The Gift of Being Truly Seen

We all need someone to truly listen to us — to be fully seen and heard.

Parker Palmer — contemplative, Quaker, and one of the founders of the Center for Courage and Renewal — has spent decades creating spaces where individuals could be seen, heard, and understood. Through Circles of Trust and other programs, these gatherings are spaces of no fixing, no saving, no advising, no setting each other straight. They are places to simply be present with one another — offering the healing gifts of silence and laughter, and when speaking, doing so through powerful questions and reflections rooted in curiosity, love, and compassion.

In his book A Hidden Wholeness, Palmer writes about moving through a deep depression. He describes finding comfort and strength in "those few people who neither fled from me nor tried to save me but were simply present to me."

I was reminded of this not long ago at a large event in Sioux Falls — hundreds of people milling around, waiting for the event to begin. In the bathroom, I struck up a conversation with a couple of accomplished, high-achieving women, one of them a vice president of a large company in town. We swapped stories and laughed together while fixing our hair and reapplying lipstick.

About an hour into the event, I slipped back into the bathroom. It was empty — except for one woman standing in the corner by the hand dryer, crying. When she lifted her head, I realized it was the same woman I'd connected with before the show. I walked toward her and gently said, "Hi — I'm wondering if you need a friend, or if you'd rather be alone." Through her tears, mascara running down her cheeks, she said, "I would like a friend."

"Why don't we step outside? It's a nice night," I suggested.

We walked out together and sat down on the concrete steps. For the next twenty minutes, she let it out — the pain and grief she had been carrying after losing her father. I was struck by what her vulnerability seemed to reveal: that this high-powered, high-achieving woman may not have had many — or any — spaces like this where she could simply break down and be heard.

I did what I try to do in any of my sessions: I listened deeply, stayed fully present, reflected back what I was hearing, validated her experience, and asked a few open-ended questions.

At the end, she looked at me through her tears and said, "Thank you so much for listening to me."

In the cohort I teach, there's an entire section on the power of presence, and one of my favorite tools for exploring it is the beautiful picture book The Rabbit Listened. I won't give too much away — you should absolutely read it — but at its heart, it illustrates the many ways we instinctively try to fix people or move them through their pain on our own terms. And it gently shows us that the better, harder thing is simply to offer a space of listening and non-judgmental presence: to be fully with someone in their pain.

We live in a world that rewards doing, fixing, and moving forward. But sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is none of those things. Sometimes it's sitting on concrete steps, fully present — and in doing so, giving someone the rarest gift of all: the feeling of not being alone. Who in your life might need that from you today?