Some experiences don’t live inside us as coherent stories.
They don’t come wrapped up neatly with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
They don’t even always feel like memories.
Instead, some of what’s inside of us exists as absences. As voids. As unfinished emotional states we move through, without knowing quite what they are, or what to call them.
Psychoanalyst André Green called this the “work of the negative.”
It’s not about the presence of something painful—but the aching absence of something that never fully happened in a way that could be symbolized, understood, or metabolized. An inner deadness that needs to be made alive.
Bion spoke of unrepresented states—experiences that were never fully thought about, digested, or known because the environment couldn’t hold them, or because they were too overwhelming at the time to be formulated into language or meaning. We probably each have our own examples of such states, states our caregivers could not mirror back to us or help us digest, ones we simply could not assimilate on our own.
Instead of becoming memories, these experiences became dreads or agonies—sudden storms of emptiness, sensation, longing, or confusion we can’t quite explain.
Winnicott, too, reminds us that healing doesn’t happen when we are pushed to know too much, too soon. Rather, it happens when someone creates for us a “transitional space”—an environment where things can simply unfold as they are, be and become, without being stuffed into old explanations, preexisting knowledge, or neat little categories.
This is the paradox: To heal what was never fully known, we must first allow it to be—before we rush to know it.
Not everything inside us is a thing to be identified and solved.
Sometimes what we carry is the trace or mark of what wasn’t—a connection that didn’t happen, a need that wasn’t met, a moment that couldn’t be processed at the time. These leave lacunae on our hearts.
And when we sit with someone in therapy (or in life) and resist the temptation to “figure it out” prematurely—when we witness without foreclosing—we open the door for meaning to enter a place where there once was only an absence.
Yet making room for something to unfold organically requires a capacity for receptivity that must be actively cultivated. It doesn’t simply happen on its own; it demands the ongoing suspension of our wish for coherence, our impulse to do something in the face of helplessness, and our tendency to cling to the familiar—even when the familiar is a painful or limiting place to be.
My sense of a holding environment for my clients isn’t just something external I offer—a space I create—but also an internal posture. It’s the commitment to hold my own impulses: the impulse to change what is, to rush into interpretation, or to impose meaning too quickly onto an experience. It’s the willingness to step into the unknown alongside the client and to allow something new to emerge organically, in its own time.