Sometimes, in the aftermath of tragedy, we don’t know what to do.

We think about the people whose lives have changed. We think about our children, our neighbors, and the places we have always associated with everyday life. We want to help, but we may feel overwhelmed by everything we cannot change.

I’ve been asking myself what I can offer. What do I know how to do? What resources can I share? How can I be part of caring for the community I call home?

Those questions have shaped my response here in Bend. They are also questions we can consider wherever we live.

What Does It Mean to Be Impacted?

The impact of tragedy can reach beyond the people directly involved and beyond a community’s boundaries.

Being impacted might mean feeling afraid when you send your child to school. Feeling sadness for families you have never met. Feeling anger, numbness, or uncertainty about what comes next. It might bring earlier experiences of loss closer to the surface.

You may live nearby or be following from a distance. You may have people you love here. You may simply recognize something of your own family or community in what has happened.

Our experiences are different, and the people most directly affected face losses and needs that deserve particular care. There is also room to acknowledge what is happening within ourselves without comparing our pain or deciding whether it counts.

When It Becomes Hard to Imagine a Future

After a traumatic event, we may feel uncertain about our ability to shape what comes next. Plans that once felt possible can seem far away. We might wonder, “Can I move forward? Do my choices still make a difference?”

Trauma can affect how we experience our bodies, relationships, and future. Some people feel constantly alert; others feel numb, disconnected, or unable to respond. What we describe as feeling “shut down” can be part of a stress response, especially when overwhelming experiences connect with an earlier history of trauma. It does not mean our nervous system has stopped working or that we have lost the capacity to change.

We can care deeply and still find it difficult to make a decision, reach out, or imagine a next step.

This is part of why opportunities to choose and participate matter to me. For some of us, a manageable action can become an experience of having an influence again: “There is something I can choose. There is something I can contribute. There is support I can receive.”

That action might be asking for company, attending a class, learning something, or offering practical help. Its meaning comes from having a say in what we do and noticing how our choice affects our experience.

Taking Care of Yourself Is Part of Caring for a Community

When we feel overwhelmed, even “How can I help?” can feel like another demand. Sometimes a place to begin is, “What support is available to me?”

We do not have to earn care through service. Receiving support is part of community life. Resting, declining an invitation, or asking someone to help us consider our options can be meaningful choices.

As we are able, participating in community life may offer opportunities for connection and purpose. We can contribute to something we value while still grieving and still needing care ourselves.

What I Can Offer

For me, one response has been to offer free trauma-sensitive yoga classes, available online and in person at Namaspa in Bend.

You are welcome whether you are part of the Bend community or joining from a distance. You do not have to arrive feeling hopeful or know what to say. You do not have to share your story.

These classes offer opportunities to notice your body, explore movement if you choose, and make decisions about your participation.

I am offering them because I want people to have accessible places to receive support and experience having a say. You can choose how to participate, change your mind, and have those choices respected. When life feels beyond our influence, I believe opportunities like these deserve a place in how we care for one another.

I am also offering trauma-sensitive yoga Foundations training that is open to everyone, with free participation available to people in Central Oregon who have been impacted by the tragedy.

Learning can be another way to respond. It can give us an opportunity to consider how we want to support people, what we want to bring into our work, and how we might contribute to change in our communities.

For someone who teaches, provides care, or supports others, that learning may become part of what they offer moving forward. It can also be personally meaningful to choose a direction when the future feels uncertain.

Making this training available is one way I can support people in considering, “What do I want to bring into my life and my community from here?” Learning may help someone develop an approach to their work, offer a resource to others, or discover possibilities they could not previously picture. These are opportunities to participate in shaping what comes next, at a pace each person can choose.

Classes and training

Supporting Care That Continues

Another way to participate is by supporting organizations already doing the ongoing work of making care accessible.

As a board member of the Namaspa Foundation, I care about bringing yoga beyond the studio and into community spaces. The Foundation supports yoga and mindfulness offerings in Central Oregon, including schools, shelters, addiction recovery programs, and settings serving people who are incarcerated. It also offers yoga teacher training scholarships.

Donations help sustain this work and compensate the teachers providing these classes. For people nearby or at a distance who would like a practical way to contribute, supporting the Foundation is one option.

Learn more

Finding Our Way Together

Your contribution may look different from mine.

It may be a meal, a ride, a donation, or checking in again when the first wave of attention has passed. It may be asking someone what would help and respecting their answer. It may be accepting the support someone is offering you.

