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This mother of 12 year old Lisa, a vehicular homicide victim, asks us to remember her daughter who not only loved life but loved this peace symbol as well.
"The many tapestries of order that permeate one's daily life become apparent only when one loses them, or oneself in them."
R. Neimeyer, Constructing Disorder
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I Know How You Feel
Edited by Founder, Connie Saindon, MFT
While sitting in the lounge waiting for my car to
be serviced I started chatting with a teacher who said she worked
with immigrants from Africa. She said she was touched by the lives
they lived before coming to our country. She felt deeply their struggles
of living here and living with past events that drove them to find
refuge in another world. She mentioned many had witnessed the murder
of their loved ones. I told her about our work in building a resource
nationally for Survivors of Violent Loss.
She then asked with great sincerity: "Why
is it so bad to say to someone: I know how you feel?"
Of course I answered her and then sent an email query to some survivors
to give them an opportunity to reply.
Here are some of their remarks: (It is SVLP
policy to not publish Survivors names unless specifically requested
to include them).
Dear Connie,
The attempt to empathize is futile. There simply is no way you Really
Can Know. You have no basis for this emotion until it has been felt
through a loss of your own. To say "you know how I feel" makes it
seem like an attempt to minimize the pain I am feeling, which is
impossible. There is no bottom to the depth of the pain I feel.
The words make my heart hurt a little more. Just let it be. It cannot
be blanketed so easily. It is best just to sympathize, best to regret
that this has happened. Best to simply hold me and let me weep.
Dee
Dee Bridgens
Terry Lee Sims, age 20, murdered 12/21/84 |
Dear Connie,
Here are a few thoughts:
What is conveyed in a word or sentence depends on how deep you want
to connect. To me, by saying to someone "I know how you feel" invades
a sacred place within the victim. I hear the words, but don't trust
it until I hear more and that isn't always possible. I imagine what
someone wants to do is hold and comfort the person by letting them
know they are not alone.
I think, for me this is done by words such as, "I'm so sorry." or,
"Yes, my loses have been difficult, but I can not imagine what you
must have gone through, or continue to go through." It is about
the victim and not us at that point. And really, witnessing the
murders of family members and having to leave your home, town/village,
and country I would imagine challenges your identity--who you are
now and where do I fit. So much more to consider.
Dear Connie,
To those who say "I know just how you feel" - I pray to all the Gods
there are that you DON'T know just how I feel.
This statement is often followed by another statement, "My (sister/husband/whatever)
died a few (weeks/months) ago." And if I inquire further, it was usually
a slower death, of some illness or other, and by the time the person
finally died, it was a blessing to all concerned. There was no surprise.
If someone dies an expected death, the estate is settled before the
death, the heirlooms are predealt. There's a good start on the mourning.
A natural death is nice and clean, and is part of the natural order.
The trouble with sudden death, especially murder, is that it isn't
nice and clean - no matter how good and organized your life was before
that, hold on. Suddenly, the cops are questioning your neighbors about
your possible collusion in the death, there's worry about trouble-maker
strangers (media and otherwise) showing up at the funeral, there's
being dragged through years of trials, (or worse, never seeing justice
trying to get done), there's being hounded by the press... There's
a bumper crop of shock, anger, guilt, loss, pressure, and confusion,
not to mention full-blown depression. You find mourning particularly
hard. You find that you have to be polite to defense attorneys (a
particularly low form of life), and your best friends get it with
both barrels sometimes. It isn't natural, and it goes on and on.
People, whose loved ones are murdered, killed in car wrecks, fires,
etc. - we're blazing our own trails through the human psyche and writing
our own books. Sudden death isn't new, but it's never been openly
discussed from our point of view. We hardly know from one day to the
next how we feel.
Don't tell me that you know 'just how I feel', just because your Mother
was lucky enough to die at her third heart attack. For starts, you
don't know how much I envy you...
