The Trauma of Witnessing
Kat Robey, Let All Thrive Counseling
We were flying into New York while the wreckage was still burning.
Our 10-person Crisis Debriefing team was deployed to train and support counselors in the New
York City.
The city was quiet. The iconic skyline was gone. The air was filled with ash and smoke. While
the world saw the attack on screens, people in New York were not watching from a distance —
they were looking out of their own office windows.
They had not been inside the towers.
They were not first responders.
They were not “direct victims.”
They were witnesses.
And what I heard again and again was some version of the same sentence:
“I just stood there.”
As clinicians, we often talk about trauma in terms of what happens to someone. But there is
another layer that receives less attention: what happens when you see catastrophe unfold and
cannot intervene.
The nervous system mobilizes anyway.
The body prepares to act.
The heart races.
But there is nowhere for that activation to go.
Witnessing without agency leaves its own imprint. There can be helplessness that feels like
failure. Rage with no direction. Guilt for surviving. Guilt for not being “more affected.”
And then there was another emotion — quieter, but persistent.
People felt embarrassed, even trivial, for what they were grieving.
One woman described watching from a building across the street. She had always assumed she
would go up into the towers one day — for a meeting, for lunch, for the view. She never had.
Now she never would. She hesitated, and stated apologetically:
“It sounds so small… I’ll never get to go inside.”
Others echoed the same sentiment. They “missed” the buildings. They missed the ordinary
possibility of walking through the lobby someday. And then they would quickly diminish it —
because how could you grieve an unrealized lunch meeting when so many lives had been lost?
But what they were grieving was not trivial.
They were grieving a rupture in the assumptive world — the quiet belief that there would always
be time. That symbols of stability would remain stable. That tomorrow would resemble
yesterday.
The loss of imagined future is not small. It is profound.
During our debriefings, pilots spoke about something else that had shifted. Aircraft — once
symbols of travel, business, connections, had become weapons in a single morning. And yet
flight patterns continued. Planes still crossed the sky. These New York pilots were still flying
over the burning wreckage below.
The sky itself no longer felt neutral. Meaning had fractured.
When symbols break, people lose more than safety. They lose orientation.
As a crisis debriefing team, we were supporting counselors who were themselves inside this
rupture. They were helping others metabolize shock while still metabolizing their own. The work
was not happening after resolution. It was happening while the wreckage was still on fire.
There is something profoundly destabilizing about offering steadiness when the world has not
yet steadied.
I have come to understand that trauma is not only about participation. It is also about proximity.
It is about the moment when your body prepares to move — to help, to intervene, to stop
something — and there is nothing you can do. There is nothing to be done.
That frozen activation can linger. It can turn into shame. It can turn into self-criticism: “I should
have done something.”
Often, what sits underneath is something harder to admit: vulnerability.
We were vulnerable to what we saw. Vulnerable to how it changed us. Vulnerable to the
realization that we could not protect, repair, or reverse what was unfolding.
When I work with clients who have witnessed tragedy — personal, communal, or global — I
ask:
What, where did you feel in your body?
What did you wish you could have done?
What did you make it mean about yourself that you didn’t?
What did you make it mean about yourself that you couldn’t?
Healing sometimes begins not with reframing the event, but with acknowledging and wrestling
with our vulnerability.
Today, exposure to witnessing has expanded exponentially. We see violence, disaster, and
upheaval in real time, often from thousands of miles away. The nervous system does not always
distinguish between physical proximity and emotional immersion. We often find ourselves
activated by events we cannot influence.
The question remains:
What do we do with the energy of seeing when we cannot act?
Part of the answer is compassion — for the part of us that mobilized, cared, wanted to help, and
could not. Compassion for the part that felt small. Compassion for the part that could not control
the outcome.
Trauma does not require participation. Sometimes it only requires presence. And willingness to
sit with vulnerability.