We can begin with what is available, listen to what people need, and allow our responses to change over time.

Our lives have changed. Some things may never feel the same again. There is grief in that, and uncertainty.

There is also the possibility of continuing to care for one another as we discover what comes next.

We do not have to know the whole way forward to take part in it together.

Wishing you wellness

Keri Sawyer

Somewhere along the way, “being regulated” started to sound a lot like being able to handle everything on your own.

Calm yourself down.
Manage your emotions.
Get yourself back to okay.

And I think that can turn regulation into an individual accomplishment.

Something we should eventually be able to do independently.

The more capable we become, the less we should need from other people.

But I’m not sure that is what regulation actually means.

Regulation isn’t simply being calm.

Sometimes responding well to what is happening means mobilizing. Speaking up. Pulling back. Moving. Resting. Reaching toward someone. Taking action.

For me, regulation has much more to do with flexibility.

Can I notice what is happening?

Can I respond to what is actually here?

Can my experience shift as circumstances change?

Can I have access to more than one way of responding, rather than feeling locked into the same pattern every time?

That feels very different from simply asking whether I can calm myself down.

And it also changes the way I think about relationship.

Even when I experience myself as handling something on my own, I am not separate from the relational environment around me.

The people around us are part of the information our nervous system is taking in.

A shift in someone’s voice, expression, distance, attention, or responsiveness can change what happens in us, often before we consciously evaluate it.

It’s a little like weather.

We don’t have to decide that the wind has changed before we begin responding to it. We are already in it.

Relationship can give us more room to respond, and it can make that room smaller.

Either way, it is affecting the experience.

That is one reason I think co-regulation can be misunderstood when it is described as one person simply helping another person become calm.

Relationship is doing more than that.

Another person’s presence, absence, intensity, steadiness, withdrawal, or responsiveness can all shape what becomes possible in a moment.

The history between two people matters.

Trust matters.

Power matters.

Attunement matters.

Rupture and repair matter.

So other people are not only people we turn to when we need help regulating.

They are also part of what we are responding to in the first place.

And I think this becomes especially important when we start talking about self-sufficiency.

There is a lot of value placed on being able to handle things yourself.

Needing less.

Managing your own emotions.

Not depending too much on anyone.

There can be something important in developing more capacity to respond to our own experience.

Being able to notice ourselves, support ourselves, and make choices from within our own experience matters.

But that is different from making independence the measure of health.

Sometimes “I can do this myself” reflects real capacity.

And sometimes it reflects a history of learning that needing someone else wasn’t going to work.

From the outside, those can look very similar.

Internally, they may be very different experiences.

Maybe the question isn’t:

Can I regulate myself without needing anyone else?

Maybe it is:

Do I have enough flexibility to respond to myself, to other people, and to what is happening between us?

Can I draw on myself?

Can I receive something from another person?

Can I notice when relationship gives me more room?

Can I notice when it narrows that room?

Can I move toward connection without losing myself in it?

Can I step back without believing I have to do everything alone?

That feels like a more human way of thinking about regulation to me.

Not as mastery over ourselves.

Not as proving we can do it alone.

But as having more ways to respond to what is happening, both within us and around us.

We were never separate nervous systems trying to master ourselves in isolation.

We have always been affecting and being affected by one another.

Wishing you wellness,

Keri Sawyer

For a long time, I thought finding my voice meant becoming more confident.

Knowing what to say.
Speaking with more certainty.
Trusting that I had enough experience to stand in front of a room and lead.

But I think finding your voice can be much more complicated than that.

Because before we ever begin to sound like ourselves, many of us have spent years learning how to sound like the people who taught us.

We learn the language of our trainings.
The phrases our teachers use.
The words that seem to belong in yoga spaces, wellness spaces, healing spaces.

We learn what sounds informed. What sounds compassionate. What sounds professional. What sounds like someone who knows what they are doing.

And without realizing it, we can become very good at speaking in a voice that doesn’t entirely belong to us.

I know I have.

There have been times when I have heard myself say something and thought, Do I actually believe that? Or have I just heard it enough times that it became part of how I teach?

That question can be uncomfortable.

Especially when you have spent years training, studying, teaching, and building a professional identity around what you know.

There can be a strange vulnerability in realizing that something you once taught with certainty no longer feels as certain.

Or that your lived experience has complicated what you were taught.

Or that the language everyone around you is using no longer quite fits what you are seeing when you sit with actual people.

Finding your voice, then, isn’t only about learning what to say.

