I haven’t been through an Experience like yours…..but I have experienced that Emotion…
In one of my first process groups, as a co-anchor (to Jaya Narayan in 2014), I said to a participant, “Yeah !! … and then hurt can just fill one (me) up with anger sometimes and sadness some other times… ”. And she snapped back, “What do you know about me? How can you even possibly understand what I have gone through?”.
Feeling challenged and cornered, I swallowed my saliva till there was no more of it left in my mouth. After a few long moments, this is the response that came to me, as if from another self and uttered with a, now, dry mouth —
“Uhh…Yes !! I don’t. I don’t know about you. I can’t ever know enough about you to understand what you are going through. But I know hurt and anger and sadness. I know what hurt does to me and I speak of that.”
We may never be able to completely understand what another person has gone through, yet we can relate from our own emotively similar experience. Recognizing another’s emotions, tuning in to our own (from the past) and opening that emotive experience up to the other, can help make the other feel heard and understood.
The above response may not have satisfied the participant, but definitely made her begin trusting the process a bit more.
Hearing, “Yeah, the accident tied me down for a while and it felt like such a loss…”can be a lot more powerful than, “Yeah, I had a similar accident where I lost movement in my left arm”. Even less helpful of course, is when we are so eager that we add a bonus one-up, “Oh! In fact, to make things worse, in addition to the loss of movement, I had pain in my left leg for the longest time.”
