I live with someone who is in pain almost all the time - maybe all the time, even. I try to help him out where I can, but nothing I do is going to help relieve it (aside from picking up his prescription once a month). For the past few months, I’ve also had some chronic joint pain that’s sometimes pretty severe, and if he sees me wincing, he’ll rush to comfort me, but it makes me feel bad to think someone who has to live with it all the time is concerned about my pain.
Maybe, but I would say it’s probably the exception, because telling someone in pain that their pain isn’t unique can tend to be dismissive or demeaning, and in reality, people are very often not in careful control of their motivations and are just being the Me Monster.
Certainly if you’re in pain due to some specific cause, and you are being comforted or counselled by someone that you already know has been through something similar, that can help a lot; that’s why support groups work, but that only really works when it’s done with great care and sensitivity, which I think is not the common case where people just want to interject their own anecdote.
There are of course other exceptions, for example when the person suffering explicitly asks for people with relevant experience to share theirs.
But I think generally, it’s more useful to try to create space for them to pour out their own feelings and fears, than it is to fill that space with your own story, even if (perhaps especially if) your story is one of triumph.
IME there are people for whom all of life is a competition. Their entire self esteem is built upon constant comparison with others. With people like that there is no amount of good intention, caring, or sensitivity that will make your similar story anything other than a challenge to their pain.
Fortunately they don’t seem to be the majority. Most of the people I know live in a more cooperative world, with self esteem based upon their achievements or contributions. And those people usually appreciate the validation that a similar experience can provide. Especially if it comes along with strategies or the name of a good Doctor. I am strongly in the “misery loves company” camp. If only because it makes me feel freer to just TALK about it. If you’ve lived something similar then I am probably not boring you.
The things that really make me crazy are the people who assure me that exercise, or their brand of woo would help. I really do not want to hear that crap. I am a tough one, and I know how to live with pain. I am willing to try just about anything with a scientific basis behind it (and probably already have.) But don’t come to me with crystals and pyramids.
“How bad is your pain on a scale of 1 to 10” is one of those tricky questions. I always assume I’m being a wimp and report a lower number than I probably should.
I once was a paid guinea pig in a study looking at oral osmoreceptors (long boring stuff omitted). Part of the study involved gradual forced dehydration via intravenous administration of hypertonic saline. (the study paid generously)
I had to rate my thirst on a 1-5 scale. I guess I’d led a charmed life up to that point, as I fairly quickly reached a “5” for thirst. Yet the experiment continued.
The researchers went back and re-did my previous answers and we kept going. Soon I hit 5 again, and again had to redo previous answers. And we continued, reaching new heights of thirst. You know the western movie where the guy is passed out in the dessert, dying of dehydration? Yeah, I got to experience that.
This was circa 1984. I’m pretty sure the study would not be approved to be done today. After all was said and done I spent an additional 24 hours on the hospital recovering.
I think it is ok to say, “I understand, I’m here if you need me for anything,” if you have had a similar experience. The person knows they are not being judged and I think it helps validate to the other person that what they are experiencing is ok and to know there is an end to that pain (probably). The journey is still their journey and unique to them. And it will still suck for them but it can help to know there are others who have been in a similar place. That’s why support groups exist for so many things.
I try to phrase it a bit differently, and it seems to help (at least with certain people in my life!).
Instead of saying “I’m here if you need me”, which adds a layer of “work” to the person that’s experiencing hardship that they might not want to take on, I phrase it like “what do you need or need from me right now?”. I find people can identify something - sit quietly, give a hug, get me a glass of water, leave me alone, get the cat so I can pet it - and acting immediately on it is one step towards other actions that might help alleviate their distress.
Following up is good too. After a while I’ll check in with them and see if they need anything. Just reminding them they aren’t forgotten and I’m still there as they work through their emotions and pain.
Sometimes it doesn’t work, but I appreciate it when people take that approach with me when I’m upset so it’s what I do.
Does some peoples’ perception/claim of “trauma” reflect their attempt/experience of “sharing” someone else’s pain? Some tragedy happens across the globe, and some people go to lengths to establish how THEY PERSONALLY are affected by SOMEONE ELSE’S tragedy. Maybe because they once had a neighbor whose distant relative may have described a sorta similar experience…
There’s an idea in interpersonal relations about being a psychopomp. Not literally ferrying people to the underworld, but, rather, walking through hell with them. There are two essential elements. One is the psychopomp being present on the walk through hell. The other is the psychopomp being OK, themselves.
Psychopomps sound interesting as they appear devoted to other people in life transitions. I admire people who have their interactive role defined out so they can do that every day with different people. It must be a rare person who can do that for sure.
Being able to eloquently encapsulate someone’s pain in a pithy or witty phrase isn’t comforting either, even if it might elucidate it for a third party.
There is a play from, IIRC, the late 1980s, called Mass Appeal about a long-time parish priest mentoring a seminarian. Jack Lemmon originated the role of the senior priest.
There is a point in the play where he gives the seminarian advice on talking to people in grief. He says that your job is not to say something brilliant. It’s to say the usual things people say, that are somewhat trite and inane. People want, to an extant, NOT to be immediately comforted, because they need to know that their pain is beyond easy comfort.
If everyone tells a person “Oh, I’ve been through that, it’s common,” they are going to feel like their profound grief isn’t permitted, somehow.
Your job, in offering comfort is to elevate their ordinary grief to something extraordinary by making it inconsolable. By saying something trite, you let them know that it is beyond your ability to understand their pain.
How about “I’ve been through that, it was awful”?
I was helped immensely after my mother died by a friend who told me that, for a while after her mother died, she felt like, as she put it, she was losing her mind – she kept forgetting things/screwing things up that used to be routine. Being told by someone else who had been there that this is one of the normal reactions was a huge help to me.
I’ve also taken plenty of comfort, when grieving a cat, from people telling stories about them grieving their cats. They weren’t trying to one-up me, they were trying to share. It helped me.
Maybe this is a matter of ‘people vary’. But some of it may be having run into people who genuinely were one-upping – I have seen some of that, but it doesn’t seem to me to be at all the same thing.
I’m not sure how to parse this. What does this mean?
It probably needs another comma:
Your job, in offering comfort, is to elevate their ordinary grief to something extraordinary by making it inconsolable.
In other words, don’t try to come up with words of comfort that are brilliant, witty and original. Same the same stuff people always say, because, if the best you can offer is to fall back on customary words like those, it is because their grief is beyond your ability to be witty or original.
In a way, it’s true, too.
New grief is inconsolable, even if it objectively seems like it isn’t the worst thing you’ve gone through. I lost my father in 1998. I worked through that grief. In 2004, I lost a dog. Immediately after that loss, it was much more painful than the loss of my father.
No one could have said or done anything in the first week or so to make me feel better.
I think a more versatile phrasing might be “I’ve been through that, I had a very painful time.” The difference is that “it was awful” is a description of the event, making the awfulness a property of the event, therefore asserting something about what the other person experienced, and you don’t actually know what the other person’s experience of the event is. But you definitely know what your experience was. Talking about your experience opens the door to them talking about theirs. Just my thought.