I met two friends for dinner a few nights ago and we immediately dispensed with the niceties and got down to the real stuff, in the way that friends straddling both sides of 50 often do.
Deb and her family have endured a tremendously painful two years. Her oldest daughter struggles with anxiety and depression and was harming herself. The family sought and found treatment and, as so many of us tend to do, kept their pain a secret from their community of friends.
Until they didn’t.
Deb’s daughter decided to share her story with her peers and even gave a talk at her high school about it. Deb and her husband began to tell close friends and neighbors, the families with whom they’d spent their lives — nanny shares, play dates, holiday parties — for the past couple decades.
“We didn’t want our struggle to be wasted,” Deb said.
They discovered that nine other families close to them were going through extremely similar circumstances. Nine other kids in crisis, just in their circle.
“By talking about it, not only did it create capacities for us to be relationally more supported and connected — and I’m sure more relationally judged, I don’t want to be all Suzy Sunshine on this one,” Deb said. “But what it also made available was nine other families now are living more authentic versions of their own lives.”
Deb said that last part on a podcast I host with family therapist John Duffy. Her family’s story, especially this next part, felt so crucial to this moment that I asked if she’d come on and share it with others. She generously agreed.
A few weeks after Deb and her family started telling people about what her daughter was enduring, Deb ran into a longtime friend at the store.
“The first thing she did in her greeting with me was move into a three- or four- minute diatribe about what a terrible friend she had been, ‘I’m the worst friend. I’m so sorry. I should have called. I didn’t call,’” Deb relayed. “And there was this real sense that she was seeking my forgiveness and comfort. I can tell you that in the headspace I was in, I was happy to let her off the hook. Happy to say, ‘It’s OK, no problem.’
“But I can just tell you,” Deb continued, “if your first instinct is to get someone who’s struggling to comfort you because you feel guilty or you feel badly? That’s not a good use of the emotional energy in the exchange.”
Next, the friend went down a path that had become all too familiar for Deb.
“This happens particularly when the conversation turns to self-harm or suicide,” Deb said. “She started to relay to me a number of stories that she was aware of, of people either in her own immediate community or things she’d heard on the news. And often people will tell you the stories about children they know, or families they know, about a child they know who was successful in killing themselves.”
Deb understood, she said, even in the moment, that it came from a good place, an attempt to relate. But it chipped away at Deb’s sense of safety.
And then Deb’s friend relayed her own fears — that so many kids she knows are struggling, that kids she watched grow up are struggling, that this all might mean her own kids will start struggling.
“How it landed for me,” Deb said, “as the parent who’s already steeped in pain and shame and struggle, is that it confirmed my worst fear: that she was concerned my kid was contagious.”
But this isn’t a story about judgment or betrayal. This is a story about grace and growth.
“I thought, ‘Bless her heart,’” Deb said. “She just wants to love on me right now. She just wants to be empathetic. She just wants to be reflective of her own distress about my distress, and yet her first three responses were injurious.
“And I think of my first three responses when I’ve been in this experience with people,” Deb continued. “I’ve been injurious. I’ve been unsafe in my rescuing, trying to fix. ‘Let me make a connection! Let me introduce you to people!’”
Haven’t we all?
Duffy said his therapy clients tell him stories of seeing their friends duck down a different aisle at the store to avoid a tough conversation, to avoid being called on to comfort.
Deb left the store that day determined to do two things: Continue to love her friend, and find a way to help other people show up for each other..
She posted something on LinkedIn about looking for trauma specialists to interview. A contact connected her to Jen Marr, the founder of Inspiring Comfort, an organization that offers training — to individuals, workplaces, schools — on how to care and comfort each other in the wake of trauma. Deb reached out to her.
Marr has a new book out called “Showing Up: A Comprehensive Guide to Comfort & Connection” (New Degree Press). Deb is giving copies to all her friends.
“And not comfort like a cozy noun,” Deb said. “Comfort like the strength of coming together in community and bringing strength in community.”
We’re going to need it. We have been needing it. We are, so many of us, walking around injured or injuring, scared or scarred, judged or judging, not sure what, if anything, to say.
I love the idea of getting intentional about doing better, being better. As bell hooks told us, and I love to repeat: “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation.”
