We are constantly making sense of one another.

Someone tells us something difficult, and we recognize the feeling.
We reassure them, ask a question, explain, remember something similar.

Nothing has gone wrong, and yet, before the other person has finished becoming themselves in the encounter, we may already have decided what is happening.

We do this with other people.

We do it with children, with partners, with groups. And, just as often, with ourselves.

We call it understanding. Sometimes it is care.

But understanding is also something we do.

What we do changes what can happen next.

The inquiry

What happens when we remain with an experience before making it familiar?

Witnessing Without Colonizing is a practice of staying in relationship with something that has not yet settled into certainty.

We don't try to eliminate interpretation, explanation, care, or understanding. We slow them down enough to notice them.

A pause lasts longer. A response remains descriptive instead of interpretive.

We notice the impulse to reassure. We let a question remain unanswered. We notice what happens when we name something and what happens when we don't.

The point isn't to find the right way to participate.

It's to discover that there may be more than one.

What becomes possible

When familiarity loosens, something else can become available.

A person can tell their story without being told what it means, a parent can remain with a child's experience without immediately resolving it. Partners can discover that they don't know each other quite as completely as they thought. A facilitator can notice what their intervention is organizing before reaching for the next intervention.

Often, we discover that we do the same thing to ourselves:

• we explain the feeling before we've experienced it

• correct the reaction before we've understood it

• decide what the experience means before it has finished unfolding

What happens when we leave a little room around what we think we know?

“Because I didn't share a similar experience, I heard more.”

“It was a real pleasure not to be told what I meant.”

“The witness's use of participatory language helped my own story become unfamiliar to me.”

“I am excited about how much possibility there is in interaction.”

A practice, not a method

There is no set of witnessing skills to master. Each practice begins with an encounter, then one condition changes, and we notice what happens.

Sometimes the change is small enough to miss. Sometimes something that has always seemed inevitable becomes strange.

And sometimes, something becomes possible that neither person could have anticipated.

The conditions are composed. What they reveal is not predetermined.

One inquiry. Many encounters.

You might come to this work through a relationship, a child, a group, a conflict, your own experience, or simply a curiosity about how you participate with other people.

The situation changes, and the inquiry remains:

Can I stay close to what is happening without requiring it to become what I already understand?

Come into the inquiry

I offer Witnessing Without Colonizing as short practices, deeper group inquiries, and work shaped with existing communities and organizations.