Why You Never Feel Like You Belong: The Practice of Witnessing and Being Witnessed

This one comes from our Salem 2026 gathering, with Jenn Reagan and Naomie Harris.

Hi, I’m Sara Walka, founder of The Sisters Enchanted, and I’ve spent the better part of a decade building community with witchy women. First online, and then, this year, in person in Salem, Massachusetts. Here’s something I’ve learned in all that time: a lot of us are really good at being in a room full of people and still feeling completely alone in it.

You know the feeling. You get invited to something new, maybe a group of women you’ve only ever met through a screen, and before you can even RSVP your whole body says no. Too much to manage. Too many other people’s emotions to carry. What if you say one true thing about yourself and somebody shuts down, and now you’re spending the whole night trying to figure out why they shut down? It’s a whole gosh darn thing, and most of us would honestly rather just stay home.

So I brought two of my favorite people onto the podcast to talk about it: Jenn Reagan and Naomie Harris, who together pulled off our first big in-person gathering. They saw all of it. The excited women, the nervous women, the ones emailing us beforehand practically begging to be talked out of coming. And what came out of that weekend is the thing I want to hand you today: the actual practice that turns a pile of strangers into people who belong to each other. It’s called witnessing and being witnessed, and nobody teaches it to us. So let’s fix that.

What does it really mean to belong in a community?

Belonging is not something a community grants you from the outside. You belong because you allow yourself to belong, and allowing it means letting yourself actually be seen. That’s the whole thing, and it’s harder than it sounds.

We throw the word community around a lot these days. You sign up for a program and there’s a community, which turns out to be a mildly moderated Facebook group people may or may not check into. That’s not it. Community is truly having people’s backs. It’s having a neighbor whose door you can knock on to say this thing happened, or I need this, can you help me. It is very challenging to build that in a digital space. I know, because I do it. But it’s doable, and it’s worth understanding what actually goes into holding it.

Think about a family, because a family is a community too. Y’all bicker, you’ve got wildly different opinions, and for the most part you still show up to the holiday dinner and it’s okay. Community is no different. Sometimes you work through the itchy stuff, and sometimes you just have to ask, what’s the north star that brings us all back together? Here’s what struck me about our women in Salem: the only thing every single one of them truly had in common was the witch hat they like to put on, sometimes in public and sometimes in private. Different ages, different stages, different bodies, different bank accounts, even different religions. And they still belonged, because they let themselves.

Why do we say no to new spaces before we even try?

We say no because we’re afraid of being too much, and because we don’t want one more set of emotions to manage. That fear kicks in before we’ve even thought it through.

A lot of us are introverts, or extroverted introverts, or just deeply empathic, and there’s a part of us that quietly decides we don’t need whatever other women might bring to the table. We’re scared of sounding braggy. We’re scared of making someone feel bad. You say one nice thing about your own life, somebody else goes quiet, and now you’re managing that too. So it feels safer to opt out entirely.

When we opened the doors to Salem, the inbox told the whole story. We had women writing in who were very desperately trying to talk themselves out of coming, and coming up with some genuinely great reasons not to. Some truly couldn’t make it, completely understandable. But a lot of them were just scared. Scared of not being accepted. Scared of showing up and not finding one friendly face. Scared of being too loud, too witchy, not witchy enough, or of not being able to keep up. Naomie put it perfectly: everybody was going to be scared, so the real question was what could we do in advance to help them feel safe enough to come anyway.

Here’s the reframe that cracks it open, and it’s pure holistic witchery. Instead of asking how am I going to act around these new people, or bracing for how nervous you’ll be, ask: how do I want to feel instead? Jenn does this every single day. Before our recording she decided she wanted to feel confident and knowledgeable, so that’s how her day went. When you know how you want to feel, you can source the self-trust to walk through the door. If caring what everyone else might think is the thing keeping you home, I’ve written a whole lot more about that in the witch wound and caring what other people think series over on the blog.

What is witnessing and being witnessed (and why is it so hard)?

Witnessing is receiving someone’s truth without making it about you. Being witnessed is letting yourself be seen. It’s hard for one simple reason: we were raised to do the exact opposite.

Nobody teaches us this. We’re taught to be humble, don’t brag, wave off the compliment, say oh it’s not a big deal. I catch myself doing it too. So here’s what happens in a group: somebody shares something good, someone else feels a little bad, and suddenly nobody wants to share their good stuff anymore because they don’t want to make anyone feel small. Everyone shrinks. Everyone loses.

At Salem I did a thing I hadn’t planned. I had a room of women, most of them strangers to each other, turn and witness something about another person. No prep, barely any background, just now, friends, you’re going to witness someone. And that part had tears. People felt good in a way they clearly weren’t used to. Because witnessing is a muscle, and most of us have never trained it. Witnessing looks like hearing someone say I just booked a first-class plane ticket, or I got a $20,000 raise, and simply letting it be true for them. You don’t have to fake happiness you don’t feel. You could be genuinely suffering and still say, wow, how great that this person gets to have that. And being witnessed is the other half: I’m going through something hard and I want to be seen in it, or I did something wonderful and I want to be seen in that too.

