About five years ago, I experienced a downturn in my life that was both scary and disappointing. No one died, but I thought I had lost a job I loved, a person I loved, at the same time as going through some personal turmoil due to a bad investment I had made. I had a counselor that I cried to; spilled my guts hoping to remove all the badness and come out on the other side. Instead, he completely shut me down. He told me that I was wallowing in self-pity and that I should concentrate on the positive side. To this day I’m still not sure what the positive side of losing one’s job, the man one thought one was going to marry, and one’s freedom in less than a month’s time is, but I suppose that just makes me nothing more than a Negative Nancy.
In any case, I was hurting, badly, and to have that shat upon, having my feelings invalidated by someone who was supposed to help me improve my situation, hurt even more. Mind you, all of this bogusness fell out of this man’s face within the first few weeks he was counseling me, so it’s not as though I had been crying on his couch for months on end. I was sad and depressed and angry and scared of what would happen next, and the Positivity Police were trying to get me to turn that frown upside down, as though it were that simple. Maybe for some people it is?? It’s a nice thought, but as time has gone on and I’ve experienced other, different losses in life and watched people I care deeply for lose friends, homes, loved ones, jobs, marriages, children, experience disease, disability and be diagnosed with life-altering medical conditions, it only makes me more angry when they are shut down, the way I was shut down, for expressing their hurt and anger.
Human beings experience emotions that other human beings do not like to have to deal with. Just because a person is angry or depressed because they are going through something does not make them an angry, depressed person. When someone experiences a loss, no matter how trivial it may seem to the eternal optimist, what that person needs may not be a shot in the arm of sunshine but for you to give a damn about how they feel, let them feel that way for a little while, listen to them and be there as they work through it. Then cometh the power of positivity. Shoving it down a sad person’s throat doesn’t help them; sometimes it makes them feel more alone. And telling someone who is going through something that their feelings are wrong is just a shitty thing to do to a friend.
Anger and sadness are parts of grieving whether a person is seven and their cat dies, sixteen and their first boyfriend turns out to be a dud, or thirty and their dream job just bottomed out. Grief is grief is grief. No one can turn it off or make it magically go away, though some people are better at hiding it than others. If you care about a person, do you have to agree with them 100% of the time?? Give them a hug, let them be upset. Get them through this. If it goes on too long, then by all means tell them that they need to either start helping themselves or find a professional because there is only so much a friend can do. But blaming a sad person for being sad isn’t going to make them un-sad. The school of “don’t let it get to you” is quite often nonsense, because the bad shit gets to all of us at some point in time or another. We’re human beings and we came with feelings, some of which are not fun or enjoyable for anyone. But we have them, and we need each other when we do.
No comments:
Post a Comment