We All Want to be Found

CLICK HERE to read this article in Portuguese.

“It’s fun for a child to hide. But it would be a disaster not to be found.”

This maxim by the renowned psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott has stayed with me ever since I heard Dr. Sue Johnson discuss it in an interview with Dr. Rick Hanson. The great insight from that conversation was that this doesn’t apply only to children. Deep down, we all hide — and we all want to be found. And it’s disastrous when we are not.

The feeling is easy to imagine. A child gets excited after finding a good hiding spot. There’s even that delightful chill in the stomach — that’s the goal. She hears the other children being found and stays quiet, proud of her cleverness. Time passes; the sound of play fades, the laughter stops, daylight dims, and silence takes over. She remains there.

In a heartbeat, excitement gives way to frustration — and then to fear: Where is everyone? Did they forget me here?

We don’t want to be forgotten. We don’t want others to stop looking for us. After all, not being found is a disaster.

Most people hide because they’ve been hurt and learned that hiding keeps the pain away. Others were taught that this is what one should do. And some may simply find it fun to hide, like children do — without realizing the danger in that.

And this is precisely where our work as EFT therapists comes in: helping people be found in their hiding places, soothing the fear of being forgotten there, and creating enough safety for them to be seen and to rediscover those they love.

In EFT, we call these moments of being truly seen and emotionally responded to enactments or encounters — choreographed emotional encounters where experience comes alive in the room and new patterns of connection begin to take shape. In EFCT, these are the moments when partners risk stepping out of their defensive positions to reach for each other in new, more open ways. It is within these moments of contact that healing unfolds.

In EFIT, enactments happen when an individual client dares to step out from the emotional strategies that have long kept them safe yet alone — and begins to engage differently with their own inner world or with an attachment figure internalized from the past. These moments invite the client not to talk about emotion, but to experience it differently, in motion, within a safe and responsive bond with the therapist.

For example, a woman who has always appeared strong and unshakable pauses, takes a breath, and says softly, “I don’t think anyone really knows how afraid I am of losing my importance to others — of being left alone if they see my weakness.”

The therapist stays close, mirrors her emotion, and validates her longing to be accepted as she is. In this shared moment, she experiences — perhaps for the first time — that it is safe to be found.

At other times, the enactment unfolds inwardly: a client may be invited to turn toward a younger part of the self that has long been exiled. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” she whispers to the small, trembling image of herself she can now sense. “You just wanted someone to notice you.”

In another session, a man who grew up with a distant and critical father imagines facing him now. His voice trembles, but he continues: “You scared me. I needed you to tell me I was enough.”

Each of these moments is an enactment — not a role play, but an experience of contact, where emotion finds new expression and the self reorganizes around safety and interpersonal connection. This is where healing happens: when emotion moves, and the person can finally feel accompanied in places that once felt unreachable.

Moments like this don’t happen by chance. They arise when we, as therapists, slow the process down enough for emotion to surface and for new experiences to unfold. The most powerful tools we have in EFT are simply slowing down and using encounters. We invite clients to discover and own their automatic patterns of protection from difficult emotions, and then invite them to step out of their automatic hiding patterns and to stay present with what’s really happening inside. This slowing creates the safety needed to risk being found.

After all, this is the beauty of EFT: offering a clear map to what is most human in us — our capacity to seek and to offer emotional safety.

One of the phrases that has touched me most in training is, “I see you. I see your pain.” What more do we need than to be seen — to know that someone can truly see our pain? To know that we are not alone or invisible?

And yet, we all have our natural hiding places — our reactivity and our protective emotions. They serve an important purpose and arise for good reasons, even though their impact can be negative. We know this so well through our clinical work. In EFT terms, second ary emotions like anger, criticism, or withdrawal often serve as hiding places for our primary vulnerabilities — the fear of rejection, the shame of not being enough, the terror of abandonment. When we slow down with our clients and help them access how they avoid their
core emotions and then safely explore what lies be neath the surface, we’re essentially helping them risk being found in their deepest needs.

I remember a couple where the husband “hid” behind analysis and control. He approached his marriage like a manager — precise, organized, always trying to make it work. His reasoning was so sharp that it was hard for his wife to share her experience with him. One day, I invited him to slow down and explore what was really at stake when he needed to stay in control. I asked, “What memories do you have of needing to be so alert?” He paused, then spoke of painful experiences from his childhood. When he reached one especially difficult story, he froze, his eyes filled with tears. I said, “Could you let your wife see that emotion now?” He nodded, turned to her. She cried. He cried. They held each other. In that moment, he was finally found — and from then on, he could begin to rely on her as a safe place for his difficult emotions.

The spirit of our time moves against our deepest needs, offering us increasingly sophisticated and effective hiding places and making the chances of being found ever more remote. This need to be found is not only a fundamental element in our EFT therapy, it is also a common need for all of us as human beings.

We’ve learned to hide behind our status, our political opinions, our economic power, our social media personas, our use of alcohol or drugs, our critical thinking, our ideals of self-sufficiency, our accumulated knowledge — and so many other things that keep others from looking at us and saying, “I see you. I see your humanity. I see your pain.”

We post carefully curated images of our lives while hiding our struggles. We debate ideas passionately while avoiding the vulnerable admission, “I’m lonely.” We achieve professional success while our relationships starve for emotional presence. The more sophisticated our hiding places, the more isolated we become.

Of course, we don’t want to go around displaying our pain. It feels wrong — private, even. But ultimately, it is our contact with that pain, with our vulnerability, that allows us to form real connections with others — the kind that nourish our most basic human need, the one that Dr. Sue Johnson has done such extraordinary work making explicit: our attachment needs.

As I write this, I can’t help wondering how often — as a therapist and as a person — I still find myself hiding, waiting to be found. Hiding becomes such an automatic mechanism that we often don’t notice we’re doing it. However, when we speak from a place of deep connection with our emotional experience, we have the power to draw others to us.

In the end, it’s not about exposing our pain, but about being connected to it — to our vulnerabilities, our humanity, to who we truly are — without yielding to the spirit of the age that tells us, “Project the right image first.” Only then can we find the humanity in others — and be found in our own. After all, we may “have fun” hiding, but it is disastrous if we are not found.

Raphael Mestres, MA, Psychologist
EFT Therapist with additional training
Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil

CLICK HERE for references.