Dear Connie,
Thanks for your request for our comments. I really believe people
"mean well" when they say they know how we feel, but they really can't
know unless they have experienced a traumatic loss. We know of someone
who said this and commented the reason they knew how the loss felt
was because they had lost a pet dog! I think people who want to help
do best when they just sit quietly with us as we cry and/or talk about
our loved one. Words are not necessary or comforting - just the presence
of one who "feels" with us, who allows us to express the pain, the
sorrow, the anger without judging us.
"Our son was murdered in 1990 and his body has not been found and
we did not know for almost 9 nine years what happened to him. We "knew"
something terrible had happened to him, but until one of the two killers
confessed, we were living a paradox - hoping Tim might be alive somewhere
and at the same time trying to accept the reality that he was dead."
Dear Connie,
I continue to be amazed by the replies of people and question what
motivates them to want to ask a question like that. So many beliefs
are changing for me, sometimes daily. I wonder if anyone can really
know, "How" a person feels when in the midst of loss, even for those
who have experienced a similar event. Perhaps that is the clue, similar.
Yet when you come down to it - one just can NEVER KNOW. I believe
that is a very personal relationship belonging to the person experiencing
it and needs to be honored, held, comforted and cared for like a newborn
with love. Without being intrusive or demanding of it to be anything
other than what it is - beginning and growing, tender and vulnerable.
Dear Connie,
My reaction to your question is this.
"How could YOU know, when I don't even know. It has been two and half
years and I am still trying to figure it out. There were no legal
proceedings in my case. There was no clear determination for us about
whether this was a vehicular homicide, if my fiance was involved some
how, or a mutual fight that got totally out of hand? My thoughts and
feelings play out all the time and once I THINK I Have it something
new comes up. An innocent comment by my friend who is having marital
troubles was talking to me. She said "If my husband were thinking
about me, why would he have done what he did? Since he did what he
did, then he must not care about me. I feel so betrayed." I felt bad
for her at the time. Her comments got me thinking about my fiancé
and made me wonder if he really cared about me? Was he thinking about
me when he decided to go and party so much that night? My friend feels
betrayed by her husband. Her husband didn't get insanely drunk and
die for no good reason. How's that for a betrayal?"
This is just a small example, of what happens to me when someone says:
"I know how you feel!"
No you don't know how I feel. If they said "I can't imagine how you
must feel.", that might be ok. But then I feel isolated even more
because I feel like no one understands me.
Dear Connie,
When somebody says, "I know how you feel," the words represent one
more deception in a world already fearful and rotten with them. When
I experienced Dad's murder, the world abruptly became a terrifying
place, full of half- truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies.
My existence was rent* by a yawning chasm. One side, the side with
me on it, was crawling with demons and other fearsome slithery things
with sharp claws. I felt those things were always lying in wait, ready
to do me harm, maybe kill ME as well.
On the other side, the side I thought I'd never get back to was the
halcyon land of ordinary, daily life. Only another survivor could
understand this terrible isolation, lived in full sight of a lively,
lost world indifferent to one's suffering.
Whenever someone would say, "I know how you feel," I immediately felt
contempt, distrust, weariness. Resentment.
I would think, "Who is this barking fool who speaks complacently at
me from the safety of his or her "normal" world? How dare they! "People
like this unwittingly stirred up already roiled feelings of distrust
and rage. Ignorant clods.
Only a very few really, truly know how one feels after the murder
of a loved one. They are survivors of violent loss. All others need
not apply. You could not POSSIBLY know how I feel, and you'd best
pray you never will.
Definition:
Rent; to remove from place by violence," to split or tear apart
or in pieces by violence. To lacerate with painful feelings," "very
violent or ruthless severing or sundering.
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This article is fairly lengthy and necessarily so. It is still
a brief composite of such a complicated subject. I do hope though
that this will help survivors tell others why it usually isn't of
any help to utter that phrase. I like what one of our survivors
says, and I hope you never do know what if feels like.
Connie Saindon
Please let us hear from you about this topic as well. We welcome
all reactions and will consider them for submission as time and
space allow. Send it to info@svlp.org.
SVLP reserves the right to edit all material
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