Naomie named the thing underneath all of it. People come to us and say I feel lost, I don’t know who I am anymore, I don’t feel connected, and they can never quite put a finger on what’s missing. Watching that room, I don’t think a single one of them was missing anything in that moment. The missing piece was this. Being witnessed. Holding space to witness someone else. That’s the connection we’re all starving for.

Why do cliques form, even in the most welcoming rooms?

Cliques almost always form out of fear, not cruelty. When you’re scared you won’t belong, you create a really tight, defined little sense of belonging so you can be sure you’re on the inside of something.

Our whole Salem theme was belonging. No Enchanted Sister left behind. And we hadn’t even gotten to Salem yet when we got feedback that it felt like maybe some cliques were forming before the event started. People were feeling left out of things other people were doing. I don’t believe it was on purpose, and I’ll always assume it wasn’t. But when you already feel like an outsider, that feeling can quietly confirm the exact story that kept you nervous in the first place. See, proof this won’t be good for me.

Here’s how we handled it, and this is the part I really want you to take with you. My instinct is always to raise the energy back up. We don’t drop into low, gossipy, who-said-what, weed-it-out energy. That road goes nowhere. We don’t need to relitigate intentions. We just bring everybody back up to the top. And when we raise the collective energy, we empower every woman to raise hers too, so she can say, you know what, maybe some of my own fear was adding to something that was really no big deal. Practically, we leveled the field. Wear something purple, wear something Sisters Enchanted, so we’d always know each other on the streets of Salem. One through-line, everybody in.

Naomie tied it to something bigger, and she’s right. Somewhere along the line society decided we’re all in competition with one another, and the whole idea of women gathering is in direct conflict with that. We are not each other’s competition. We’re each other’s support, the ones we’re meant to turn to. So we said, we hear you, that’s not where we are, and we brought the belonging right out into the world. We got compliments from Salem vendors on how our community showed up. That is the biggest compliment a group that had never once gathered in person could get. If saying yes and just participating feels impossible, that’s its own kind of magic, and I wrote about it in Good Witch Bad Bitch Summer: why just participate is the witchiest thing you’ll do.

What happens when you stop performing and just show up as yourself?

You find out that fitting in was never the point. The more authentically you show up, the more naturally you belong, and the performing was the thing keeping you out all along.

Jenn walked into our team house before the event terrified she’d turn into a fan girl. She kept telling herself, you cannot be too loud, you cannot be too much, and then she caught herself thinking, but that’s just not who I am. The second she got in the door, a little switch flipped: you don’t have to worry about any of those things, just be you. And the more her she was, the better it got. We ended up in pajamas, morning and night, laughing our heads off. The thing she was scared of was the thing that made it work.

The morning of the event, the first two people Jenn saw were the two Lisas in their hats, and Jenn in her flower crown. Everybody dressed completely differently, and everybody belonged, precisely because they were exactly who they are. Jenn drives a yellow Jeep with a big daisy on it and has crazy hair and is fully okay with that. That’s the whole lesson. It’s not a fitting-in situation. You’re you and they’re them, and that turns out to be the point of connection, not the obstacle to it. Living that out loud sometimes ruffles the people around you, and that is a feature, not a flaw.

You want proof it works? A hundred witchy women learned a dance Jenn taught, up on a stage together, and not one person was judging the dancing. We were just having the best time. That is what it looks like when nobody’s performing.

And I’ll leave you with Jenn’s flood, because it’s the bravest part. Two days before Salem her basement filled with water in a community-wide 100-year flood. She had to choose: stay and bail water out of a house she isn’t even handy enough to save, or trust her gut and come. She called her dad, who was far better equipped for the water than she was, and she got on the plane. She trusted her intuition, and it became one of the best decisions she’s ever made. (Turned out she was displaced for three months and couldn’t have stayed anyway. The doors that opened by saying yes, the belonging, the learning, none of it would have come if she’d said no.)

One more thing, because it matters. We don’t have to be growing all the time. Real spiritual growth is a spiral, not a straight line up, and sometimes what a room like this lets you do is not grow at all, but explore a part of yourself that never needed fixing. It was always there. You just weren’t letting yourself see it. That’s belonging. That’s the deeper pattern under all the fear of being too much, the same ancestral fear of being too powerful, too visible, too much that we call the witch wound. Being present in a community but never letting yourself be seen has a name, and once you can name the pattern, you can interrupt it. You can read the full framework in what is the witch wound, the 7 self-sabotage patterns keeping you small.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where to practice this

Our in-person gathering was a moment, but the practice is ongoing. Our Enchanted Journey membership is the virtual gathering spot where you get to come hang, get to know people, and practice these exact skills of belonging and being witnessed, at whatever level of witch hat feels good to you. All black all the time, or a yellow Jeep with a daisy on it. Both belong here.