I understand why people sometimes snarl at a helping hand. I’ve snarled at helping hands. Like the time my father advised me to be silent and breathe deep for a few minutes to calm myself.
Furious, I exploded, “I’m way past the point where deep breathing will help me.”
I hated it every time someone who wanted to be there for me but didn’t understand me or my pain tried to help me, and made me feel worse. Have you ever snarled at helping hands? Why?
Sometimes people are under extreme duress, in such pain that the help of a well-meaning person who doesn’t not know what they are doing, can do more harm than good. Sometimes empathy needs to be accompanied by expertise and knowledge. This was something I instinctively knew, even as my ideals wished it wasn’t that way.
I knew I couldn’t help Molly, a girl I knew in the hospital when I was 12. In the middle of a conversation with me she started cowering, pleading “please, don’t hurt me!” over and over. But it wasn’t like she was afraid of me, begging me. It was like she was repeating something on a loop. I tried to reassure her that I wouldn’t hurt her. No response. No awareness of me being there. It felt like she was no longer present and inhabiting the same time and place as me. Like something had possessed her and turned her into a zombie. I realized this was beyond my scope, so I ran into the hall and told the nearest staff person that something was wrong with Molly. I didn’t have a clue, but something was wrong, and they needed to go help her. They did help her. Afterwards they reassured me, told me that because she suffered from post-traumatic stress, she had flashbacks and relived bad memories.
Mostly, the same staff that so pitilessly restrained her whenever she acted out, would gently talk her out of a flashback and offer her comfort at her most vulnerable. But sometimes because she experienced so many of them, they would in a brusque manner verbally shake her back to the normal time and place of 3 East. Expertise delivered without empathy or compassion is cold. It usually doesn’t feel good to receive, and doesn’t always help.
Empathy and expertise belong together.
