08 Jun Your Epidermis is Showing
“I have to tell you something difficult, Emma,” Ella said with a serious look on her face.
There was a long pause.
“Your epidermis is showing,” Ella said.
Emma looked down and around, confused and slightly alarmed before Ella burst into laughter and said, “It’s a joke. Nothing’s wrong.Your epidermis is your skin! It is showing because it’s all over your body!”
The girls laughed together. Ella commented on how hard it was to deliver the joke with a straight face.
There are times when we have to deliver difficult news, and the challenge is harder than simply keeping a straight face. Usually, it’s a situation we approach with dread. It’s normal to become nervous as we anticipate the person’s reaction to our words. There’s a particular kind of desperation when we think about the potential pain of what the news means to the person, especially when we are the messenger.
How exposed emotionally—how much emotional epidermis—should we allow ourselves to show when we deliver difficult news?
Often, our response is reflexive. Imagining and putting ourselves in the place of the person hearing something difficult, we become distressed and experience a frantic search to take away the person’s pain. Though it comes from a place of genuine compassion and caring, joining the person’s experience, sympathizing, or attempting to identify with it often leaves people feeling like they need to comfort us.
Another option is the approach of emotional self-protection. Perhaps, as we become hardened by the frequency with which we have to share difficult information and attempt to protect ourselves from compassion fatigue, we deliver the news as a simple matter-of-fact. The emotional distance helps us keep us guarded from another’s pain, but this indifference to a person’s emotional experience tends to leave people feeling alone.
There’s a third stance we can take. An empathic approach requires us to suspend our own experience and emotions in the service of being fully attentive to another’s. To begin, we bring our complete and total presence to the person we are talking with and try to understand what the person is thinking, feeling, and experiencing as they process the information we are sharing.
I once heard someone say that you can either be a voice that someone has to overcome or a voice that helps them overcome.
Empathy is that voice that helps people through.