When Presence Becomes a Way of Life

Jean‑Yves Caen,  Person-Centered Counselor and Psychotherapy Practitioner – Supervisor and Facilitator – Business Consultant and Mediator – President of the PCAIF
May 10th, 2026

Throughout my journey, I increasingly perceive that my life path has never truly followed that of a conventional professional trajectory. It resembles far more an inner and relational crossing, a constant search for coherence between who I deeply am, human relationships, and the collective structures within which we evolve.

For a long time, one central intuition has inhabited me: a person can only truly develop within a relational space where they feel welcomed, recognized, and respected in their own experience.

This conviction now runs through almost everything I do: my involvement in the Person-Centered Approach, my reflections on the concept of self, the actualizing tendency, competence, mediation, couple relationships, collective work, and organizations.

The three fundamental attitudes of the Person-Centered Approach — congruence, empathic understanding, and unconditional positive regard — have profoundly shaped my way of being in the world.

Over time, however, they ceased to be merely theoretical concepts or professional attitudes for me. They became an existential way of entering into relationship with life itself.

Congruence, for me, is not simply psychological transparency. It represents an attempt to remain genuinely present to what is lived inwardly, a fidelity to the living movement of experience, even when it is contradictory, fragile, or uncertain.

Empathy, for me, is not only the ability to understand another person. I experience it as a form of deep resonance — emotional, energetic, and human. Every encounter affects me, moves me, transforms me.

I do not believe I have “clients.”
I encounter people.

And every encounter matters deeply to me.

Emotionally, energetically, and humanly, these encounters pass through me and transform me. I have often allowed myself to be influenced by the people I meet, not in the sense of losing myself, but because I believe that genuine encounters necessarily change those who live them.

I do not seek to remain untouched in the presence of another.

On the contrary, I believe authentic relationship implies a form of conscious permeability, a capacity to be affected without disappearing, to be moved without losing one’s personal power.

As for unconditional positive regard, I do not see it as a naïve idealization of human beings. Rather, it is a deep trust that beyond defenses, violence, conditioning, or contradictions, something in each person is still seeking to live, connect, and unfold.

Yet the more I move forward, the more I realize how deeply vulnerable this impulse within me truly is.

For a long time, I may have mostly shown the strength of this commitment: the capacity to listen, to think, to be present, to transmit, to create spaces of encounter. And yet behind all this lies something much more fragile.

To truly encounter human beings is profoundly exposing.

When I speak of presence, empathy, congruence, or unconditional positive regard, these are not protected relational techniques hidden behind a professional posture. They involve a genuine openness of oneself toward another.

And such openness necessarily implies vulnerability.

Every important encounter leaves a trace within me.

I believe my entire way of being has been built around this tension: how can one remain open to life without being crushed by it?

Being permeable to the world is not comfortable.

It means being affected — by human suffering, institutional incoherence, domination, exclusion, ruptures of connection, misunderstandings, and sometimes by the impossibility of truly meeting one another.

Very early in life, I intensely perceived atmospheres, tensions, emotional movements, and the gaps between discourse and reality. Perhaps this hypersensitivity often made me vulnerable, but it also became an essential source of human understanding.

I cannot think of relationships only intellectually.
I feel them physically, emotionally, energetically.

Groups affect me deeply because they amplify emotional circulation, belonging, exclusion, power relations, implicit expectations, and resonance phenomena.

For a long time, I may have tried to protect this vulnerability through analysis, conceptualization, containment, or by taking on the role of facilitator.

But the more I move forward, the more I understand that this vulnerability is not a flaw to correct.

It is an integral part of my way of being in the world.

I now believe that many social, institutional, and professional systems seek instead to neutralize vulnerability through control, distance, expertise, rigid roles, and protocols.

As if being affected were a weakness.

I believe the opposite.

Conscious vulnerability can become an immense relational strength when it is neither denied nor used to gain power over others.

Yet this way of being also carries a permanent risk: exhaustion, emotional overload, disillusionment, or withdrawal.

Recognizing this vulnerability also means acknowledging another essential need within me: the need for withdrawal.

For a long time, I mainly valued movement toward others — creating bonds, supporting groups, facilitating encounters. But over time, I realized that remaining constantly exposed to relationships can become destabilizing for me.

Withdrawal is not an escape from the world or from others. It is a vital necessity for balance.

It is a way of protecting what is alive within me.

A space where I can reconnect with myself, recover inner continuity, allow accumulated tensions to settle, distinguish what comes from me and what belongs to others, and rediscover silence and stability.

I progressively understand that this alternation between openness and withdrawal is an essential part of my way of inhabiting the world.

I cannot remain in permanent exposure without risking emotional saturation, relational exhaustion, inner confusion, or a form of losing myself within collective dynamics.

Today, I no longer see this need for withdrawal as a weakness or contradiction.

I believe that knowing how to withdraw can be a deeply responsible way of preserving one’s future capacity to truly encounter others.

A presence that never replenishes itself eventually becomes exhausted, defensive, or emptied of its quality of availability.

Withdrawal therefore allows me not to cut off relationship, but to preserve the possibility of a living and authentic encounter.

There is something in this dynamic that resembles the rhythm of life itself:
a movement of expansion and return,
of openness and inwardness,
of contact and silence.

Since childhood, I have struggled to consider statuses, functions, or external references as naturally legitimate. Prestige, titles, hierarchies, and affiliations have never truly impressed me.

I do not encounter statuses.
I encounter presences.

I do not encounter “a patient,” “a director,” “a professional,” or “an expert.”
I encounter a person, with their experience, vulnerability, history, and inner movement.

This way of being in the world also resonates with certain intuitions found in Buddhism.

I believe less and less in fixed or closed identities.

Human beings seem fundamentally in movement, interdependent, shaped by conditioning, experiences, suffering, impulses, and continuous transformation.

Nothing in human beings appears entirely fixed to me.

And yet, amidst all these movements, something constantly seeks to unfold, to adjust, and to recover a form of living coherence.

Institutions seek to organize, categorize, and predict.
Ideologies seek to explain.
Identities seek stability.

But life always overflows.

There exists within every person an irreducible dimension that can never be fully controlled or possessed.

Over time, I have come to understand that what I long called vulnerability is not only fragility.

It is also strength.

Not the strength of domination or control, but a living strength — the strength that comes from remaining sensitive, affected, and touched by life without cutting oneself off from it.

Perhaps true human strength lies in this capacity to remain open without dissolving, to welcome the intensity of life without freezing it, and to accept uncertainty without abandoning presence.

What is alive is always vulnerable.

A living relationship is vulnerable.
A living love is vulnerable.
A real encounter is vulnerable.
Even thought, when it remains open, is vulnerable to transformation.

Wanting to eliminate vulnerability entirely would perhaps mean drying up life itself.

Today, I no longer believe that maturity means becoming invulnerable.

I believe it means learning to inhabit sensitivity fully without allowing it to become destructive.

Perhaps what I seek most deeply is a way of being human that no longer opposes strength and vulnerability, presence and withdrawal, singularity and otherness, stability and movement.

A way of inhabiting the world in which sensitivity would no longer be perceived as a weakness to correct, but as a profound intelligence of life itself.

And despite tensions, wounds, disillusionments, or moments of withdrawal, something within me continues to trust this movement.

As if, beyond fears, systems, and confinements, life were still tirelessly seeking to encounter itself through us.

(english translation by Dr Valois Robichaud)