St. Paul tells us to bear one another’s burdens, but that’s easier said than done. Not because we don’t want to, but because we frequently don’t know how. Hurting people don’t always need or want what we think we should give them.
I speak from painfully acquired experience, both as a would-be bearer of others’ burdens and the subject of others’ attempts to bear mine. I think we tend to assume we know how to bear someone else’s burdens, because we are people too. We overestimate our knowledge of the world and forget what mysteries other people are.
Burden-bearing is a skill like any other, acquired only with training, practice and experience, and for which some people are more gifted than others. It requires learning to really look at and listen to other people — and learning to ask them what they need, even when we think we’re sure we know.
We don’t always understand
Part of bearing other people’s burdens is not claiming we understand their burdens. The burden of grief and loss, for example. We miss a lot.
Some years ago, my friend Emily Stimpson Chapman wrote a moving and wise, and admirably honest, reflection on suffering infertility.
When she was still single, she’d written several articles about infertility and adoption. That work, and being a single woman in her 30s, she writes, “made me think I understood much of what those struggling with infertility went through.”
And, she wrote, “I did … to some extent. Being single and 30 (or single and 35, 40, 45 or 50), wanting to be married and wanting to be a mother, while the biological clock steadily winds down, is a real and exceptionally heavy cross. It’s its own particular brand of suffering, and far too many women struggle through it these days.”
But Emily didn’t understand the suffering of infertile women the way she thought she did. She only truly understood it when she experienced it herself.
“That cross, for as heavy and awful as it is, is not the same cross I carry now. Back then, the pain was generic. I grieved the possibility that I would never be a mother. Today, the pain is specific. I grieve the likelihood that I will never be a mother to Christopher Chapman’s children. That our love will never take human form.”
We shouldn’t claim to understand
Here’s one example. Don’t say, “I know how you feel.” Well-meaning people do say it often. I have. It seems the right thing to say, to make a connection with the person who’s suffering and help him or her feel less alone. I’ve also had people say it to me and resented it.
Sometimes it works, but it often fails, even when the person saying it speaks from real experience of the same pain. (Which isn’t always the case — I’ve been targeted by some predatory sympathizers and people who leapt on my experience as an excuse to talk about themselves.)
It can feel dismissive, for one thing, as if the person is saying, “I’ve been through it, you’re not special.” The feeling may be unfair to the speaker, but part of bearing another’s burden is accepting and not judging the way that person hears what you say.
People in real pain don’t want their pain treated as an example of a generic pain. No one has ever suffered quite this way, because no one has been them and lost what they lost.
He didn’t just lose “a wife,” he lost Elizabeth, who’d shared his life for 27 years and with whom he’d had three children, who was so sensitive to lonely people and so bad at gardening, who loved thrash metal and the metaphysical poets, who’d been the only one of her who ever existed and had been his closest companion for so long, and now was gone.
She didn’t just lose “a job,” she lost a crucial support for her family and her father who lived with them, work that she enjoyed and made a difference in the world in a way other jobs hadn’t, and came with a schedule that worked for her family, a community of friends and co-workers in whose work she shared, a job she wasn’t likely to find again.
Yes, people can move out from their own experience to find comfort in the similar experiences of others, but not right away. That comes later.
In a Belgian television show called “Professor T,” an older policeman tells a couple who’ve just lost their adult son that he knows how they feel. They tell him angrily that he doesn’t. The viewer knows that the policeman himself has lost a child. I expected him to tell the couple as much in order to get them to hear something he thinks they need to know, but he just nods and stays quiet.
Later, when they can hear it, he tells them he also lost an adult child, and then gives them advice, being careful to say that he’s only speaking of what helped him in case they find it helpful.
That was a man who’d learned how to bear someone else’s burden.