Sometimes it is about noticing what you have been repeating.

It is about becoming curious about the difference between what you were taught and what you have come to understand through experience.

It is about noticing where you edit yourself because you are afraid of saying the wrong thing.

Where you soften something you actually believe.

Where you reach for language that sounds familiar instead of language that feels true.

And in trauma-sensitive work, I think this can become even more complicated.

We become deeply aware of language. Of power. Of the impact our words can have.

That awareness is important.

But there is also a point where trying so hard to say everything correctly can make us disappear from our own teaching.

We can become so focused on avoiding the wrong words that we stop asking what we actually want to say.

For me, finding my voice has become less about sounding confident and more about sounding like myself.

Not the teacher I think I am supposed to be.

Not the person who has all the answers.

Not the version of me that fits most neatly inside a training manual.

Just the person who has spent years teaching, listening, questioning, changing, and paying attention.

My voice has changed because I have changed.

Things I once believed have become more complicated.

Questions have become more interesting than answers.

And sometimes the places where my experience does not perfectly match what I was taught have become the places where I have learned the most.

Maybe finding your voice isn’t about finally arriving at the right one.

Maybe it is about becoming willing to hear yourself clearly enough to notice when your own understanding is changing.

And allowing your teaching to change with you.

Wishing you wellness,

Keri Sawyer

There are phrases many of us have heard in modern yoga and wellness spaces.

Stay with it.

Go a little deeper.

Push through.

Find your edge.

You’re stronger than you think.

Often, those words are meant as encouragement.

And still, I find myself wondering what else they might be teaching.

Especially for someone whose history has already required them to disconnect from what they were noticing.

Trauma can shape the way we respond to discomfort, pressure, uncertainty, and expectation. Sometimes getting through difficult experiences meant staying when you wanted to leave, becoming still when you wanted to move, pleasing someone else, or learning that what you were feeling mattered less than what was expected of you.

Then you come into a yoga class and hear:

Stay.

Don’t give up.

Breathe through it.

Go further.

That gives me pause.

Not because challenge is always a problem.

Not because discomfort should always be avoided.

And not because staying with something difficult can’t be meaningful.

The question for me is:

Who is deciding?

There is a difference between staying because someone is telling you to stay and noticing that you want to stay.

There is a difference between moving deeper because the teacher suggests it and realizing that you are curious about exploring something different.

There is a difference between enduring discomfort because you think you are supposed to and choosing, for yourself, to remain with it.

Those differences can look small from the outside.

From the inside, they can be significant.

Trauma-sensitive yoga asks us to notice those moments.

What am I noticing?

Do I want to stay here?

Would I like to move?

Would something different feel more workable right now?

And the answer does not have to be the same every time.

Sometimes I notice discomfort and choose to stay.

Sometimes I notice the same discomfort and choose to move.

Sometimes I’m not sure yet.

What matters is that the information does not immediately get overridden by instruction coming from somewhere else.

For a long time, yoga culture often celebrated pushing past limits.

Going deeper.

Holding longer.

Trying harder.

There was often an assumption that the voice saying “stop” was simply resistance to overcome.

But what if it is information?

What if the impulse to move is worth noticing?

What if hesitation is worth noticing?

What if wanting to stop does not automatically mean you should keep going?

Trauma-sensitive yoga does not need to remove challenge from practice.

It changes our relationship with challenge.

Sometimes the response is continuing.

Sometimes it is changing the shape.

Sometimes it is resting.

Sometimes it is doing something entirely different.

The practice is not about proving how much you can tolerate.

It is about noticing what is happening while it is happening.

Because perhaps the question is not:

How far can I go?

Perhaps it is:

What am I noticing as I go?

Wishing you wellness,

Keri Sawyer

When “Right” Wasn’t the Point

I was looking for the “right” answer. What came next changed the way I viewed yoga entirely.

I was near the end of a 500-hour yoga therapeutics program when I had an experience that changed the way I saw teaching yoga altogether.

At the same time, I had also just begun a 300-hour Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga certification program. I was still very early in that learning, but this moment in the therapeutics program helped open the door for me into so much of what I would later come to understand through trauma-sensitive yoga.

During one of our practice-teaching experiences, I was working with another student.

I remember looking at the way they were doing the form and turning to the trainer with a question.

I wanted to know if they were doing it correctly.

It felt like a completely reasonable question.

I was the teacher. I was supposed to know what I was looking at. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something or allowing someone to do something incorrectly.

But the trainer didn’t answer me.

