Even benevolent people sometimes turn out to be insensitive or tactless when faced with someone else’s misfortune. Trying to express sympathy or encouragement, they offend the interlocutor and hurt him. Why does this happen and how to avoid it?
A person suffering from depression is often told: “Pull yourself together, in the end!”. Abandoned wife – “Don’t worry, you will find yourself better!”. Victim of bullying on the Internet – “It’s my own fault! Draw your own conclusions! Thus, people sometimes try to express sympathy for those who feel bad, support them, help – without noticing the inappropriateness and tactlessness of their statements, states social psychologist Juliana Brains.1. Their tactlessness, explains Brains, is that they underestimate or even devalue the experience of another person and the complexity of his problem. Sheryl Sandberg, a member of the board of directors of Facebook, recently wrote about this in her post on the social network. This year she lost her husband, and her fast was dedicated to the end of shloshim – 30 days of mourning, adopted in the Jewish tradition. Cheryl says how painful it is for a bereaved person to say things like “Everything will be fine”: “When a person shows real empathy, he does not say that everything will be fine – he admits that now everything is not good at all.”
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Another version of the tactless statement, notes Juliana Brains, is an attempt to make a person responsible for something that is actually beyond his control. In this sense, it is tactless to tell a person with depression that it is his choice to be in such a depressed state, that he should just “pull himself together.” It sounds as if he himself is to blame for his illness.
Six reasons for tactlessness
1. They don’t know what it is. If there have been no particular difficulties in a person’s life, or if he himself has never encountered that particular problem that makes his interlocutor suffer, it is difficult for him to put himself in his place. As Sheryl Sandberg admits, before she lost her husband, she never knew what to say to people in trouble. Sympathy for people experiencing physical pain is much higher for those who have experienced it themselves. As a rule, people who have experienced serious problems in their personal lives are more sympathetic to those who find themselves in a similar situation than those who have not gone through it.
2. They had to go through a similar experience, but this experience is in the past. It would seem that this is obvious: if a person himself once went through certain trials, he would rather empathize with someone who faced something similar. In fact, sometimes it’s the other way around. People who successfully coped with a traumatic situation (such as bullying) then treated the victims of a similar collision much more harshly than those who did not experience it themselves. Apparently, in retrospect, their own victory did not seem so difficult to them.
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3. They do not want to imagine themselves in such a situation. Suppose a person has not experienced anything similar. But can he just imagine what it’s like to be in such a difficult situation? Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Empathy hurts, which is why some of us try to “look out.” Experiencing stress at the sight of other people’s experiences, a person sometimes becomes less responsive; his first concern is to reduce his own stress, and not to support someone who is ill. His hurtful words are nothing more than an attempt to downplay the seriousness of the problem.
4. They want the problem to disappear quickly. There seems to be nothing wrong with advice and recommendations. But the fact is, some problems don’t have easy solutions—and in some cases, there are no solutions at all. Someone who feels bad most likely needs care and understanding, and not instructions on what to do. But advisers are often aimed specifically at solving someone else’s problem – this helps them feel useful and thus get rid of the painful feelings associated with other people’s difficulties.
5. They don’t want to feel vulnerable. We are very upset when, roughly speaking, something bad happens to good people. The very thought of this is so traumatic that we try to convince ourselves that the victim is somehow responsible for the bad things that happened to him. But this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a person feels less vulnerable, on the other hand, he becomes less responsive.
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6. They just say what they say. It happens that people really want to express sympathy and support, but they do not have enough words. Not knowing what to say, they grab onto some kind of stamp like “Never mind” or “Everything will be fine” – and achieve the opposite effect: all these platitudes do not allow a person to feel warmth and support.
When we are suffering, kind-hearted people may make hurtful remarks about us. But if we understand why they do it, we may not be so hurt. Usually such words say more about these people themselves than about us.
Those who really want to help sometimes need a little nudge in the right direction by replying to them, for example, “I’d really like to believe that everything will be okay too, but at the moment the situation is too uncertain for me.” Or: “I really appreciate your advice, but right now it’s more important for me that you just hug me.” Feel free to explain to people what they do not understand, such as that depression is not a weak will, but a disease, or that there is no common time frame for grieving.
And what can we ourselves, as kind-hearted people, do to be more sensitive in such situations, instead of boringly repeating all these well-known “you must not …”, “you must not …”? First of all, be aware that our ideas about what a person experiences, why he experiences and what he needs are not necessarily correct. When in doubt, don’t be afraid to ask questions and honestly admit that you don’t know or don’t understand something. And if you happened to say faux pas and you were given to understand it, do not brush it off, think about what the person wants to tell you, instead of getting defensive. Your blunder does not mean that you are a bad person. We are all in this sense not without sin.
1 Juliana Breines has a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley (USA), works at Brandeis University (USA), co-author of the blog “Psych Your Mind: Applying Psychology to Everyday Life”.