The Power of Slowing Down
When someone we love is hurting, many of us want to quickly jump in and help them. It’s human nature. We see someone in pain and we want to do something to help them because we care about them.
We begin to draw upon our years of experience in problem solving. We have a few ideas of what could help them feel better. We start giving them suggestions and recommendations.
But now suddenly we’re fighting with each other. We’re being accused of not listening. The situation is escalating… more pain is happening. This was the exact opposite of what we wanted to happen.
Being able to effectively help another means we have to work on our own ability to slow down, validate, see it from the other person’s perspective. Many of us are good at critical thinking, have eons of life experience, and generally can provide some solid advice (that often actually does work!).
But when pain is present, we have to slow down. Most people who are in large amounts of emotional or psychological pain have spent oodles of time trying to problem solve already. They have most likely tried out many of the suggestions you are bringing up… which is why they get frustrated with you. It can make them feel like you don’t think they are smart enough to think about working out or just thinking positively. They have. They’ve tried it.
They are hurting because they’ve tried it so many times and it hasn’t worked. They’ve exhausted all of their own resources. They feel helpless, stuck. They’ve been trying so hard.
And remember, sometimes you can’t always see all the ways they’ve been trying. Many people hide their trying because they feel shame about needing to work so hard in the first place or don’t want other people to watch them fail.
We need to slow down and understand where they care coming from; we have to start with validation. Validation is understanding why a person’s emotions make sense in a given situation. Validation connects us to the other person because it communicates to them… I understand why you feel the way you do; most people would feel this way in this situation. You’re not abnormal. You’re okay. You’re not alone.
Validation can be very challenging because it requires us to slow down and put ourselves in the other person’s shoes. We have to tolerate the other person’s discomfort and pain while we learn how best to support them.
It’s very similar to a doctor in the ER during a time of high physical pain. It would be really easy to give someone a shot of morphine to relieve the pain… but if the doctor does that before figuring out what’s going on, the doctor doesn’t know what they are treating, they don’t know what will be helpful, and they could even make it worse.
We need to slow down.
It hurts to see others in pain.
But we need to understand before we jump into solving the problem.