Instead, they turned toward the person I was practice teaching and asked:

“How does it feel in your body?”

That question changed everything for me.

In that moment, the person with the most important information was not the trainer.

It wasn’t me.

It was the person actually having the experience.

And with that came a large shift in the power dynamic.

The authority did not stay with the person on the other side of the mat.

It moved back to the person who was actually having the experience.

Their experience mattered.

Their noticing mattered.

What they knew from inside their own body mattered.

I had spent a great deal of my yoga education learning how to see someone else’s movement through my own eyes.

Where was their foot?

Was their knee aligned?

Was their spine positioned the way I had been taught?

Was the form recognizable as the form I had demonstrated?

There can be useful information in all of that.

But this question invited something I had not been paying nearly as much attention to:

What does the person doing the movement know that I cannot know by looking at them?

I couldn’t see sensation.

I couldn’t see effort.

I couldn’t see uncertainty, ease, tension, preference, or the small internal signals that might tell someone they wanted to move differently.

And I certainly couldn’t decide from the outside what an experience felt like from the inside.

It changed how I saw yoga altogether.

I began to understand that teaching was not about creating the experience for someone or deciding what the experience should be.

It was about making room for them to have their own experience.

That meant I could still bring practice into the room, but the experience itself did not belong to me.

It belonged to the person practicing.

That was a significant shift in the power dynamic.

The teacher was no longer the person holding the answers. The person practicing became an active part of understanding what was happening, what they were noticing, and what felt right for them in that moment.

And that changed the way I taught yoga moving forward.

I was no longer as interested in whether someone was having the experience I thought they should be having.

I became much more interested in whether there was enough room for them to notice, explore, and have an experience that was actually their own.

That moment became one of the first openings for me into trauma-sensitive yoga.

I was beginning to realize that this work was not simply going to be another collection of techniques I could add to what I already knew.

It was asking me to reconsider some of the things I thought I knew about being a yoga teacher in the first place.

I had been learning how to become better at seeing people.

This work was beginning to teach me how important it was to listen to them.

There was something freeing in that realization for me, too.

I didn’t have to know everything about another person’s experience.

I didn’t have to determine whether every movement was right or wrong.

I could bring what I knew, offer something to explore, and still leave room for the person in front of me to know something I did not.

In many ways, that one question opened a door.

It invited me away from:

How should this look?

And toward:

What are you experiencing?

What are you noticing?

What feels possible from here?

Years later, I can see how much of my understanding of trauma-sensitive yoga was already beginning to take shape in that one moment.

I thought I was asking a question about form.

What I was beginning to learn was something much bigger:

The person having the experience holds information that the person in the other side of the mat never fully can.

And when we make room for that, something else changes too:

the power in the room becomes less concentrated in the teacher and more shared with the person having the experience.

That changed the way I taught yoga moving forward.

Sometimes the most important thing we can do as practitioners is not rush to tell someone whether they are doing it right.

What we can do is ask:

How does it feel in your body?

Wishing you wellness,

Keri Sawyer

“I couldn’t get my coffee this morning. I’m traumatized.”

We hear versions of this all the time.

A delayed flight. An awkward meeting. A frustrating morning. Something disappointing or inconvenient happens, and the word trauma gets used to describe it.

The concern is not really about the word itself.

It is about what happens to the meaning of trauma when it is used so casually — and how that meaning shapes the way we see and treat people who are actually living with its effects.

Trauma is not simply having a bad experience. It can deeply affect how someone experiences themselves, relationships, trust, sensation, and the world around them. Its effects can continue long after the experience itself has ended.

When trauma becomes shorthand for almost anything difficult, those effects can start to seem less significant.

And that has consequences.

Someone who is constantly scanning their surroundings can be called dramatic.

Someone who shuts down can be seen as disengaged.

Someone who struggles to trust can be labeled difficult.

Someone who has a strong response to something others see as small can be told they are overreacting.

This is where the watering down of trauma becomes more than a language issue.

It can become a way of minimizing people.

If trauma begins to sound ordinary, then the people living with its effects can start to look as though they are reacting too strongly to something that should not be affecting them so deeply.

That is stigma.

Not only refusing to talk about trauma, but reducing its significance to the point that we stop recognizing what it can actually do to a person.

We can become very comfortable talking about “trauma” while remaining uncomfortable with what trauma may actually look like — mistrust, shutdown, dissociation, hypervigilance, difficulty in relationships, or responses that do not make sense from the outside.

