You don't need to be fixed - You need to be met.
- Dana B. Fernandes
- Jul 21
- 3 min read
Many of us come to therapy, or to different types of treatment, with the notion that something is wrong with me. That notion often hides a sense of shame — something unfolding, hidden within pockets of experience that we sometimes carry for a lifetime.
I know this closely, both from my work in practice and from my own path into the somatic field. Fifteen years ago, I came to this work through my own chronic pain. That was my entry point. And when I came with that, I also carried the notion that something was wrong within me. Some of us hold this notion around physical difficulty. Many of us hold it around adversity, trauma, and things we carry with us emotionally.
One of the most significant realisations my practice has been discovering what actually changes traumatic experiences and adversities — even just hard experiences, places where we were not met, and the patterns we carry through life because of that.
The element that has struck me hardest, again and again, is this: to be met. Presence.
I finished a session today with a client I've worked with for a long time — long by my standard, since I don't usually work with people for very long. A traumatic experience had come up in our previous session, one that had never surfaced before. In today's session, I asked her what had happened since we last spoke. What she told me struck me deeply: life experiences, physical experiences, things we might call symptoms — the very things she had come to know herself by — had shifted completely.
What I know from working with trauma is that what happened is proximity. Many people living with traumatic experience, in some form of PTSD, re-experience that event within them even when there is a gap of twenty years between then and now.
So one of the most significant inner experiences of healing — or perhaps more accurately, transformation — is the experience of proximity: that suddenly the event feels at a distance. She said today that it felt like it belonged to a past life. There was suddenly a distance from it. It doesn't overwhelm in the same way. It's still in her bag of experiences, it still happened to her, but it no longer activates and impacts her here and now in the same way.
What touched me today, to tears, was the realization of what is actually needed. So many people walk through this world carrying their bag of adversity, of difficult experiences, of developmental trauma. And what is most often required is for them to be deeply met in their experience.
This capacity took me years to develop and build — to be able to sit like this with my clients. And yet it also, very often, feels to me so simple. Not easy. But simple.
How many people walk through this life without ever having the experience of being met? How many children grow up in this world without the experience of being truly met?
To be met doesn't only mean someone is there. We shouldn't confuse the two. It means someone is present enough. And it means they are connected to the place where I am.
So this is what I want to leave here, for us to carry with us: when we struggle long enough, walking through the world looking to be fixed — I remember saying this myself, that I wanted someone to take me apart and put me back together, like a car in a garage, but a body — when we walk like this, carrying the feeling that there is someone, or someplace, that will do this for us, I want us to recognise meshing.
The thing we are missing first, in our experience of adversity, is the sense that someone met us there. This is the first thing we are probably lacking. And this is the thing we should put our heart, our attention, and our seeking toward — finding a practitioner, or someone, who can truly meet us there. Not someone who offers promises of release or fixing, because that only continues the narrative that something is wrong with me, that something needs to be fixed within me.
But someone who can meet me in my experience, and whose presence and heart can support me in rewiring that.
Comments