Sitting beside you in the dark
On a spring day in 2020, my daughter played in our front yard and must have silently recounted in her mind a recent phone call with my mother, in which my mother shared that another little one in the family lamented how hard it was not to hug others due to the pandemic.
Unexpectedly, my daughter began crying under the large shade tree, my family members’ fresh words melting into her own. “It’s not fair. I miss hugging my teacher and my friends. It’s not fair.”
Her kindergarten-world shattered that March with the stay-at-home order, but it was the first time I had seen such despair from her since the start of the pandemic. Up until that point, the realities of the world showed up only in her play—piles of stuffed animals and dolls shoved into her closet for quarantine, and eventually, Kleenex tissue masks covered the mouths of Barbies.
I listened to her as she spiraled, but interjected (my first mistake), “We can give each other lots of hugs and we can still do video calls with your friends, so you can see them.”
“You don’t understand! You don’t understand!”
She stood exposed in a hurt and fiery fury. The truth was I didn’t fully understand. I did not start school during a pandemic while making my very first friends, and I was not her at that moment. What I did understand was that I already knew not to try to reason with her when she was in such a state, and yet, I did anyway. Why was it so hard to say nothing?
The idea of a simple hug to serve as silent words flashed across my mind, but I moved too quickly and pushed ahead knowing better. I couldn’t quite tell you exactly why at that moment I was unable to find the courage to pause long enough to table my immediate reaction and leave room for reason. Perhaps I began to feel beaten down by the pandemic as well. The days of all of us squeezed into a home while simultaneously schooling and working felt suffocating. Maybe my desire to ease her pain felt greater than any other need or reason.
I stood in the same yard a few years prior with similar sentiments of feeling alone, with others trying to fix what they didn’t understand, when all I wanted was for someone to say, “I hear you. That is really, really hard and your feelings make sense. Anyone who was going through that would be having a difficult time. How can I support you?” I often think about how those words may have changed everything for me. Yet even knowing so, simply standing there with my daughter at that moment, rather than trying to fix it, felt like a mountain I couldn’t bear to climb.
The fix-it mentality, which I’ve started calling the “I just brought a casserole” approach to life, feels helpful on the surface, but maybe we’ve actually gifted food mismatched to someone’s taste, or perhaps their fridge or freezer is already stuffed with food they will never eat. We feel the need to do something, anything. What we do or say makes us feel better, but not them.
In her latest book, Atlas of the Heart, Dr. Brené Brown, research professor who studies courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy and New York Times bestselling author, reframes how we’ve come to know empathy and compassion over the years and explains what they are and are not. She writes, “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.”
Reading these words helps me more clearly understand that in that moment under the tree, I saw myself as a mother healer and her as a daughter wounded. But I didn’t need to bring the light. I just needed to sit in the dark.
In addition to establishing the sharer and listener are equals, rather than fixer and fixee, Brown adds, “Rather than walking in your shoes, I need to learn 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.”
The latter half of that insight strikes me—the key to unlocking true empathy is trusting the other person’s experience even though it might look different from your own experience. That simple yet powerful description is one I wish I could have verbalized many years ago. (Read more about Atlas of the Heart in this book review.)
I’ve heard at least a few people over the years say, “I didn’t get it until I went through it myself.” The “it” might’ve been raising a child, experiencing a miscarriage, dealing with the death of a loved one, receiving a cancer diagnosis, or any other challenging life situation. Some also added, “I shudder to think of what I said to others who were in that situation at the time.”
The following are a few responses I’ve heard over the years from those who were well-meaning, but had not shared my lived experiences, and so the unwelcome feedback only led me to feeling more dismissed, alone, and hopeless, and I imagine I may have also fallen into this trap at one point or another.
1) “You can’t complain because this is what you wanted.”
2) “A lot of people go through this, but you can’t handle it.”
3) *Insert an action here that you didn’t want in an attempt to fix things for you.
I read somewhere (I wish I could remember where because it’s important to give credit where credit is due) that if you couldn’t be emotionally present in a particular moment with another and your response was not what you hoped, then you can reach back out and say something to the tune of, “At the time when you told me _____, I wasn’t able to respond how I hoped. Can we revisit this?”
While I haven’t used that response yet, it is now in my courage toolbox for when I am not at my best and need to course-correct.
But what if we express our hurt to others, but we can’t seem to put into words what we are actually feeling?
For a short while, I worked for a grant-funded program designed to support children with challenging behaviors by supporting those who work in and run childcare centers. This is where I may have first heard the term “name it to tame it” coined by Dr. Daniel Siegel. The idea is that when we are able to name what we are feeling, it is easier to understand what is going on inside and, in turn, easier to regulate ourselves.
However, in Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown shares that research shows that on average people are only able to name three emotions while they are experiencing them, happy, sad, and angry, which vastly limits our understanding, self-awareness, and ability to express our feelings to others and secure appropriate help. Her book explores 87 different emotions and experiences.
Brown herself has grown into a new understanding of feelings and emotions through this research and says, “I no longer believe that we can recognize emotion in other people, regardless of how well we understand human emotion and experience or how much language we have.”
Since different emotions might present outwardly in the same way, it is difficult to accurately pinpoint the emotions of another. Also, some emotions, like anger and frustration, have subtle internal differences, such as one we feel we can impact a situation for a desired outcome (anger) and the other we feel we cannot (frustration). So it seems it is up to us to learn more about our own emotions to identify them correctly and express them to others.
Recently I bought a Wheel of Emotions Feelings pillow whose home is now on our family room floor. While this sounds hokey, and I can’t say we use it every day, it serves as a visual reminder and a resource should we need it. Are we feeling scared (and are we frightened or terrified) or anxious (and are we worried or overwhelmed)? I never thought of emotions in such a granular way, and it’s helping me guide my family through experiences and pinpoint my own.
For myself, I’m also practicing observing my feelings rather than getting sucked down the drain by them, although it is harder than it sounds. The idea is to observe your feelings as important signposts without judgment and attachment. The Gottman Institute takes us through the six steps to mindfully deal with difficult emotions.
Courage is often connected to extraordinary experiences, but the small passing moment with my daughter in my front yard stays with me because courage can also look like making space to listen, reflecting on how someone’s big feelings trigger our feelings and responses, and course-correcting if we stumble the first time around.
Was there a time you felt truly understood
and also a time when you didn’t feel heard or believed?
What led you to feel this way?
What is one thing you could try to be present the next time
someone reaches out to you?
For related resources, see the prayer In Empathy, quote from Dr. Brené Brown, and book review on Brown’s Atlas of the Heart.