Whatever you’re going through is as real to you as whatever anyone else is going through is to them. It’s often useful, yet it may be unimportant, even harmful, to put into perspective your issue.
You hear this “there are people who have it a lot worse”, and this sentence means that the person saying it has a meta-belief about the trouble they have in mind. A guilt concerning feeling what they are feeling based on an evaluation that their issue is not worthy. The attempt is to trivialise their problem, or to create a perception to those that may be listening that they don’t wish to be judged harshly or argued with about it. Offering the suggestion that they are not themselves making a big thing of whatever they have just spoken about can be said to be a form of self preservation.
People are often their own favourite subject, and often they are playing a game with what they offer. Sometimes a brag to try to convince you that they are more achieving than they seem to be, sometimes some boring shit that makes you end your lunchbreak earlier than you would have, sometimes a thing that I am very guilty of when they drill in too far into what should maybe start as, or should stay, frivolous. Sometimes they just want to be in a conversation to be validated by inclusion. We all want a little bit of attention.
Sometimes, a person reveals their pain, and their words are an ask for assistance. When none comes they back their way they learn only to keep it all in. With my amateur psychology hat on I imagine that this happens to men a lot in youth, the insistence that quietness is strength, the suggestion that a toughness of attitude bolsters and provides a hardened self that is resilient. I have no real opinion if that is helpful or not, certainly resilience is a trait we would wish for ourselves and our close people. Life is of course not a fair experience, a little apatheia can be very useful in place of necessitated inaction.
I say there is falsehood and truth to be found in thinking about the issues of ourselves and others, yet we must not dismiss as we would if we judged two separate issues in a comparison as if one was an apple and the other an orange. No, each person may have a right to be concerned with whatever concerns them, regardless of how it plays out in the bigger picture. Your worries are yours, they affect you and your life. It is as real an anxiety to the poor person to make a payment for their mobile phone top-up as it is to a rich person that is worried about the catering or flowers at the charity function they have planned. If we were to wire their brains to some sort of analysis machine we might see the very same neurons firing, if we were to chemically analyse their physicality we might find the same hormones flowing. Stress is stress, it doesn’t matter the cause, it is the manifest symptoms that matter. Whatever is important to you is based on what you need to feel whatever you class as valid.
Now of course we can assign in gravity a different external response to differing problems, but the most important first step must be to recognise that the person is going through something, that they have an experience that is causing them angst. Congruence, the establishment of an empathetic relationship between yourself and someone who has revealed something to you that must, by virtue of the fact that they have entrusted you, indicate their trust in you. We cannot betray this by responding to the information by being dismissive, unless we are feeling particularly uncharitable, we do not want their confidence, or we wish to bring to them a jolt of perspective that might make them reconsider the ridiculousness of what they just said.
It’s a judgement call because it may sometimes be important to meet falsehoods with the call of “bullshit” . I could give exact examples but that might personally attack some people, and if you know me you may know who I am referring to. I will give themes though. The person that feeds off sympathy, the person who makes everything about themself, the person who needs to be liked at all costs and has long since lost all idea of their own authenticity, the liar that just wants to be included, the one who has absorbed every psychological malady and uses all of them as excuse because they are a shield against ever having to take personal responsibility or culpability. You know one, or maybe all, of the aforementioned.
Psychological work may be the attempt to alleviate the necessity for validation from sources where it is not helpful to the self. To feel angst is to physically manifest the troubles of a future perspective concerning an event that maybe has happened, is happening, or might happen. My pal Dave has a refreshing approach to stresses in that he just detaches from caring about things that he can do nothing about, or he comes to a point where he no longer gives a fuck (no more fucks to give). Dave even invented the idea of having a corporate email account called zfg@*******.com (zero fucks given) so employees could dump their trivialities and forlorn wishes in there where no-one would ever be bothered by them.
I personally suffer from a reflecting malady where I go over the events I have been involved in and worry that I did not do my best, say what I should have said, or that I maybe wasn’t brave enough, this is called Ruminating. I also worry about the future but only in terms of financial security, this worry makes me much more compliant than my intellect would allow me to be if I had enough hay in the barn so to speak. This post is not about me however, it is about you and my attempt to let you know that your worries are not trivial, yet they may not be valid. At some point you have to face them to solve them, and that may involve solving your view of something rather than the thing itself.
Get a therapist, talk it out, chew the problem and develop a strategy as if you would for better health or more exercise, lean on friends, talk to people and explain the you that is you not for excuse but for reason..
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