Week 4 – End of Week Update
Whenever we see someone in pain, especially someone we care about, we can be tempted to respond in a number of ways – fix the problem, judge them for not knowing better, try to convince them to move past whatever it is that’s bothering them, etc. When we do this, our intention is usually pure – we don’t want that person to be in pain. However, these responses can be deeply invalidating, and cause that person to feel worse, rather than better. Why is that? It’s because what’s actually happening is that their pain is uncomfortable for us to witness, and it’s triggering uncomfortable feelings within us. Not only that, but if we’re responding in such ways, it means that we’re not comfortable handling such emotions, and we want them to go away. This is the driving factor behind why we respond to people who are suffering in a way that leaves them feeling worse. The response another person’s pain calls for is empathy, which requires that we are “willing to be present to someone’s pain” (Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart, pg. 122) – not that we feel their pain for them, but that we are capable of and willing to sit with the uncomfortable feelings that arise when we see someone else in pain. When we are able to do that, we’re able to empathize with them by understanding what they are feeling, even if we haven’t experienced exactly what they are going through ourselves. Empathy, as Brené Brown says in Atlas of the Heart, is not walking in another’s shoes, but is instead learning “how to listen to the story you tell about what it’s like in your shoes and believe you even when it doesn’t match my experiences.” (pg. 124-125) When we try to put ourselves in the other person’s place, we are sucked into a “vortex” of our own emotional experience (pg. 125). We lose sight of the other person and become focused on our experience, and at most how the other person’s experience compares to our own. Then we’re back to where we started, with a response that doesn’t actually provide the support we’re hoping to give.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of my own suffering, and how people have responded to it in the past. For example, my dad, who has mellowed out slightly as he’s gotten older, will sometimes say that “the past is in the past” and that since “there’s nothing we can do to change the past, we need to focus on the future.” However, given what we know now about how to empathize with a person, we can see that this response is actually borne from his discomfort with contending with his role in my childhood trauma. He doesn’t want to reckon with the uncomfortable emotions that would likely arise if we were to examine the past, and as such, he’s hoping to bury the past and just move on. This is an obvious example, but we can see a more subtle one with the way my mom, who has the best intentions, tells me that she hopes that I can “get over” my past so that it doesn’t hold me back. Her intention is one of love – she doesn’t want my past pain to cloud my future – and I know that. But when she tells me to “get over it,” it invalidates the pain I both have experienced in the past and continue to experience in the present. It tells me that my pain is not okay, and that it’s making her uncomfortable, so please, can we make it go away? One does not simply “get over” trauma, and “getting over” trauma is different from healing from it. To heal from trauma, you have to be willing to wade through all that pain and feel the grief that certainly exists. You have to feel all of your emotions and learn to sit with them, bring that darkness into the light, and allow it air to breathe. To heal from trauma requires taking out these painful experiences and examining them in the light, seeing what they have to teach you, and seeing what you have to learn from yourself. Burying trauma or pain in the dark and moving on is like trying to shove a beach ball down under water – eventually, you’ll get tired of holding it down, and the beach ball will explode up with so much more force than if you had just let it exist on the surface. Not only that, you fail to experience the necessary and critical growth that comes with it. When you heal from trauma, it still exists to you, but you’ve learned and grown from it. You’ve befriended it, shown it compassion, and in return it helps you and pushes you forward. When you get over trauma, you’ve likely shoved it down as deep as it can go and hope to forget it about it, When my mom tells me that she hopes I’ll “get over it,” what’s likely happening is that she feels pain and discomfort because I am in pain. She would prefer to feel positive emotions instead, but it’s hard to do that when her daughter is suffering, so the result is that she tries to push me to just move past the trauma. If I’m no longer in pain, then she no longer has to feel guilt or shame over her role in my past, and she doesn’t have to feel grief over my pain. I don’t think she is aware that that’s what’s happening inside her, but I’m fairly certain that it’s the reality of what drives her to keep telling me that she wants me to get over my childhood trauma.
Another issue that often comes up, not only for myself, but I think for many people, is receiving cheerleading-type responses rather than empathy when we confess that we feel worthless, that we don’t see our own value. The common response to this is usually something along the lines of “You’re so smart/talented/kind/loving/funny/accomplished/ etc.! Look at all these amazing traits and accomplishments you have! Don’t feel that way!” But again, this response tends to feel pretty invalidating, and I usually feel worse when someone responds to me. The reason is that the message that is subtly being conveyed is “There’s no reason for you to feel that way! You should feel great!” and/or “Please stop feeling that way, it’s making me uncomfortable.” And when someone tells you that you should feel great, but you don’t, more shame is piled up on top of what the person is already feeling. Not only that, but the person may feel like they have somehow fooled this other person that they care about into seeing them as someone they’re not.
Beyond the fact that it’s invalidating, responding to someone’s feelings of worthlessness by telling them that they are worthy because they’re so kind/compassionate/smart/funny/etc. is further reinforcing the premise that someone’s value is based on their attributes and characteristics, not on the fact that they are a human being. Every person has value, and that value has absolutely nothing to do with what they’ve done or what their personality is like. Our value is built upon the fact that we are human and we are alive, and that is all that matters. Telling someone they’re not worthless because of XYZ traits is essentially saying “because you have those traits, you’re worthy.” What happens if we lose those traits? What happens if we do something that fails to exhibit or uphold those traits? Does that mean now we’re worthless again? Of course not. And that’s not what you really mean when you’re trying to reassure the person you care about in that way, but it is the message that gets conveyed. What the person in pain needs instead is for someone to sit with them in that feeling of worthlessness, to hold their hand and witness that pain, without feeling it for themselves. What’s needed is “I believe that you’re in pain, and I care about it, and it matters to me that you’re feeling this way,” not “No, you’re not worthless because you’re so smart and talented!”
As I think about all this, it reminds me of the quote from John Green in his book, The Fault in Our Stars: “Pain demands to be felt.” When I was younger, I thought that the quote meant that pain is hard to ignore, that you can’t help but to feel it when it’s present. But now as I’m thinking about it, I realize that maybe there’s another meaning to it – that pain must be felt and processed and moved through, rather than gotten over. That you cannot shove pain down or hide it from yourself and others, because it will still manifest itself in ways that you might not even realize. Pain demands to be felt, because if you do not allow yourself to fully feel it, if you do not sit with it, then you cannot ever truly be free from it. So when we see someone in pain, it is our duty to allow them to feel it, and to allow ourselves to sit with whatever uncomfortable emotions that it brings up within us. If you try to rush it away, not only will you not be successful, you may very well increase the pain, the very thing that you’re so desperate to remove. Allow others to feel pain and sit with them in it, and allow yourself to feel it too. Pain demands to be felt.