Reaching out...

An interesting thing sometimes happens to people who work in the healing professions. They often find themselves attuned to people’s pain. It’s a kind of empathy that allows them to enter into the feelings other people have to find the best way to help them. When it happens to those in the mental health field another thing sometimes happens as well. They start to see pain everywhere…

Most of us have some level of empathy towards others in physical pain. If we were to encounter someone who say, had a motorcycle accident and had an open leg wound a femur was sticking out of, the sight would be so horrific to us that we would experience a level of shock ourselves. Those of us so inclined might try to stop the bleeding and treat for shock. Most people would certainly call for help. In the mental health field things aren’t quite so clear.

We encounter people every day who have open wounds to their psyches. Instead of ‘stopping the bleeding’, treating for shock or even calling for help, we most often just expect them to straighten up! Wounds go unnoticed and untreated, they scar over and they continue to cause pain. Such pain is everywhere.

The sad fact is that often the only thing needed to treat such pain is the simple recognition of it. If we could see the pain that others are in we might not be so quick to expect them to simply straighten up. We might begin to develop a level of empathy towards them. That empathy can be just the recognition of someone else’s pain that they need to begin to heal. Unlike physical pain, sometimes just the witness…the testimony of our troubles to another human being can be all that it takes to begin the healing process.

We often refer to some unseen pain as ‘emotional baggage’. We sense it sometimes in the form of defense mechanisms or rationalizations. Sometimes no one sees it until it manifests itself in the form suicide or violence towards others. There are all kinds of wounds to the psyche. They manifest themselves in all kinds of ways. And they are all around us.

Perhaps, if we could take some time in our lives to put our own problems and concerns aside and begin to notice the wounds other people carry, our world would begin to change. Forgetting our own problems and helping someone else with theirs can begin the healing in two people. It's called outgoing concern, and it has the power to heal wounds there aren't even words for.

Christians will know it by another name...Love.