The journalist Tracy E Gilchrist had just four minutes with the Wicked actors Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande – and she had to make them count. She just didn’t bargain on becoming part of one of the year’s most-used memes as a result of saying the phrase “holding space”. “I just went in and did my job, which was to try to get an authentic answer to a question in a very short amount of time,” she says. “It felt like the right term for what I was trying to get across to Cynthia, which is the idea that you can interact with a work of art like Defying Gravity and feel something within yourself.”
In the interview – a standard junket affair of rotating film journalists – Gilchrist, teeing up her question, informs Erivo that “people are taking the lyrics of Defying Gravity and really holding space with that and feeling power in that”.
If the comment itself was slightly left-field, Erivo’s teary response was even more so. “That’s really powerful,” said the British actor, who plays the lead role, Elphaba, in the screen adaptation of the stage musical. “That’s what I wanted,” she added, gripping co-star Grande’s index finger.
It was the latest stop on an exaggeratedly earnest press tour that has included the actors revealing matching lyric tattoos on Kelly Clarkson’s talkshow. Gilchrist’s question reflected the rise in popularity of the phrase “holding space”, a companion term to popular self-help concepts such as “emotional bandwidth” and “drawing boundaries”. But what does it actually mean? And how do you hold it for the lyrics of a 20-year-old Stephen Schwartz musical number?
“To me, it means to be in the moment,” says Gilchrist, who was working for Out magazine. “To be fully open to something and to not be cynical. To hear something – maybe a song like Defying Gravity that you have heard hundreds of times – and to have it hit you in a new way.” So just sort of … being there? “If it was a few years ago, I might have said ‘people are feeling seen’,” she says. “You can feel seen by a work of art, or a song, or another person, so I think it can be very similar.”
Heather Plett, a Canadian writer and coach who runs a workshop on holding space on Vancouver Island, says it’s a concept that she has been workshopping for 15 years. “The way I define it is that it’s a practise that we do when we show up for another person in support of whatever they’re going through. We do that without judgment, or without trying to layer our own story on to theirs, and we offer them compassion and support while allowing them to have their own sovereignty.”
The etymology of the term is hazy, but it may have something to do with Donald Winnicott’s writing on the maternal holding environment in the 1950s and 1960s – or what would probably be called, in 2024 parlance, a safe space.
Lesley Caldwell, a psychoanalyst and honorary professor at University College London, says: “Holding relates both to the question of what happens in an analytic session and what the analyst provides [for a patient]. It is also derived from the idea of what a mother does with a baby – though we might now extend that to the caregiver. The question is: what are the conditions in which a safe space is established and how can that continue to be established internally by someone as a result of the early infant care they experience?”
It’s hardly the first instance of therapy-speak bleeding into everyday conversation – “inner child” and “repression” hark back to Freud. “There are quite a lot of phrases like this, for example: ‘This is triggering,’” says Peter Kinderman, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Liverpool. “It’s using psychological jargon in everyday life to confuse.”
“I think we feel that if we have a specialist term for something that it legitimises it,” says Hazel Price, a lecturer in English language at the University of Salford, who first encountered the term in a neonatal group. “We tend to use expert language because it somehow legitimises something that actually isn’t rooted in any kind of rigorous evidence.”
But Benjy Kusi, a 29-year-old inclusion and wellbeing consultant, insists that some in the LGBTQ+ community have been using it for years. “I would say in the queer spaces I’m in that it’s used quite often. I facilitate workshops in regard to topics like anti-racism and LGBTQ+ inclusion, and in such sessions I hold space for people to share their lived experiences.”
Is any phrase bad – even if it’s jargon – if it encourages compassion? “I’m just happy that we are having some joy and that most people are coming together as a community and having fun with it,” says Gilchrist. She doesn’t regret asking the question.
