Let People Care
No matter how they go about it
This one is a delicate subject… I saw a post not long ago from an angry woman who was complaining that she didn’t like the way people offered their condolences over the loss of her significant other.
She didn’t like the way the said “lost the battle with”…
She herself had also been diagnosed with a similar illness and she wanted to vent about how well-meaning friends and acquaintances used this phrase - her argument being that it insinuated that he didn’t do everything he could to “fight” the illness.
This invited a slew of comments regarding other ways people attempt to offer some type of condolence to someone who’s dealing with life-threatening diseases, either themselves, or through a loved one.
“I know - I hate it when people say (insert whatever unintentionally offending remark was made), it makes me so annoyed!” And there were many comments - all intended to make the writer feel seen and heard, no doubt.
And I get it!
I remember back 23 years ago when I had a miscarriage and my own father said something like “Everything happens for a reason” - and I was so upset with him. It felt dismissive and somewhat unfeeling to me in the moment, when I was mourning and raw.
But now that I’m a little older (and hopefully a little wiser), I see that he was just struggling to know what the right thing was to say to me.
It’s always difficult to know how to behave in those moments… words are never going to take the pain away, but you can’t allow the fear of saying the wrong thing deter you from offering some sort of kind (at least in your eyes) words to let them know that you are sad that this happened to them.
Not to mention the fact that when people are grieving, they aren’t necessarily in their ordinary, rational minds. You ARE angry, and you want someone to blame. But, it was just a senseless destructive disease that unfortunately came into your life and there IS no one to blame for it.
Certainly no one who offers those words is suggesting that the person who died didn’t WANT to live and therefore, just gave up. And even if they did - it’s their life to give up on, so it really doesn’t matter what anyone has to say about it.
I’m sure that person put that discussion out into the webiverse so that they could feel anything other than the pain they are going through right now. They wanted their anger and frustration to fuel others to “side with them”, in an attempt to rally some type of comfort from the masses who agree that it was unfair.
I’m sure it didn’t make her feel any better, and it may have even amped up her frustration.
My concern is the energy that’s created by such a post. A post that has gone viral like that stirs emotions up in people - often because we have something in our lives that we can relate to it, and it digs up those feelings again.
Whenever this happens, rather than adding more gasoline to an already very well fueled fire, perhaps we can use the emotions to allow some of our unreleased grief up too - so it can move OUT.
Rather than turning it into an excuse to vent - and at the same time spread the frustration to still more people - we could allow ourselves to feel it.
These emotions are hard, I know. But shoving them down and burying them is only going to invite future bouts with anxiety or depression and the problem will only exacerbate when we don’t deal with our feelings head on.
Burying these things always adds to our problems, and when we start to feel anxiety or depression getting worse and we still don’t address them, our physical body is the next thing that’s going to be under attack.
Which isn’t going to help if we’ve already been diagnosed with something, and if we haven’t yet, we may soon see symptoms ourselves.
I DO get the anger one would feel, and nothing is wrong with feeling it. Illness is frustrating, demoralizing, painful - ALL of the negative, low frequency energies are normal in times like that!
We just need to allow them to come up and KNOW that it’s okay to feel them. Venting about them is a natural inclination, but fueling it by soliciting more of it from other people isn’t going to make them go away.
Only allowing them to be felt will.
And while blaming others for saying the “wrong” thing may help vent a few frustrations in the heat of the moment - it’s only going to redirect the feelings to another source that isn’t where it needs to be felt and dealt with.
People just want to show they care, and if they’re trying to do that, let’s just let them, no matter how they may fumble it - because caring people are the foundation of a world that is more peaceful, and I know that’s where I want to live.