“Oh, are you trying to analyse me right now?”
“Let me tell you all about my nephew’s mental health difficulties…”
“Ok, tell me what I’m thinking right now…”
“I bet you’re wondering why so many people are wearing green shoes tonight…”
“I could never do what you do, it seems so upsetting.”
My answer to most of these questions is to politely avoid the question and go talk to someone else. I have no desire to be a psychologist when I’m out at a party or event, but I also don’t want to be rude.
But the last question sticks with me sometimes. Why do I choose to do a job where I listen to people’s trauma and sad lives? I’m not voyeuristic. I’m not someone who listens to gruesome crime podcasts in my spare time. I don’t watch TV shows that are violent or contain distressing material. I especially don’t want to hear about sexual trauma in my spare time. But in my job I am very willing to listen to anything and everything people feel ready to share, even if it is violent or morally challenging or if they went through absolute hell.
So what’s the difference? The answer is the why. Listening to a trauma story for the fun of it isn’t fun and isn’t something I want to do. It doesn’t help anyone, it just leaves me feeling emotionally battered and bruised for no one’s benefit.
But being there, in the room with someone who has been hurt, whether it was physically, sexually or emotionally, or hearing their story of being neglected or not protected, I’m not doing that for my entertainment. I’m doing it because there is real power in someone being able to share their experiences and to feel heard and to feel believed. To have someone listen to their story and say “I’m sorry that happened to you, what happened was wrong, and it was not your fault”. Or to say to someone, “I hear that you did some things that were wrong, and you are more than your worst day, let’s find a way to heal and repair.”
I work with people who were sexually harmed as children and then spent years blaming themselves for what happened to them. This can happen because their abuser tells them that directly. Or it can happen because the people who were supposed to protect the child didn’t know about the abuse, so they never got the chance to tell the child that what happened to them was wrong and not the child’s fault. Or maybe the adults did know about it, but didn’t know how to respond helpfully and accidentally or sometimes deliberately gave the wrong messages.
Other times, people look back on their childhood experiences with their adult brains and forgot that they were just small children with limited options and limited people to talk to or places to go. Sometimes blaming yourself for your abuse feels safer than acknowledging that the adults in your life failed to keep you safe.
Therapy can help people have a safe place to revisit their worst moments. We can’t change what happened, but we can help see those experiences differently, recognising the lack of options or the context or just explicitly naming what happened as abuse and as wrong. We can’t stop the abuse from having occurred but we can help people see that what happened was in the past and had a beginning, a middle and an end. We can help people learn that they are more than what happened and there is a way forward.
Not all of us are trained as therapists, but all of us have the option of responding to someone else’s suffering like we’re watching a TV show or we can choose to hold their experiences with care, compassion and hope. All of us have the power to help someone feel heard and seen, especially when that person has been told in the past that they will be judged or not believed. All of us have the choice to be upstanders, not bystanders; to help make the world a more caring place, rather than just be witnesses.