And then the person can carry another burden on top of what they have already lived through:

Why am I still affected by this?

Why can’t I move past it?

Why does everyone else seem to handle things better than I do?

When the meaning of trauma is diminished, our response to people can diminish with it.

We may judge what we see instead of becoming curious about what shaped it.

We may focus on changing someone’s behavior rather than understanding what their nervous system has learned to prepare for.

We may expect someone to “move on” without recognizing how deeply an experience has altered the way they move through the world.

When we minimize the meaning of trauma, we risk minimizing the people living with its effects.

That is the deeper concern.

This is not about policing which words people are allowed to use.

It is about remembering that meaning matters because meaning influences understanding — and understanding influences how we treat one another.

Trauma does not need to become a forbidden word.

It needs to remain a meaningful one.

Because when we understand the weight of trauma more clearly, we are more able to recognize the weight someone else may be carrying.

Wishing you wellness,

Keri Sawyer

Some people grow up learning that care is inconsistent.

That needs are inconvenient.

That love can disappear.

That home can be unpredictable.

That asking for help does not always bring help.

When those experiences happen over and over, they can shape more than memory.

They can shape expectation.

This is how life is.
Nothing is going to change.
I do not really matter.
I am not someone people take care of.

And those beliefs do not always disappear just because childhood ends.

A person can build a stable life and still feel like something bad is coming.

They can be loved and still have trouble trusting it.

They can be cared for and still feel uncomfortable receiving care.

They can finally have choices and still feel unsure that their choices matter.

They can know, intellectually, that they are safe now and still not experience that safety in a way that feels real.

Because safety is not only something we understand.

It is also something we experience.

Present-moment experience matters because it gives us new information.

Not an idea of safety.

Not a memory of it.

An actual moment where something is different now.

I am here.
I can notice what I feel.
I can choose what happens next.
I can stop.
I can change my mind.
No one is taking that away from me.

This is one reason practices like Trauma Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) can be so meaningful.

The invitation is not to picture safety somewhere else.

It is to have an opportunity to experience something different in the present moment.

Right here.

Right now.

Not because one experience erases what came before.

But because it can interrupt the belief that it will always be this way.

And sometimes that is where change begins:

not with being told that life is different now,

but with having an experience that lets you feel, even for a moment,

maybe it can be.

Wishing you wellness,

Keri Sawyer

As practitioners, there are moments when we can feel something happening before we fully understand it.

A sense of ease. A tightening in our own body. A pull to move closer. A wish to create more space. A feeling that connection has deepened—or that something has shifted.

These moments can be easy to overlook, especially when we are focused on what we think we should be doing next.

But they matter.

Because attunement is not only about paying attention to the person in front of us. It is also about staying connected to ourselves while we are with them.

We are part of what is happening.

One idea from Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) that deeply informs the way I think about attunement is the shared, authentic experience. For me, that means remembering that we are not outside the relationship looking in. We are part of it.

We Bring Ourselves Into the Relationship

As practitioners, we bring more than our knowledge and training into an interaction.

We bring our own body, our energy, our reactions, our boundaries, and our way of being in that particular moment.

That does not make the relationship about us. It simply means that we are not outside of it.

Our presence affects the space, and the person in front of us affects us as well.

There is something deeply relational in recognizing that.

We do not have to become blank, neutral, or removed in order to be helpful. We can remain connected to ourselves and still make room for another person’s experience.

Our Body Is Part of the Relationship

Sometimes our body notices something before our mind has made sense of it.

Our shoulders tighten. Our breathing changes. We feel ourselves bracing. We notice warmth, ease, a wish to pull back, or a sense of connection.

These experiences do not tell us what the other person is feeling. They are not evidence about someone else.

They tell us something about our own experience of being here with this person, in this moment.

That information can matter.

When we are connected to our own body, we have a better chance of noticing when we are becoming hurried, guarded, distant, or more intense. We can notice before those shifts begin shaping the relationship without our awareness.

Sometimes that awareness can be as simple as:

I can stay connected to what I’m feeling while staying connected with you.

Authenticity Means Staying Connected to Ourselves

Authenticity does not mean sharing every thought or feeling we have.

It means we are connected enough to ourselves that our presence is genuine. Our care is real. Our interest is real. Our responses come from the interaction that is actually happening rather than only from the role we are occupying.

That can feel vulnerable for practitioners.

We are often trained to focus on the other person. To know what to do. To respond well. To keep things moving.

But there are moments when we are uncertain. Moments when we feel something strongly. Moments when we do not know what comes next.

