At least...

I had one of those moments the other day when I was reminded of the brilliant short video from Brene Brown X RSA Shorts about empathy and “silver linings”...

My daughter was playing at a new friend’s house and I was chatting to their mum who was carrying her 1 month old baby in a sling. I was saying how much I missed that feeling of having my daughter as a little baby so close to my chest, especially now she’s so heavy I can’t carry her for long!

The other mum said, “Well there’s always time for another whirl” and I got the usual feeling. Do I share about the IVF journey or just be “breezy” and say “yes maybe”?

I decided to be honest and tell her how it’d taken so long to get pregnant with my daughter and that we did more IVF to try for another child but finally reached a point where we decided to stop and are now focused on enjoying being a family of three.

She said, “At least you’ve made the decision and you can move on now.”

This mum is an absolutely lovely person and of course I know what she means. She’s not wrong, it is easier now that we’ve accepted the situation, we acknowledge how lucky we are, and we see all the benefits of being a family of 3. But it was hard and painful work getting to acceptance. And hard to summarise that in a couple of sentences of casual conversation.

But it was the phrase “at least” that jarred me in this conversation. I’m sure I’ve said something like that before in a different context:

“At least you had that quality time at the end with your mum before she died” 

“At least you got a nice redundancy package to give you time to find a new job”.

These things are true but they over simplify and skip over the important strong emotions hidden in the story. Oftentimes the best thing we can do is listen and empathise, for example, “That must’ve been hard not being able to have another child”.

In Brene Brown’s video she gives these tips:

♥️Recognise that person’s perspective as their truth

♥️Stay out of judgement

♥️Recognise emotion in other people and try to communicate that

♥️Empathy is feeling WITH people, not trying to make things better

Anyway, it’s just a good note to myself to not bring my big silver linings paintbrush into conversations where it’s not needed! And hopefully a useful reminder for you too whether in life or in work 🙂