We all have existential needs. To be seen emotionally by others. To be understood. To find meaning through our relationships.
A client once described to me the weight she feels every time she goes back to her family home. No one sees her for who she is. Everyone tells her how she ought to be and what she should do to fix herself. No one tells her that she is enough.
There are people, then, who grew up without ever experiencing a relationship in which someone really listened to them and saw them, without interrupting, correcting, or — at worst — constantly judging them.
Do we exist if others cannot see us? Or rather: how do we exist when others do not see us?
Many of us may pretend to be something else in order to become visible to others. To appear stronger, more assertive, more attractive, more certain. We all carry these deeply existential needs — to be seen, to be understood, and to find meaning in our connection with others. This is not a superficial need for validation, but the need to exist within relationship.
When a child is born, they need to be mirrored — to have their inner world seen and acknowledged by the adults who care for them — and it is through this that a sense of self gradually forms. When I see a child struggling, I need to acknowledge it so that they can perceive their own difficulty and begin to put into words what they are experiencing. It is from the way others see us that we begin to build ourselves. An infant exists through the gaze of another. Through responsiveness. Others are our mirror.
When that responsiveness is adequate, a sense of a coherent self is created. When it is missing or inconsistent, a trace can remain: a sense of invisibility, an experience of “I’m not enough”, “I don’t deserve”.
So, as adults, we are often not simply looking for contact. We are looking to be felt by the other person.
Presence, however, is not an individual property; it is created in the “between”. It is not something we carry steadily as a purely individual characteristic, but something that happens in the meeting. We are not the same people in all our relationships. Our self emerges differently with people who provoke fear or anxiety in us than it does with those who understand us, give us room and allow us to be who we are.
To be present means being in contact with our body, our feelings and our thoughts; being able to turn towards others without losing ourselves; and at the same time allowing this particular moment to affect us. This is a small illustration of what happens in psychotherapy. In Gestalt theory we speak about the cycle of contact, which consists of stages. First we perceive something in our body — a need. We try to understand what we need and we move towards it, we meet it, and then we withdraw. These stages are a picture of a healthy process of contact, and they apply both to our personal needs and to how we relate to people. There are cases, however, in which for various reasons this cycle is not completed in this way and is interrupted — through avoidance, overthinking or emotional withdrawal.
In order to meet others authentically, we first need to be able to stand within ourselves. This means being able to bear our feelings without being flooded by them or avoiding them, and being able to remain in, or return to, a relative inner steadiness. This capacity is created through experiences of relationship, or through psychotherapy.
In this way we can be open without losing ourselves; present without feeling threatened or dissolving into others; without needing to predict the outcome and without feeling exposed. To manage this, we need to deepen our self-knowledge, to practise our capacity to listen and observe, and to bear uncertainty.
In the end, what stays with us from our relationships is not only the words or the actions. It is the moments in which we felt that we existed within our relationship with others. The sense that someone met us authentically.
And perhaps presence is exactly that:
a way of saying, without words, “I am here, and I see you”.
Note: This article is inspired by the paper “Presence as a Relational Process” by Marie-Anne Chidiac and Sally Denham-Vaughan.
