Empathy And Other People’s Shoes
Why would you get upset with someone you love who has survived after spending some days teetering between life and death? Sounds hard to believe that you could feel like that, what is interesting is it has happened to both my Mum and Him and I reckon they were perfectly justified in feeling that way.
As mentioned in the last post we went on a big trip to visit His mother, Nana, as she is not in the greatest of health. A few days after we returned we got the message that Nana was in hospital. The next day we got the message she had declined, was intubated and air lifted out to Adelaide with a very poor prognosis. He rushed over to Adelaide to be with her.
The next eight days were a roller coaster of emotions as there seemed to be signs of hope which were often dashed. The doctors did not seem optimistic. He was also suffering with a bit of the flu, not sleeping well and generally feeling the strain of it all. In the end it got to the live or die bit where they were to pull her breathing tube out and it wasn’t going to be replaced.
She lived, in fact, she thrived. Within 24 hours she was sitting up and talking. So why would he feel upset with her. It was at this point that she noticed he was a bit sick and showed a total lack of understanding or empathy for the worry and what he had been through over the last ten days.
The story is the same for my Mum and what she went through with my Aunt, her sister. She spent several days by her bed in Intensive Care and then my Aunt made a similar recovery and seemed to be revelling in all the attention and completely oblivious to the stress that Mum had been through.
In defence of Nana and Aunt they were out to it for most of the period prior to their recoveries so they hadn’t spent time worrying about whether they were going to live. They may have been surprised that Mum and Him did not seem so completely overjoyed. This comes down to having a bit of empathy, putting yourself in the shoes of the other person.
Similarly in life you can find that someone you are dealing with does not react as you would expect. Stop for a moment and think about what is going on for them, ask them about what they are feeling. We can often get caught up in our view of the world and events and not realise that other people may be feeling differently for a variety of reasons as it was with my Aunt and Nana and Mum and Him.
Tags: die, empathetic, Empathy, live