Attunement allows us to remain connected in those moments rather than leaving ourselves behind in an effort to get everything right.

We Do Not Have to Disappear to Connect

Caring deeply about another person can sometimes pull all of our attention outward.

We begin anticipating. Adjusting. Trying to make the interaction work. Trying to make things easier. Trying to be what we think the person needs.

And in that effort, we can lose touch with ourselves.

But connection does not require self-erasure.

We can care and still have boundaries. We can be responsive and still notice our own limits. We can feel deeply connected and still remain ourselves.

There is something important about allowing both people to remain connected to themselves within the relationship.

Each person brings their own body, history, responses, boundaries, and way of being.

Connection can grow from that meeting, without either person needing to lose themselves in the process.

Practicing With, Not Outside

There can also be something powerful about practicing alongside someone rather than standing outside the experience and directing it.

When we participate with another person, the relationship can begin to feel more collaborative. The power dynamic shifts. We are not asking someone to go somewhere we are unwilling to go ourselves; we are sharing in the experience while each person remains connected to their own choices and their own body.

For many of the people we work with, practicing alongside another person can offer an experience they may not have had before—the experience of doing something with someone who feels safer, rather than being directed, watched, or left to navigate it alone.

That can help create a safer space for participation.

When we are practicing alongside someone, there can be less sense of being singled out or observed from the outside. Seeing us participate can also make the experience feel more approachable. We are there together, while each person still gets to decide whether, how, and to what degree they want to participate.

That sense of with matters.

It can shift the relationship from authority toward collaboration, from distance toward connection, and from expectation toward invitation.

Something Is Created Between Us

There are moments in relationships that belong entirely to neither person.

A sense of ease. A moment of closeness. Distance. Warmth. Uncertainty. A feeling that something has changed.

We do not always have to explain those moments.

We do not have to decide what they mean immediately.

Sometimes it is enough to notice that the relationship feels different.

Attunement is not about accurately reading another person. It is about being aware enough to recognize that the relationship itself is alive.

It moves. It shifts. And we are part of that movement.

What Attunement Asks of Us

Attunement asks us to stay connected in more than one direction.

To the person in front of us.

To our own body and internal experience.

And to what is happening in the space between us.

It asks us to notice when we begin to leave ourselves, when we become more focused on managing the interaction than participating in it, and when our own tension, urgency, or uncertainty begins shaping how we are with someone.

And it invites us back—to our own experience, to the moment, and to the relationship.

We do not need to know exactly what another person is feeling.

We do not need to create the perfect interaction.

We do not need to lose ourselves in order to connect.

Attunement is being connected enough to ourselves that we can genuinely be with another person—and allow something real to happen between us.

Wishing you wellness,

Keri Sawyer

It is easier to feel connected to someone when we understand them.

When their response makes sense to us.

When the relationship feels comfortable.

But empathy matters just as much when none of that is true.

When someone is angry, guarded, mistrustful, distant, or making choices we do not understand, something can begin to shift in us. We can become less warm, more certain, more directive, or more focused on changing what is happening.

Empathy is the willingness to stay open to another person’s experience and humanity, even when their experience is different from our own.

It does not require us to fully understand.

It asks us to remain open enough to remember that there is always more to a person’s experience than what we can see from the outside.

When We Do Not Understand

Someone can seem resistant.

Detached.

Angry.

Uninterested.

Unpredictable.

And very quickly, we can begin creating a story about what their behavior means.

They do not want help.

They are not trying.

They are being difficult.

But what looks one way from the outside can feel very different from the inside.

What we experience as distance can reflect caution.

What looks like resistance can have roots in protection.

What appears to be disengagement can be uncertainty.

And sometimes we simply do not know.

Empathy gives us room to not know without turning our uncertainty into judgment.

A person does not have to make sense to us in order to be met with dignity, respect, and care.

Empathy Without Rescue

Helping professionals often want to make things better.

We want to ease distress.

We want people to feel supported.

We want to know that what we are doing is useful.

That desire comes from care.

But sometimes care can become tangled with the need to fix.

Another person’s discomfort can create discomfort in us. We can begin moving quickly toward reassurance, solutions, or change because it is difficult for us to sit beside an experience we cannot make better.

Empathy offers another way.

It allows another person’s experience to exist without immediately turning it into something we need to solve.

Our presence can communicate:

I do not need you to feel differently in order for me to stay connected to you.

That does not mean doing nothing.

