Reading more SSC archives, and came across this:
I remember, one of my first few months of internship, listening to a patient – not a PTSD patient or anything, just someone presenting with something totally different like bipolar disorder or drug addiction – explain the brutal abuse he suffered as a child. And the whole time, I was thinking “Oh god oh god this is the worst thing I’ve ever heard I want to go home and cry.”
And then he finished his story and I had to say something. And I didn’t want to say “Oh god oh god this is the worst thing I’ve ever heard I want to go home and cry”, because I was supposed to be Competent Medical Professional, and Competent Medical Professionals don’t go home and cry every time they hear a sad story.
[…]
So I said: “Gaaaaaaaaaah!”
This may, in retrospect, not have been the most appropriate comment.
and I realized I had the matching half of this anecdote and needed to share.
When I was fifteen, a 70-year-old guy whom I had never met before decided that we were In Love – despite my and my parents’ protests to the contrary – and started doing various creatively creepy things, like writing me long letters about how Pure and Definitely Nonsexual his Love For Me was, and stalking me online, and asking my parents’ permission to court me.
This was exactly as creepy as it sounds. It was really not improved by the fact that various community members, including all of the relevant authority figures, decided to take positions ranging from “none of our business” to “there are two sides to every story” to “you must have done something.”
(Thankfully, my parents were completely absolutely 100% on my side. I don’t think I could have coped, otherwise.)
Anyhow, eventually we went to the police, and so I got to be sixteen and sitting in the office of a local detective watching her look through the casefile my mom had painstakingly made up on this guy in a desperate attempt to get someone to take this seriously.
And as I was sitting there trying not to cry and wishing my parents hadn’t decided I was old enough to talk to the detective alone, she got to the photocopy of the first creepy love letter the guy had sent me.
And I swear to god the detective flinched back from the paper a little and said “Gaaaaaaaaaaah!”
…and I nearly broke down crying on the spot, because it was such a massive relief to finally have someone acknowledge that this whole thing was absurdly horrifying and creepy, instead of having to wonder if I was just crazy or oversensitive or something.
And then of course she apologized and said something much more professional about the casefile which I have long since forgotten. But over the next couple of years of dealing with that guy, I honestly cannot express how often I thought about that professional competent detective going “gaaaaah!” at his letter, and felt reassured that I was not the crazy one, and that the legal system was going to look at this case and go “gaaah!”
I will take that over all the carefully taught Certified Empathy Responses in the world.
This applies to physical illness too. Like I have spent so many years begging for help from various health care workers. And for most of that time my increasing distress, about being sick and not being able to find help, is what gets the focus over you know, the thing causing the distress.
The very obvious difference between the helpful people and not helpful people, is the not helpful ones will act like super concerned about my mental state, but absolutely no reaction when I describe my situation, of being a sick person who has struggled to find care. The doctors who are never going to help me, without fail are very focused on how upset I am, but when given the opportunity to do stuff like idk, write referrals to specialists or order tests, instead refer me to psyche because “my mental state is concerning”.
Good doctors on the other hand, are horrified when I tell them my story. They say “I’m sorry you had to experience that” and go about actually doing their jobs. They understand that “I am scared of dying from lack of treatment” isn’t a distorted thought that needs to be fixed by CBT, but an actual valid fear fixable by well, treating me.
Basically from what I can tell, health care as a whole, does not want to take environment that is not immediately controllable by the patient, as a major factor in illness. I suspect this is because if you admit it, you have to admit that a lot of society is basically harmful by design and not the fault of the people who are trying to just live in it.
If you don’t take in account lack of control and abuse, it’s super easy to just victim blame. It’s not genetics and working a 70 hr desk job making you fat, it’s your bad diet. It’s not an influx of hate crimes making you scared, it’s paranoia and you need medication. It’s not being overworked at a manual labor job causing you pain, it’s you not having coping skills. It’s not poverty making you starve, it’s a choice you are making.
I will take “rude” over robotic “default” answers that ignore individual situations and suck out the hope anyone will ever give enough of a shit to actually help you escape a bad situation any day.