have entered alone.
Earlier today, I wrote a separate note about this, which I’ve linked to HERE.
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Thank you for walking alongside me ~ Imogen