what the world [really] needs now...

Lately it seems like there is heartbreak around every corner.  From the horrific events in Connecticut to so many people who are going through personal crisis, it seems like there is heartache everywhere I turn.  I don’t say that to talk about how depressing it is or be a downer, but it’s just very sobering at times to recognize that on my best days, and my worst, there are people going through very tough things and it’s important to be able to look outside of my feelings and my opinions and have compassion.

Having endured my share of personal crises, I know that no matter how public the information is about what’s hurting you, it still is very sensitive.  Even if the whole world knows why and how you’re hurting, the only real thing that anyone can do is offer love and compassion.  The tendency of many is to want to give opinions or advice, which is usually meant well, but is often misguided.  The irony of offering our unsolicited advice or opinions is that often we (a) can’t relate to the situation at hand and (b) giving such a strong opinion that we make the one who is hurting feel like they need to react in a way that is agreeable to us and makes the grieving/healing process awkward.  I’ve seen people who suffered a very painful loss and are just trying to keep going, only to constantly have people bring it up every time they speak, and cause them to relive the pain over and over.

I know that for me, personally, the most hurtful things I’ve gone through, I’ve been overwhelmed at all the opinions of people who offered what they thought were solutions... which only ended up feeling like demands.  For example with my health, I had so many people telling me the remedy that they just KNEW would work.  I was already spending so much of my time in specialists offices and hospitals hooked up to machines, feeling incredibly unstable trying out all kinds of new medicines; and the amount of people that pressured me to try their doctor, acupuncturist, special diet, or home remedy was quite inundating.  Not to mention the way people would tell me how I should and should not feel, emotionally, without me having given any indication that I needed their “encouragement”.  They all meant well, but it became exhausting, and made me very guarded and made me not want to speak to anyone about my situation, or even answer a simple “how are you feeling?”

The recent events in Connecticut really reminded me of those moments.  It’s something so heartbreaking, and the reaction of many is to offer propaganda and their perspective on why it happened, or how we can fix it.  Don’t get me wrong, there are things that need to be evaluated in our current system and I’m not blind to that; but using the devastation of so many lives as a springboard for your political convictions when the hurt is so fresh is not sympathetic.  Thinking of the families who won’t have their child this Christmas and are finding it hard to get out of bed each morning, what they need is compassion, love and support... not everyone’s opinion on gun control.  We should be heartbroken and outraged that this happened, but also sensitive to the people whose whole world feels shattered.  To them, this is so much bigger than a subject to debate, it’s something they’re trying to survive.

This post isn’t about Newtown victims and gun control statements, it’s about sensitivity to those who are hurting. I know that for myself, I close off the areas of my life that are hurting to most people, and only will speak about them with people I know well and don’t have to feel guarded around.  No matter what solution you may feel you have when dealing with someone who is hurting, remember that they’re HURTING!  They're trying to work through their own thoughts and emotions and they don’t need to try and sort out yours too!  Don’t allow your need to “fix it” become more important than their hurt.  When someone is dealing with complex and deep wounds and you offer an overly-simple “solution”, you invalidate their hurt and accomplish the opposite of comforting them.  People forget what you say, and what you do, but they never forget how you make them feel.  Love and compassion make them feel understood, and reminds them they’re not alone.

No Regrets: The Holly Williams Story

Okay, so I added the subtitle for dramatic effect, and I feel that I did it justice.  It adds that whole “Lifetime Original Movie” vibe, and I’m down with that.  Errrrr, maybe it should have been something about confrontation, since that’s a more accurate summary of this post.  I love the drama of it though, so “the Holly Williams Story” it is.

It has always rubbed me the wrong way when I heard people say that you should “never regret anything that once made you smile” or not to regret it if you learned something from it.  I don’t think we should spend our time focused on our regrets, but to have them is to prove that we did learn from them.  There are a few situations in my life that I regret the way I dealt with a person, or a decision I made.  I don’t dwell on those regrets or even think about them often, I’ve moved forward; but I would never say I don’t regret them, because to say I don’t regret hurting someone I love is to tell them that I wasn’t sorry I did it.  I feel like to not regret a way that we’ve hurt a person, or let God down, is to say that you would do it again if given the choice.  Regret doesn’t have to be our focus, but our lesson learned in moving forward.

