You Are Not Alone: On Holding and Being Held

I was driving on the highway listening to a podcast (Hillary McBride’s Holy/Hurt Podcast actually… I’ve mentioned her before and would highly recommend her podcast)… and the guest shared a quote. They attributed it to Dr. Gabor Mate (who I’ve also mentioned here before). 

And it had to “press rewind” (is that even what the kids say today?!). Listen again. I was struck by it so much - I pulled over because (safety!) and I wanted to make sure that I had written it down in my notes. 

Let me keep you in suspense for what I think is an important tangent. In preparation for writing this, I dropped the quote into Google and discovered that the internet and its AI masters debate as to who actually said it. Some say it is Gabor Mate… and others attribute it to another expert in trauma, Peter A. Levine. It is important to check your sources! Otherwise, you might be saying that someone said something that they didn’t… but then the internet is full of inappropriately attributed quotes. Enough… back to what I really wanted to talk about. The quote!

The fact that the quote more likely comes from Peter A. Levine will become clearer when you know that Levine developed something called somatic experiencing. Somatic Experiencing is a body-centered therapeutic approach based on the insight that trauma is stored as unresolved physiological activation in the nervous system, and healing comes through gently guiding the body to complete the defensive responses it was unable to finish at the time of the overwhelming event. Gabor Mate speaks and writes from a similar perspective when it comes to trauma.

Here’s the quote:

"Trauma is not what happens to us but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness."

Read that again slowly.

It's not the wound itself that defines trauma. It's the silence around the wound. It's the carrying that happens alone.

For those of us in ministry right now, that silence is familiar.

You have watched your congregation shrink and wondered what it means about your calling. You have burned through your reserves and smiled through Sunday anyway. You have looked around for help and found that the help isn't there. You have held the grief of a community that is itself grieving... and had no one to hold yours.

That is not weakness. That is what happens when empathetic witnesses are scarce.

In my opinion, The Church is in a particular kind of pain right now.

Decline.
Burnout.
Diminishing resources.
Tipping points.
The slow erosion of what once felt stable and sure.

These are not just institutional challenges. They are carried by people… people just like you… in bodies and in spirits that were not designed to bear weight in isolation.

When there is no one to witness your grief, it doesn't disappear. It goes somewhere else. It gets heavier. And sometimes it manifests in how we are feeling physically. 

Maybe you have heard about this kind of body-centered trauma work in the book, My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem around racism. If you haven’t read this book, I’d highly recommend it.

This is why "You are not alone" is more than a tagline for us at Ministry Forum.

It is, we believe, a bold theological claim.

That isolation is not the final word. That witness matters. That the act of being seen… truly seen by someone who can hold the weight of what you're carrying is itself a form of healing.

It is also why we are so committed to the dream of our Lilly Grant work around Listening Partners: the idea that ministry leaders need not just resources or advice or better strategies, but someone who will sit with them in the complexity of what this moment actually feels like.

An empathetic witness. Present, non-anxious, and genuinely there with you.

If you are holding something heavy today… maybe some grief about your congregation, your calling, your capacity… we want you to know:

You don't have to hold it alone.

That is not just something we say. 

It is something we are trying to build, together, one relationship at a time.

You are not alone.

Is there someone in your ministry context who needs an empathetic witness this week? 
And is there someone who might be that for you?