When "I'll be Here With You" Isn’t Enough
The Need for the Therapist to be More than a Caring Witness
When I first began offering PSIP sessions, I would stay within the designated boundaries of the roles handed to me by my clients, never pushing back or stepping outside of them. As long as they were willing to remain inside the SI container1, I would wear any projection thrown onto me—distant, fragile, passive—and simply follow it up with, “...I’ll still be right here with you.” This is still an intervention I use often, but there are times when accepting the projection and pairing it with presence isn’t enough. It’s essential to remember that the need for solution2 is constantly shifting in proportion to the amount of nightmare that emerges. How directive we need to be in offering relational solution often depends on how much—or how little—internalized solution or internalized good object3 exists in the particular nightmare the client is experiencing.
I find it easiest to articulate this through an example. This individual has been kind enough to allow me to share their session—I’ll refer to him as Joe. This session was unique in that another therapist was present, co-facilitating with me. We were already deep into the work within the SI container, where the mounting pressurization organically gave rise to powerful negative transference, casting me in the role of the perpetrator. Joe began oscillating between collapse, bracing, and fear, knowing—on a felt level—that I would violate him again. We had already cleared out his prior solution, dissociation, and now he was in the thick of the nightmare with no buffer of disembodiment to protect him.
I could sense Joe felt cornered, sitting across from his perpetrator without enough opiates to dissociate, yet too terrified to mobilize an active defense. He had built a connection with the other therapist in a prior session, where holding her hand had helped him feel into earlier frames of the terror-inducing memory. Recognizing that more solution was needed, I signaled the other therapist to offer some form of relational support, hoping she could step into the role of the savior while I embodied the perpetrator.
Therapist #2: “Joe, I’m wondering if some contact or closeness would be helpful here.”
Joe: “No no, I don’t know. You can’t help me, you can’t protect me. He’s going to hurt me—you can’t do anything to stop him!”
Therapist #2: “Well, it’s completely up to you, Joe. If you want me to hold your hand, just know I’m here.”
Joe: “Ah maybe, I don’t know. Will you protect me? No, you won’t be able to. You won’t stop him.”
Therapist #2: “I’m just letting you know—I can be here for you if you need, but it’s your choice.”
These interventions were warm and gentle, and in many situations, they would have been just right—respecting the client’s autonomy, allowing for self-directed contact, and avoiding any pressure. But as I listened to this exchange, I could feel Joe projecting the role of bystander onto the other therapist—the passive, ineffective, or absent adult from the original trauma. At the same time, I sensed the need for more solution and saw the potential to shift the bystander into the protective figure that had been missing during the original wounding, especially after Joe asked, “Will you protect me?” As the interaction began to stall, I stepped in to try to push Therapist #2 out of the bystander role and into the savior role.
Daniel: “Joe, I want you to remember how she showed up for you yesterday. Even with all the panic and terror you experienced, she didn’t let you go. She was solidly there with you.”
Joe: “Yeah yeah, I remember. Okay, I guess you can bring some contact, but…I don’t know. She’s not going to be able to protect me—you’re too strong!”
Daniel: “I’m telling you Joe, there’s no way she’s going to let me hurt you again. She’s seen too much. There’s no way she’s going to turn away and ignore it now.”
Therapist #2: “Yeah Joe, I’m going to keep him away from you. I didn’t back then, but I will now. I won’t let him get anywhere near you, I promise. And if at any point the contact doesn’t feel good, you can let me know and I’ll take it away.”
Joe: “Okay you can come closer and try holding my hand”
Sidebar: it’s remarkable how a client can experience me so thoroughly and viscerally as the perpetrator, and yet still distinguish what I say as Daniel—not as the one hurting them.
As Joe settled into the contact—comfortably, but with caution—I asked him to shift his attention back to me, the perpetrator. This unleashed a new wave of terror, activating his nervous system to grip more tightly to this newfound solution, the hand. That contact became the solution that allowed a full state 2 wave4 to emerge and complete. On the other side was calmness and a new sense of connection with the adult figure who hadn’t shown up back then, but might be able to now.
Here’s my interpretation of what happened: The nightmare had ripened because the previous solution—dissociation—was no longer working. This opened the system’s appetite for a new solution, but the one available at first—the bystander—was too weak or distant to meet the need. Joe needed a stronger, more active solution to metabolize the terror he was sitting with across from his perpetrator. When the therapist acknowledged the traumatic event and proactively took protective action, she was pushed out of the bystander role and into the savior role. That gesture gave Joe’s primary consciousness5 the security he needed to trust: This will never happen again—not with her here.
This is such a common feature of effective solution—because I know the same thing won’t happen again, I can fully enter into the horrors of when it did. That shift allowed Joe’s autonomic nervous system to mobilize and metabolize the terror he had felt during the original trauma.
As I mentioned earlier, how directive we need to be in offering solution depends on the composition of the nightmare and the presence—or absence—of internalized good objects. For Joe, the original perpetration was compounded by the absence of a protective or believing adult. When clients lack an internalized good object, the demand on the therapist to embody that role becomes more acute. And it’s often in those moments—when the therapist clearly takes up that position—that a new emotional texture begins to emerge: tenderness, relief, and a long-forgotten need. It’s in moments like these that the early imprint of a good object can begin to take hold—carrying forward, perhaps for the first time, a felt sense of protection, care, and emotional continuity within themselves.
It’s a delicate task, knowing when to stay inside the projection and when to offer something more. But it’s in this delicate dance—between presence and disruption—that the nervous system begins to trust that something different is finally possible.
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1 SI Container (Selective Inhibition): Inhibiting voluntary secondary management strategies to increase access to our primitive and primal healing response.
2 Solution: the necessary condition for the nervous system to engage the healing response.
3 Internalized Good Object: A mental representation of a reliable, nurturing caregiver internalized during early development, which provides a template for emotional security and healthy relational functioning.
4 State 2 Wave: A surge of high-intensity sympathetic arousal—trembling, shaking, heat, or movement—that reflects the nervous system’s peak mobilization, leading to deep resolution and integration when fully supported.
5 Primary Consciousness (Robin Carhart-Harris): A fundamental, immediate mode of awareness involving raw sensory and emotional experiences, without reflective thought or conceptual processing.