That’s not the main thought, though.  That was more like the disclaimer.

So why is this random awkward picture in here?  It’s definitely the portrait of regret, as this woman jumped a fence at a zoo in Germany to go chill with the Polar Bears during feeding time.  I don’t know if she was hoping that they were more like the animals in Disney movies, but I’m sure she regretted it.  To most, this is an obvious no-no, but as it turns out things we will regret in the future don’t always get red flagged in our mind as we’re doing them.

Most of my life, I’ve been afraid to confront things or situations.  In my childhood, there was good reason for that.  Now, there isn’t.  In my adult life, I got to a place where if someone offended me or hurt me, I would just start distancing myself or even cut them off completely.  I was scared that confrontation would lead to the situation escalating, or that the person just wouldn’t care enough to work it out; and so I always felt like internalizing and dealing with it myself was better than trying to gage someone else’s reaction and prepare for rejection.  I’ve hurt a lot of people this way, by just pushing away with no explanation and not giving them a chance to hear me out and explain or change things, and I regret it.

For a lot of people, the natural reaction is the opposite, to confront everything and verbalize every thought and every feeling in a way that is as dramatic as you’re feeling in the moment; which almost always leads to saying things you don’t mean, and regrets (if you have enough of a conscience to be sorry about hurtful things you say).

It’s really tough to find middle ground between these two.  The deeper the offense or hurt, the harder it is to find the middle ground-to confront without being overtaken by your own hurt/emotions.

Today, I’m feeling at complete peace because I conquered my possible regret.  Conquered for the moment, at least, as many more opportunities will come.  This time, though I was facing a situation that I’d been avoiding for quite a while.  It was a pretty deep running frustration/hurt and I was likely to erupt, and I didn’t.  I definitely articulated how I felt and what I thought, but not with all the dramatic effect.  I stayed level-headed.    No more details necessary, but I confronted it in a level-headed way that left me with some insight (it may sound simple, but it felt like a revelation to me):  There is no greater feeling than dealing with a difficult situation in a way that leaves you with no regrets.

This definitely requires change on our part, which many of us aren’t fond of.  Many of us can hide behind “that’s just the way I am” and “I’m not changing for anybody”, but growth is change, and it’s necessary in life.  If it weren’t, we would still cry when we weren’t fed and scream when our toys were taken away.  We grow and adapt as children, but expect that to stop when we reach a certain age; when really, it’s the changes that aren’t mandatory and aren’t forced on us (the ones we make for ourselves) that define us.

We’ll always have moments where we’re blindsided by mistakes we made (hindsight really is 20/20), but if we just check ourselves before reacting, we can give ourselves time to gain perspective.

Call it growing up, but for the past few years, I’ve thought a lot about how we won’t all be around forever.  Regarding relationships with my parents, and other people that have always been the “grown ups” in my life, I have thought about how I don’t want to have a day where they are gone and I have regrets.  That’s the thought that pushed me in this particular situation to “gain perspective” and not react in my natural way.  A relationship in my life was struggling and I recognize that this person will not be around forever, and realized that I wanted to do everything on my part to do right by the relationship (no matter how difficult it was to not react as I wanted to), which for me meant speaking with a level of honesty I knew would hurt, but saying it with an absence of anger and a presence of love.  This way, even if the person didn’t receive what I said well, I would know I did what was best and move forward not feeling like the fallen relationship was my responsibility.

I wish it were easy to come up with an equation to handle every situation this way; but unfortunately every time it’s different.  It’s not easy to know how much you should say, when it comes to the truth (which is sometimes brutal); but the common denominator for every situation is that if you are operating in genuine love for that person, you will have patience and say what they need to hear and not what you want to say to punish them.  As good as we think it could feel to hurt the person who hurt us, it feels better to know that we responded in a way that doesn’t leave us with regrets.  It gives us what war with that person will not give... it gives us peace.

So today I feel great.  I feel like this one time, I know I handled it right.  I may be 1 for 1000, but that’s a start.  This new mentality is, instead of focusing on past regrets, living in a way that leaves no room for future regrets.  I won’t say “taking the high road”, as too many people have abused that phrase for too long; but it means thinking before we react, and responding with honesty and love (which is patient, and kind, and not proud or rude--THAT love never fails).