How can you be happy when someone else is suffering?
War, the biodiversity crisis, the death of a loved one, a friend going through a nasty divorce, a homeless child, your mother’s dishwasher broke …. Big and small things cause suffering. Far away things and close to home things cause suffering. This list could go on forever … there is an awful lot of suffering in the world. You just have to turn on the news and you get it served on a plate. So how can you be happy when all of this is going on? How on earth is it even possible to be happy? And … how dare you?
What I learned as a child about suffering
It is not okay to be happy when someone else is suffering
It is a common misconception that you have to suffer too to show that you care. That was basically the message that I was taught from a very young age. Of course I cared. I cared deeply!
And so when there was suffering on my radar, I made sure to suffer inside – even if no-one else could know that I was. And when I felt happy, I never really felt happy because there was always an anxiety that it was not okay to feel that way. This pattern was largely unconscious, because I had developed it in early childhood and it was just my normal state of being.
I thought all the suffering I felt was mine
Unfortunately for me, I was very sensitive. In fact, I was (and still am of course) a Highly Sensitive Person. This enabled me to be extremely tuned in to the feelings of others. As I tried to make sure I did the right thing, I was feeling the suffering of other beings so deeply that I couldn’t clearly distinguish what was theirs and what was mine. Of this, I was also not aware – all the feelings felt like they were mine. I also didn’t know that I was highly sensitive, as a child I thought everybody felt this way.
Put these two things together and you can see how that led to feelings of depression as well as guilt and anxiety around feeling happy. Can you relate to any of this?
Since then, I have learned a thing or two which I would love to share with you here.
How our emotions relate to caring and love
Let’s have a closer look at emotions. Suffering indicates that you are feeling a negative emotion, most likely some degree of fear, anger or sadness. Or you might be feeling physical discomfort, such as pain. The physical discomfort will very likely go hand in hand with a negative emotion.
I have spend years thinking and learning about emotions and I have come to the conclusion that all those emotions are rooted in love. How does that make sense?
Let’s start with happiness as that’s an easy one. Feeling happy means you are enjoying something that you love or care about.
What about sadness? Well, we feel sad when we have lost or are about to lose something that we love or care about. So this emotion is clearly very closely related to love.
When it comes to fear you need to ask yourself what are you afraid of? Whether the answer is snakes, losing your job, falling of a cliff or bad review … the idea is threatening you in some way. I bet you are afraid of losing something that you love or care about such as your life, your financial security or your valued position in the community.
Now it gets a bit more complicated. Anger is an expression of fear. We’ve already establsihed that when you feel threatened in some way you feel fear. This fear can quickly turn into anger when your fight or flight system decides it’s a good time to fight. It’s a defense mechanism. You are trying to protect something that you fear losing.
I can hear you think, but what if the ‘something’ has been taken away from me already. That is also a reason to get angry! Yes, but think it through, it is still an expression of fear: you fear the consequences of this loss, whether these consequences are physical or emotional.
To not feel the physical or emotional pain and sadness of the loss, you may get angry instead. It may give you a sense of empowerment, an energy to fight the situation and try to make it right, but it still comes down to the fact that it is rooted in the loss of something that you love.
So we can conclude that all these emotions are rooted in love as they each show in their own way that you care about something, there is no doubt about that.
How can it be okay to be happy when someone close to you is suffering?
So what happens when a loved one is suffering? What you are feeling, is it their emotion or yours? Should you feel their feelings with them or is there a better way to show that you care about what they are going through?
When you care about someone else’s suffering it is natural that you want to help. You want to alleviate the negative feelings and experiences that the other is going through.
When you are suffering alongside them: experiencing the feelings of fear, anger and sadness with the other; you don’t put yourself in a position to make a positive contribution. It is more likely that you end up in a place of helplessness, hopelessness and despair together. Being in this place shuts down your ability to see possibilities for solutions, for you and for the other person..
Showing empathy is a healthy way of showing that you care for the other person’s feelings, without taking them on as your own. It means seeing their feelings, acknowledging their feelings and holding a space for them to have those feelings. All of that while keeping yourself as a separate entity, where you are allowed to feel good while doing this because when you feel good you have a much greater capacity to help.
I often come back to the analogy of the flight attendants telling you to put on your own oxygen mask before you try to help others. When you stop breathing you can’t help anyone else, simple as that! So taking care of yourself first is essential if you want to help others and show them that you care in a productive way..
It may feel counterintuitive but caring for yourself first is the best thing you can do before caring for others. The happier you feel, the more capacity and energy you will have to help others who are suffering to a better place, the more love you have to give!
It took me a while to really learn this, and I can imagine you might need some help with it too. I am so happy that I am now able to use my sensitivity as a gift instead of it being a burden. A gift that I can use to help you as I am now able to tune in and deeply see and hold a space for your feelings AND know that they are not my own so that I can help you find your way to happiness and a greater capacity to help the ones you care about!
I invite you to book a Free Discovery Session so we can have a chat about how I could help you! 💚
Stay tuned for my next post where I will go more deeply into dealing with the bigger problems of our world.
