OPENING THE DOOR TO RESPECTFUL COMMUNICATION AFTER TRAGEDY

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 15, 2009

Our greatest emotional needs as human beings are to have someone who understands us, communicates that they care about us, and tell us the truth. Author and lecturer, Leo Buscaglia, once talked about meeting such a person - a four-year-old boy - in a contest to find the most caring child.

The winner, whose elderly next-door neighbor had recently lost his wife, showed great compassion. Upon seeing the man cry, the boy went to the old gentlemen, quietly climbed into his lap, and just sat. Later, when his mother asked him what he said to the neighbor, the little boy said, "Nothing! I just helped him cry."

He instinctively understood the importance of "being there" for someone. Even at his young age, he recognized the value of expressing feelings, especially difficult ones, in a respectful way. He demonstrated that sometimes our ability to communicate is most profound when we say nothing at all. As parents, grandparents, relatives, teachers, and friends, we can model this message in our ordinary daily interactions with the children in our lives - whether they are preschoolers or teens – or somewhere in between.

This is especially true when we hear about tragic stories in the news. Emotions – shock, fear, anger, confusion, violation of trust, loss of precious lives - are overwhelming! When people are suffering, what victims immediately feel, says author Nancy Guilmartin, in her book, Healing Conversations: What to Say When You Don't Know What to Say, is "Please help me find a new way to see things because right now I can't even think straight!"

Our presence, tone of voice, and body language has everything to do with "opening the door" to finding respectful solutions to problems or "slamming the door" to solving them. So, how do we support those going through something tragic?

If we are close to people, we may feel comfortable rushing right over with help. However, if we're casual friends or acquaintances, or concerned community members, we often want to do something but get stuck and don't know what to do.

Nancy offers, "One way to shift your energy …on a more healing frequency is to get in touch with your own unexpressed anger, sadness, fear, judgment, or confusion… When we don't let others know what's going on inside our head or our body, we can subtly make the people we are trying to support feel we are bored, upset, judging them, or somehow disconnected. When you have the courage to be vulnerable…it clears out the static that interferes with a healing frequency."

Author, Susan Hoch, summarized Nancy's points to creating healing conversations in a book review for Family Information Services of Minneapolis in 2006. What steps are most needed, she said, are as follows:

• Listen, actively with your ears, eyes, and heart. We need perspective. Talking about Steven Covey's principle "Seek first to understand, then to be understood", Kirk Weisler recently shared in his T4D newsletter, "We judge others based on their actions. But we judge ourselves based on our intent. It has been my experience, when I have taken the time to ask, that behind most people's actions most of time was a noble intent. It may have been misguided, mis-informed, and by all outward appearances seemed actually cruel, rude or foolish. But that is not what they thought or intended."
• Pause to reflect, tap into your compassion, and tune in to the other person. Nancy describes this step as "Putting in the clutch when you are driving a stick shift car. It lets you slow down just enough to engage the gears before you speed up."
• Be a friend, not a hero! Don't rescue people or rush them to "get over it".
• Offer comfort. Allow people to be who they are at the present time and express it safely – not disagreeing, talking them out of their feelings, or telling them how they should feel.
• Get in touch with your own feelings. Are we able to sit with our own discomfort long enough to be with someone else's discomfort? We are most able to offer compassion when we give it to ourselves as well.
• Be there over the long haul. Sometimes what we need to be is a sounding board – over and over again!
• Be a helpfull resource. Sometimes we know of resources that can help someone more than we ourselves can. Share!!
• Take the initiative. Think about what it would feel like to be in the other person's shoes. That's a great place from which to start understanding what is needed.
• Be compassionate and patient. Our past experiences can be somewhat helpful, but we still don't know exactly what someone else is feeling and what causes them pain. Listen to their stories, and when appropriate, share yours.

Each new day presents a new dilemma or problem for those involved in tragedy. Emotions will flare up like dying embers in a camp fire. They will need to be tended with care and compassion for some time to come. Let's do our part to bring healing to the lives of those around us and make these tragedies STOP! Remember the words of poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."

Source: Angela Reinhart, Unit Educator, Family Life, Champaign County Unit, 217-333-7672, areinhrt@illinois.edu