The pain we do not know
‘Silence of the Lambs’ was a multi-award-winning movie released in 1991. In the movie, the female protagonist was young FBI agent Clarice Starling and her mentor was Jack Crawford. Jack Crawford’s character was inspired by former FBI agent John Douglas. Douglas worked in the Behavioural Science Unit of the FBI. He studied the behavioural profile of some hardened criminals. The actor Scott Glenn, who plays the role of Jack Crawford in the movie, spent some time working with John Douglas to understand his role.
There was a particular interaction between Scott Glenn and John Douglas that I want to describe here. Glenn thanked Douglas for helping him understand the work that he (Douglas) did and the world that he lived in. Douglas, having studied and tracked some truly brutal criminals, disabused Glenn of this notion. Glenn had hardly seen even a glimpse of what Douglas’s world was like. He offered to play the tape of two serial killers with their teenage victims. Glenn could barely hear it for a minute. What he heard was so barbaric and so painful that it was seared in his memory.
Our picture of this world is based on what we are exposed to. The luckier we are the more positive our experiences. There is nothing wrong with being privileged enough to be spared access to the evil of the world. Yet, we do need to realize that there are experiences and life stories very different from ours. There are people in this world who have seen and felt pain that we cannot even imagine.
Just because an experience or a pain was never encountered by us does not mean that it is not true. And more importantly, it does not mean that the victim did something wrong that made them deserve it.
The pain or experience does not have to be as gruesome as the one described above. For example, it may just be the pain of being ‘fat’ in a world obsessed with slimness. Maybe we have a great metabolism and cannot understand people who struggle to get rid of or keep off weight.
It may be the pain of loneliness. And we, with our thriving social circle, may be unable to understand how anyone can remain lonely.
Maybe it is the pain of debilitating anxiety. And we, with our buoyant spirit, are unable to understand why the person doesn’t stop ‘overthinking’ and ‘get over it’.
As author, professor and TED speaker Brené Brown says:
“Not enough of us know how to sit in pain with others. Worse, our discomfort shows up in ways that can hurt people and reinforce their own isolation.
I have started to believe that crying with strangers in person could save the world.”
The certainty that people’s suffering is either untrue or their own fault can make us a danger to the mental health of others. And it can make us incapable of growth. We can’t solve the world’s problems. But now and then, we can sit with a person in pain and let them know that we hear them. And give them the space to grieve without judgment.
