One of our deepest longings—deeper than we even recognize day-to-day—is that other people should acknowledge certain feelings. We want that, at key moments, our sufferings should be understood, our anxieties should be noticed, and our sadness lent legitimacy. There is a hunger for us to be heard. There is a need for our lives to have meaning. There is a yearning for our stories to be told. We don’t necessarily want others to agree with all our feelings, but what we crave is that they at least validate them. When we are furious, we want another person to say, “I can see you have been driven to distraction. It must feel very chaotic for you inside right now. When we are sad, we want someone to say: “I know you’re usually down and I understand the reasons why.”
The habit of not having one’s feelings properly acknowledged begins in childhood. Parents, even the most loving ones, frequently stumble in this domain. It’s not that they don’t theoretically care intensely for their children, it’s that they don’t appreciate that true care involves regularly reflecting a child’s moods back to him or herself—rather than subtly pushing the moods away or denying that they exist. Parents use the weaponry of advice or distractive fixes as a way to shut down communication about difficult topics, suffocating the child’s mental balance and disturbing the harmony of his existence.
The fault springs at different levels. The inability of the parents to understand their ward, Paulo Freire ‘Banking System’, of education which makes us the passive receivers rather than active questioners. We are told to learn the art of questioning but are never allowed to employ it practically. Most often do we see our elders lamenting the loss of one or the other thing but never do we see them question their existence vis-à-vis the situation of the younger generation, their problems, anxieties and worries. It’s true that ‘the world is too much with us’ and that ‘we’ve given our hearts away’, but it needs to be understood also that we no longer ‘Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea’ or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn’.
In our culture, people quickly feel guilty or ashamed when they appear as being overly negative or critical, particularly because we are biased toward positive thinking, which is worth cultivating, but problems arise when people start believing they must be upbeat all the time.
There is one reason why parents don’t acknowledge as they might: fear. The feelings they push away are all, in some shape or other, emotionally inconvenient, or troubling, or upsetting. They may operate with the background view that acknowledging a difficult feeling will make it far worse than it is. It will mean fostering it unduly or giving way to it entirely. Parents fear that if they give a bit of unbiased mirroring to their child, they might be encouraging them to grow cataclysmically depressive, unfeasibly timid, or manically resistant to authority. What they’re missing is that most of us, once we’ve been heard, become far less — rather than far more — inclined to insist on the feelings we’re beset by. The angry person gets less enraged once the depth of their frustration has been recognized; the rebellious child grows more inclined, not less inclined, to buckle down and do their homework once their feelings that they want to burn the school down, break the headmaster’s glasses and abscond to a desert island have been listened to and identified with for fifty-five seconds. Feelings get less strong, not more tyrannous, as soon as they’ve been given an airing. We become bullies when no one’s listening; never because they’ve listened too much.
There’s a fear that making room for the intensity of another person’s pain will encourage a greater outpouring than we are able to cope with. The human experience is complex, multidimensional, and ever-shifting. While you are not your ward’s personal therapist, don’t shy away from sharing the full spectrum of life. Simply hear them out and acknowledge that their anguish exists. The system of knowledge is the first in the list. It sounds desperately simple, and in a way it is. And yet how little of this emotional nectar of acknowledgement we ever in fact receive or gift to one another.
Crucially, we don’t need to be listened to by everyone. We can bear an awful lot of unacknowledged feelings when just a few people, some of them in our childhood, and ideally in our friendship circle, every now and then play us back to us. The ranter, the person animated by a rigid desire that everyone should listen to them, hasn’t (of course) been overindulged: they are just playing out the frightening consequences of never having been heard when it mattered.
There is almost no end to what we may be ready to do for those who pay us that immense, psychologically-redemptive honour of once in a while acknowledging what we’re actually feeling, however odd, melancholy or inconvenient it might be.