It means respecting that another person’s experience, choices, and life still belong to them.

We can care without taking over.

Caring Without Carrying

Some practitioners become cautious about empathy because they associate it with taking on another person’s pain.

If empathy means absorbing what someone else is feeling, carrying their experiences with us, or feeling responsible for making everything better, it can become exhausting.

But empathy does not have to mean emotional absorption.

We can care deeply without making another person’s pain our own.

We can be moved without becoming consumed.

We can stay emotionally available while still knowing where we end and another person begins.

Boundaries do not make us less empathic.

They allow us to stay connected without losing ourselves in another person’s experience.

This is your experience. I do not have to make it mine in order for it to matter to me.

There is something deeply respectful in that.

We are not distancing ourselves from another person’s humanity.

We are recognizing that their experience belongs to them, while allowing our care to remain.

When Our Perspective Carries Weight

Our professional roles give us knowledge, language, frameworks, and ways of understanding behavior.

Those things matter.

And so does remembering that our perspective can carry weight.

When we are the practitioner in the room, our interpretation can easily become the story that gets believed.

Someone can become resistant.

Difficult.

Disengaged.

Unmotivated.

And once we begin seeing someone through that lens, it can shape how we feel toward them and how we show up with them.

Empathy asks us to leave room for something we cannot see.

There is a life behind the behavior.

A history behind the response.

A reason something has come to make sense for this person, even when it does not yet make sense to us.

Our knowledge can help us understand.

But it does not make us the authority on another person’s inner experience.

Empathy reminds us to hold our understanding with enough openness that the person in front of us does not disappear beneath our interpretation.

Staying Human When It Gets Hard

Perhaps empathy becomes most visible when connection is difficult.

When an interaction is not going the way we expected.

When we feel challenged.

When we are uncomfortable.

When our warmth begins to change.

When part of us wants to pull away, take control, fix, or judge.

These moments remind us that we are human.

And they offer an opportunity to notice how we want to show up next.

Empathy does not ask us to abandon boundaries.

It does not ask us to agree with everything another person does.

It does not ask us to accept harmful behavior.

It asks us not to lose sight of the human being in front of us.

Empathy does not ask us to carry someone else’s experience. It asks us not to turn away from their humanity when their experience is difficult for us to sit with.

There will be people we do not fully understand.

There will be moments when we feel uncertain, uncomfortable, or challenged.

And perhaps empathy lives right there.

In our willingness to stay open.

To notice when judgment begins to replace curiosity.

To recognize when our discomfort begins to create distance.

And to remember that the person in front of us is more than the part of them we are struggling to understand.

We do not have to carry their experience.

We do not have to fix it.

We do not have to make it our own.

We can continue to meet another human being with care, dignity, and respect.

Empathy is staying human with someone, even when it’s hard.

Wishing you wellness,

Keri Sawyer

There are moments when we know, almost immediately, that we are in the presence of someone who feels warm.

Something in us recognizes it.

We feel received rather than managed.

We feel that there is room for us.

We do not have to work so hard to figure out where we stand.

Warmth is not always something we can easily describe, but we often know when we feel it.

And we often know when we do not.

For practitioners, that matters.

Because care is not only something we intend.

Care also has to be felt.

Warmth is one of the ways that happens.

It can communicate, without asking anything from the other person:

You are welcome here.

You matter here.

There is room for you as you are.

Why Does Warmth Matter?

Think about what it is like to be with someone who feels distant.

Maybe their attention is elsewhere.

Maybe their expression feels closed.

Maybe they seem impatient, distracted, or eager to move on.

Nothing overtly unkind has to happen for us to feel the difference.

We can begin to wonder:

Am I bothering them?

Do they want me here?

Have I done something wrong?

Do I need to be different with them?

Is there really room for me here?

For someone whose experiences have included criticism, dismissal, rejection, not being believed, or needing to pay close attention to other people’s reactions, those moments can carry even more meaning.

A change in expression.

A shift in attention.

A sense of impatience.

A practitioner looking toward the clock.

A feeling that the task has become more important than the person.

These can seem like small moments.

But small moments are often where relationships are felt.

We can be tired.

We can be thinking ahead.

We can have a full schedule.

We can be carrying something difficult from our own lives.

The person in front of us cannot know all of that.

They know what it feels like to be with us.

That is why warmth matters.

What Does Warmth Look Like?

Warmth does not have to be big.

It does not have to be cheerful.

And it does not have to be performed.

Warmth can be found in ordinary moments.

