Sorry, tried to be descriptive in the thread title but there’s only so much that can be said there. I was watching a movie (Mirrors, if it matters) and there’s a scene where the protagonist gets freaked out by seeing a distorted reflection of himself; his sister hears him cry out and comes to ask what’s wrong, and protagonist says “I’m OK just leave me alone.” She still starts to walk toward him and he starts getting angry; “I said leave me alone! GET OUT OF HERE! GO!”
The funny thing is, I have a similar reaction to people sometimes if, say, I hit my funny bone or stub my toe or jam my finger and I’m wincing and someone asks me if I’m OK; I’ll say “I’m fine, please just leave me alone,” and if they persist in asking if I’m OK or what happened or they try to approach me to offer assistance, I end up saying something like, “I know you want to help, but I’m fine and want to be left alone, and right now you’re just pissing me off by not listening to me; leave me alone.” Then later I end up feeling guilty and go to explain to them that I wasn’t angry at them and appreciate that they were concerned, but I knew I wasn’t in need of help and just needed to ride out the pain of whatever happened.
Is this kind of like the old adage about how a wounded animal might bite someone who is only trying to help, because of the immediacy of the pain?
Not many people can handle other people seeing them in an obviously weakened state. Sometimes, in the case of grieving, for example, your thoughts are more with your own hurting, than with the opinions of others, hence you don’t even care.
p.s. Not that I see raw emotion as a weakness per se, but crying like a baby isn’t exactly perceived as a strong image by many.
I think that’s pretty much it. Well-meaning people can be really annoying when you’d rather focus on whatever pain you’re feeling instead of trying to make polite conversation.
So far I haven’t really been in many situations that involve grieving of the sort that you mention, but my feeling is that I don’t like many people trying to console me other than the usual “my condolences” or “I’m sorry for your loss” type of thing, unless the person trying to do the consoling is someone I know was also very familiar with the departed, in other words someone I felt was a kindred spirit. I think I would feel insulted if, for example, someone who wasn’t close to the decedent tried to console me even if they were familiar with the *feeling *of bereavement. I’m not sure that it’s about not wanting to be seen in a weakened state so much as confusion over one’s own feelings and feeling insulted that someone who can’t possibly know how you feel trying to solve your problems for you. But grieving is different from the situation I described in the OP; it’s a different kind of pain.
I can relate to the OP. Once when I was playing tennis I was at the net and turned to chase a lob and my foot just stuck to the hot court. I rolled over my ankle and instantly knew that it was fucked. I staggered off court and sat down and started to take of my shoe and my sock and my friends came over to see how I was.
Every word they said, every question they asked gave me the shits and I told them to leave me alone and just fuck off. I just had to be left alone to work out how badly fucked-up I was.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding ivan astikov’s post. I think he is saying that the person is trying to avoid the embarrassment of the situation. I think that is totally off the mark, and that the others are much closer: The healing requires the person to focus on the pain, but the other people (well-meaning though they be) are a major distraction and end up slowing the healing process.
In my own experience, when someone gets involved in my own emergency, it’s necessary for me to respond to them rather than dealing with the problem at hand. It’s like they’re expecting me to be polite to them when there are more important things I need to be doing. If I’m choking on some food that went down the wrong way, my primary focus should be getting the food where it belongs and getting air into my lungs. I can’t stop doing that to say, “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be all right, but thanks anyway for your concern.”
The good-old fight-or-flight response jams a ton of adrenaline into your system when you get a shock like that. It overwhelms you with a base animal instinct to protect yourself.
Your well-meaning acquantance enters this zone, and your adrenaline and lizard-brain tells you that an equal to you on the predator scale has just walked in the room. And your brain knows you are now wounded, which moves you onto the prey scale of the equation.
Your reaction is then to use a large display showing that even though you are wounded, you are an apex predator, and your friend shouldn’t approach you because you’ll still eat his slow, plodding face off.
So… Ow!!! GRAAAAAAAH!!! Go 'way or I’ll get you!!! RAAAAAAh!
When I get really hurt, what I need to do is sit down and block it out of my mind until it lessens a bit. Or until I understand whether it’s going to worsen, or is aggravated by moving, etc. I need to be left alone during that time. I have enough energy to state this exactly once. If your precious self continues to badger me, you are going to hear some very hurtful language after that point. It’s not that I intend to offend anyone but when someone refuses to respect my wishes as if I were a child, that sets me off more than anything imaginable.
Girls want to connect with somebody who’s hurt, and guys want to crawl away and lick their wounds. This causes great consternation between me and my mother when I’ve had a bad day.
There is a school of thought that, because the Corpus collosum…the bridge of neural tissue which connects the two hemispheres of the brain…is larger in females than in males (a 'fact" which is in dispute), more neural pathways exist between the areas of the brain which govern emotion, empathy, speech, etc…thus, women are more apt to offer sympathy, and guys simply are trying to regroup.
