This episode is another conversation with Rose Zealand, a financial planner and death doula who works with people facing the end of their lives, especially those who have received a terminal diagnosis at a relatively young age. Our focus this time is on the profound power of just being with a client, what Rose calls witnessing.
She describes the act of witnessing as one person being given the opportunity to say, to feel, to express, to emote, to just be however they are. And the other person is allowing that to be okay. It is a space that’s free of judgment or agenda, where the witness is holding the person who is going through this experience in unconditional positive regard.
Being witnessed in that way, in unconditional positive regard without judgment or an agenda, can be incredibly deep. It allows us to release and let go of a lot of burden that we have been carrying, which is often the burden of self-judgment.
Rose makes clear that, when someone is approaching death, not everyone who is with them will be able to create and hold that safe space of deep witnessing. Even someone serving as a death doula, which is a relatively new title and a formalization of an ancient practice of attending one another in death, may not have the training or experience to do so. The witnesses’ beliefs and biases about what a good death is are completely and entirely irrelevant. Imposing those on the dying person can be damaging. For death doulas, hospice workers, chaplains, and therapists, unconditional witnessing requires a tremendous amount of personal work and interior investigation.
One important component of that work is learning to set aside your biases, judgements, and reactions in order to stay present in the moment as a witness. Rose also makes clear that this is a two-step process, which we discuss more fully in our conversation. The first step is to recognize your response and set it aside. The second step is to go back later and process it. This is crucial to avoid burnout and compassion fatigue and to maintain the ability to participate in what Rose calls the transformational process of unconditional witnessing.
Check out The Financial Therapy Podcast by Rick Kahler concerning this topic.