Bearing witness is the orienting concept of the practice. It names what we try to do in the room, whether the room is a group programme for journalists working under surveillance, a facilitated session inside an organisation in crisis, or a one-to-one supervision conversation. It means staying present to what is actually happening between people, including what is uncomfortable or unresolved, without rushing to fix, smooth, or interpret it away.

The frame we work from is Ruth Behar’s vulnerable observer: the recognition that the person doing the witnessing is themselves implicated in what they witness, and that honest engagement with another person’s experience requires honest engagement with one’s own. Witnessing without that is extractive. It treats the witness as neutral, which they aren’t, and the witnessed as an object of attention, which they shouldn’t be.

What makes vulnerable observation hard, in practice, is that everyone in a room (including facilitators, educators, and consultants) brings unconscious patterns from earlier relationships into professional work. Stephen Karpman’s drama triangle names three of the most common: Victim, Persecutor, Rescuer. Acey Choy later added a fourth that’s often overlooked in our work, the Bystander. Practitioners working in distressing contexts are particularly prone to slipping into the Rescuer role, because rescuing feels ethical and feels like the work. It often isn’t. It often reproduces the dynamics it claims to address.

The shift Choy proposes, from Victim to Vulnerable, Persecutor to Assertive Challenger, Rescuer to Caring Coach, and Bystander to Active Witness, is the move we try to make in our own work. It isn’t tidy or linear. It’s the ongoing work of noticing when we’ve reverted to a reactive position and choosing, where possible, to step out of it.

This matters because the conditions we work in (armed conflict, displacement, institutional harm, the slower violence of everyday systems) generate enormous pressure to act quickly and to act from familiar positions. Bearing witness is what we mean by the discipline of not doing that. It is slower than reactive intervention. In our experience, it is also more useful.