He sat there, crying profusely. Age was irrelevant, because the emotion he was feeling was universal. No matter the reason, humans cry the same all over the world.
Give someone enough of a sensation of loss, of pain and of sadness, and the results are pretty similar. You watch them burn emotionally, and quench the fire in their eyes with water of their own making.
And this guy was burning hard.
The man across the desk was trying to help him, but he was ill equipped. With little training, other than that which he had picked up ‘on the job’, he attempted to offer what comfort he could to the younger man crying in front of him.
Although his heart was in the right place, his intentions were not backed up by the wisdom or the understanding he needed to try to help the weeping man to find some peace.
He was unable to see the truth beneath the tears.
Crying seemed to be the only thing the younger man could do, yet the magnitude of his emotion seemed disproportionate to the event he’d just experienced.
Sure, being dumped by someone you care about hurts, but it shouldn’t cause that much pain, unless the wound you see on the surface is masking the real one deeper below, the one the younger man didn’t even realize he had.
Because when the pain seems all too normal, you don’t know you’ve been cut, and that you’re bleeding.
And believe me, there’s many different ways this life can cut you. From abuse to abandonment, from fear to a terrifying understanding. In the eyes of those who cannot imagine the wound below, all you see is someone reacting way more than they should to something that should never have hurt that much.
It’s easy to disregard their suffering, or to fail to appreciate the damage that has already been done.
And you can’t help heal what you don’t see, and will never understand.
Because understanding helps to bridge the gap between what appears to be, and what is actually happening. Sure, the younger man was hurting because the person who he loved had essentially told him she didn’t feel the same way, and that caused pain by decreasing his sense of connection, but it was his lack of a sense of connection, of self worth and of value that was really the cause of his suffering.
Because when you have only one source of feeling connected in your life, taking that away burns to your core, and hurts in a way that nothing else can.
What the younger man needed was someone who could understand how his lack of a safe place in his home, and a fractured emotional connection to his family, could leave him with a terrible sense of himself.
When you feel like you aren’t worth much at all, the loss of an intimate relationship hits way harder than it normally would, and burns for a lot longer than it should.
So despite the older man’s attempt to help, the younger man’s soul was burning.
Thankfully in time, the fire lessened, and the tears had less reasons to flow. Another relationship would come to help reduce the void that was open in his soul, and over time, knowledge and wisdom would begin to help him see what was missing.
Learning to understanding himself would open up avenues of healing, and over time, he would find his way to some kind of peace.
Hard fought, harder won, and still even harder to keep.
It’s very easy to judge someone else’s reactions to the things in life that have hurt them, but it’s a far better thing to give them space to feel their pain, comfort to know that they are not alone, and to try to find someone who understands enough to be able to help.
It would have a made a great difference when I was the young man who was crying, although through that experience, I am able to help others, and for that I am truly grateful.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings