Does helpful advice make things worse?

You’ve hit a bad patch: maybe you’ve had some bad news that makes you feel you’ll never get pregnant.  Or you’ve just run out of energy to be hopeful.  Does it drive you mad that the people who care for you most are trying, with the best of intentions, to be hopeful for you and to cheer you up?

You know that they want the best for you, but why can’t they just recognise your pain and be with you in that pain, instead of wanting to fix the situation?

Well you probably know that already.  It’s painful to watch another person suffer and not be able to do anything to make the pain better.  So your pain, is their pain.  And all the cheering comments and encouragement to look on the bright side are designed to lessen the pain – for you and for them.

And it’s not quite like a bereavement, where outsiders can identify with and share the loss: where there’s a sense of communal pain.  This is your pain.  And parents, by definition, won’t really know what you’re going through (unless of course, they’ve gone through it themselves).

It may drive you mad to listen to all the platitudes, but if you are able, cut them some slack – they’re doing their best, just as you are.  It’s hard to sit with someone in distress and just be there for them: the temptation to try and fix things can be overwhelming.

And sometimes their words may make things a bit better for you.

But you may also choose to explain that you only need a sympathetic ear and that you don’t expect them to make you feel better, that you need time to process and work through the pain before you can get to a point of feeling better.

And perhaps, you may also recognise that your anger and frustration reflect how you feel about your situation, as well as how you feel about other people’s responses.

It’s hardly fair, but one of the challenges of the situation you find yourself in, it to manage the people around you as well as to manage your own responses to your circumstances.  It’s not fair at all, is it?