Looking up when someone enters.

Allowing our attention to turn fully toward them.

Letting our expression communicate that we are glad they are here.

Remembering something about them.

Not allowing the computer, the clock, or the next task to become the most important presence in the room.

Remaining connected when the interaction becomes uncomfortable.

Not withdrawing because someone is guarded, frustrated, uncertain, distant, or responding differently than we hoped.

Warmth is not about getting someone to open up.

It is not about making someone more cooperative.

It is not a strategy for creating a particular response.

Warmth is about how we choose to be with another human being.

Sometimes it is simply the felt message:

I am still here with you.

Warmth Is Not the Same as Cheerfulness

Warmth does not mean smiling all the time.

It does not mean being outgoing.

It does not mean trying to make difficult experiences feel positive.

There are moments when cheerfulness can actually feel disconnected from what someone is experiencing.

Warmth can exist alongside sadness.

Anger.

Fear.

Uncertainty.

Grief.

Silence.

Warmth can be steady.

Gentle.

Sincere.

Respectful.

It can mean that our care does not disappear when the person in front of us is having a difficult moment.

They do not need to make us comfortable.

They do not need to reassure us.

They do not need to respond in the way we expected.

They do not need to become easier for us to remain connected.

That, in itself, can be deeply meaningful.

When Warmth Is Missing

When warmth is absent, an interaction can begin to feel transactional.

A person can feel attended to without feeling received.

We can complete every required task and still leave someone feeling unseen.

We can gather the information.

Follow the process.

Ask the necessary questions.

Provide the service.

And still miss the human being sitting in front of us.

Sometimes the absence of warmth shows up when things are not going the way we expected.

Our expression changes.

Our tone changes.

We become more formal.

More directive.

More focused on getting through the interaction.

We create distance without recognizing that we are doing it.

And the person with us can feel that shift.

They might not say anything about it.

But the relationship has communicated something.

Awareness Helps Us Notice Warmth

This is where awareness comes back in.

Not by asking:

Am I a warm person?

But by becoming curious about something much more important:

What does it feel like to be with me right now?

There can be a difference between the care we feel inside ourselves and the care another person actually experiences.

We can care deeply and still appear distracted.

We can want someone to feel welcome and still seem hurried.

We can believe we are being open while our face, posture, or attention communicates distance.

Awareness helps us notice that gap.

Not so that we can become perfect.

So that we can remain connected to the impact of our presence.

The Person Before the Task

Practitioners have responsibilities.

There are schedules.

Documentation.

Questions that need answering.

Information that needs gathering.

Decisions that need making.

All of that is real.

And in the middle of it, there is a person.

Not a diagnosis.

Not a behavior.

Not a case.

Not an appointment.

Not a task to complete.

A person.

Someone with a history we do not fully know.

Someone who has learned things about relationships long before they walked into the room with us.

Someone who can feel whether our attention is with them or somewhere else.

Sometimes people will not remember the details of an interaction.

But they can carry the feeling of it with them.

Did I feel like I mattered?

Did I feel received?

Was there room for me as I was?

Did the person in front of me seem to care that I was there?

Warmth Is a Way of Being

Warmth is not another technique to master.

It is a way of being with another human being.

Throughout our work, there will always be things that need our attention—questions, schedules, responsibilities, decisions. But underneath all of that is something more fundamental:

There is a person in front of us.

A person with a history we cannot fully know.

A person who has had experiences of being seen and experiences of being overlooked.

A person who does not need to respond in a certain way, make things easier for us, or become someone different in order to be met with care.

This is where warmth becomes more than kindness.

It is in our attention.

Our expression.

Our willingness to remain present.

The way we stay connected when an interaction becomes uncomfortable or does not unfold as we expected.

The small ways our presence can communicate:

You matter here.

There is room for you here.

You do not have to be anything other than who you are in this moment.

We will not always know the impact of these moments.

We will not always know what someone carries with them after spending time with us.

But we can remember that care is felt in the small, human ways we meet one another.

And perhaps that is one of the most meaningful parts of trauma-sensitive practice:

Not having all the right answers.

Not creating the perfect interaction.

But showing up in a way that honors the humanity of the person in front of us.

Warmth can be felt in the way we make room for another person without asking them to be anything other than who they are.

Reflection

What does my presence communicate to the person in front of me?

Is there room for them to be exactly where they are, even when that looks different from what I expected?

What small moments of warmth might matter more than I realize?

Wishing you wellness,

Keri Sawyer