Giving Comfort
Huffington Post re-ran a piece where the author talks about a time when she shared a story and the person in mourning lashed out at her. The author points out our tendency to default to sharing ourselves. “When she began to share her raw emotions, I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to say, so I defaulted to a subject with which I was comfortable: myself.”
She wasn’t malicious. She was trying to comfort her by pointing out a connection.
She wanted to talk to me about her father, to tell me about the kind of man he was, so I could fully appreciate the magnitude of her loss. Instead, I asked her to stop for a moment and listen to my story about my dad’s tragic death.
And what follows is a deep look into how she defaults to sharing in general. “I started to notice how often I responded to stories of loss and struggle with stories of my own experiences.” It is just as easy to respond with, “Tell me about him,” as it is to respond with your own story of loss.
Except.
I looked at the shift responses in the post, and the reality is that hearing someone else understands and has a similar story (and maybe even thoughts on how to lessen the emotional pain) has made me feel less alone during a difficult time. I think it’s too simple to say, “always respond with support and never with shift,” and miss the point. In order to make human connections, we need to connect. And sometimes that happens — for me — through a shift response. From hearing that someone else has gone through something, too, when they actually have knowledge into what I’m possibly feeling.
What are your thoughts?
7 comments
I agree with you: hearing other people’s stories made me feel less alone during hard times and normalized the experience of living through something difficult. Part of what makes a tragic experience hard to bear is the (often unconscious) assumption that our default human condition is happy and untroubled. A reminder that suffering is actually universal can be a comfort and relief.
Hmmm – I think it’s a very individual kind of thing. People who want to talk about their problems want someone who will STFU and listen. People who sort of want to talk about their problems, but not really, are perfectly happy to have someone deflect to themselves – you know that you were heard (because…related problem), but you don’t have to carry the conversational burden.
The description of the situation leads me to believe that the author is actually someone who routinely turns conversation to herself and always has to have the best story. She seems like someone who is a strong competitor in the Pain Olympics, if a friend got that snappish in response. (This is just based on that brief anecdote – seems she may have learned better strategies in the end.)
I tend to occasionally share similar experiences, but I usually say something to the effect of “but your situation is completely different – it must be (insert appropriate emotion here)” to signal that I’m not trying to win or take over the conversation or anything like that. Mostly, I just let other people talk and ask the occasional question, because I am lame at conversation.
I think it depends on the person, the grief, and the type of support. My mom is one to always jump in with a story of someone she knows who had the same thing happen. It’s not often her, or even someone she knows personally (lots of Instagram “friends”) and it’s also likely an attempt to correct how the person is dealing with their grief. When I’m in pain, I like to hear stories of how oriole made it through something similar, but I don’t necessarily want advice.
My daughter is going through a health situation right now and I’m putting off sharing with my parents because I know my mom will know someone from social media who is treating her condition differently than what we are choosing, and I just don’t want that kind of “support” right now.
So I guess in that case, I get the point of not turning things toward yourself.
I find that article, especially the part about the shift and the support responses, helpful. I want to be more intentional about which one I use from here on.
I agree with you that support isn’t always The Best Answer. I think, though, that perhaps we all have a default, and as long as we make a choice of which one seems most appropriate, we are keeping our possible narcissism (seems like a strong word) or discomfort in check.
I agree with conclusion and A’s response. It depends on the situation and the individual, whether they want us to listen or talk, and whether our experiences might actually make them feel we’re competing – as in the article – or empathising, which is usually (I think and hope) the intent.
I also thought that the first Support response she gave as an example could come across as an attack, and would make me feel a little defensive. (I guess tone of voice would be key.)
Still, it’s a good article reminding us to think about why we are giving our experience and whether it is helpful.
A’s answer above really resonated with me.
I think tone makes a big, big difference here. I’ve experienced it most with NICU stories personally. Some of it is understanding the limits of your own experience – I can easily relate to a lot of the feelings that someone who had a super early preemie (say a 25 weeker) might have gone through, I know the vocabulary, but I also didn’t experience the roller coaster of emergency surgeries or have as long a NICU stay or permanent major disabilities. Similarly, someone who had, say, a 36 weeker who spent a few days in NICU might be able to relate to my having had a 28 weeker but not have had the marathon of spending months in the NICU or bringing a child home on oxygen and monitors. Respecting the differences and limits of a shared experience is important.
It sounds a little “pain olympics”, but I don’t mean it that way – it’s really in the how the story is told/used. I’ve had people who really did have 24-48 hour NICU stays that I could totally relate to and that used that experience to be sensitive. I’ve also had a person use a short NICU stay in a way that felt very much tone-policing, like “I made it through and stayed positive! You can too!” And the stories were very different – for her, a near term baby, a short stay, returned to work on time, didn’t have home monitors or quarantine, no one expected her baby to die. Whereas I’d spent months on bed rest/in the hospital, considered burial vs cremation, lost my job, had to change all my hours/get a new job, and had ongoing early intervention/medical appointments 3-5 days a week at one point. It’s not that her experience wasn’t scary and traumatic, I’m sure it absolutely was, and I know she meant well. It’s that she took her own experience, applied it to mine, and didn’t consider the ways in which mine differed from hers. Basically, instead of using her story as a platform for empathy and saying, “oh, that really sucks! I’m so sorry! I know that must be scary, I remember that I was scared too” (which I would have respected), she didn’t want to get outside the bounds of what she’d been through and her discomfort with my emotions was obvious.
Hopefully that makes sense…it’s hard to describe.
I’ve been thinking on this one. I think shared experiences can be helpful, but when you’re ready to hear them. I just did a training in therapeutic behavior management, and a lot of it was responding to someone in emotional crisis, and one of the biggest things to take away was that giving space and acknowledging and validating feelings were best in a time of rawness, and then helping the person to problem solve, when the person is ready. Trying to fix it or relate with your own experience too early actually escalated situations, like Celeste and her friend. It seemed her friend wasn’t ready to hear a different but related story of loss, she just wanted to have someone listen or sit in the silence.I do agree with a that it seems like Celeste had a tendency to bring things to herself, a lot. I have the these “I know how you feel” because it minimizes the pain of the grieving person — no one can truly know exactly how someone else feels. Lots of experience leading up to a similar event change the nuance of the feelings.
I hear Beth on her mom’s likely “support” — I’ll never forget what it was like to call my mom and tell her that I’d found out my husband had been cheating on me for the majority of our marriage, and she immediately turned it to herself and started talking about a situation with my father (they’d been divorced 14 years at the time). It made me feel alone, unheard, unsupported.
Sharing of stories had been super helpful though, when I seek it out and things aren’t so oozy. Sometimes you just need to be heard, and a shift response makes you feel like you don’t have the right to sit in your own grief, that you have to be in the position of listening to someone else’s, when theirs is likely from a while ago and scabbed or scarred over, and yours is bleeding all over the floor. Sitting with someone else without adding your experience or trying to fix it is so hard, but in those raw times, it’s what I appreciate most. Then, when I’m ready, I want to feel less alone through others’ experiences. For me, it’s a matter of timing.