‘Don’t try any of that bullshit about understanding’

Finding ways to understand that we cannot understand

The ‘bullshit’ line was how he began, the man in front of me who had seen too much.

Here was someone trained to tolerate more than most of us could ever begin to imagine. For this reason it had taken an equally unimaginable amount to break him. When he did, he broke into so many pieces that he did not believe that there was anything left.

He had come, not because he wanted to, but because he had been told that there was no other option. His marriage was breaking apart as well.

His opening line about me not bullshitting him by pretending to understand him was both a warning and a plea. He re-iterated the point again, a few minutes in. ‘Don’t pretend to understand or…’ he paused.

‘Or what?’ I asked.

In the silence, he dropped his head into his big hands as though trying to stop the images crowding in. Images of what he might do to me if I made the fundamental mistake of telling him that I understood. This was not because he wanted to hurt me but because the moral wound that he bore meant that violence pervaded so much of his thinking. He had just seen too much for one human to digest.

A Very Human Mistake

It is a basic and very human mistake to make when talking to someone who is living in the perpetual torture of experienced violence. We want to understand their suffering so we tell them that we do. It is often simply a nervous reaction. Sometimes it is because we have made an over-connection, believing that we have had a similar sort of experience, therefore we understand. We do not. Just as others cannot fully understand the experiences that we have had.

Of course, I could not understand this man. Whatever experiences I may have had in conflict it does not mean that I have a grasp of the impact of violence on others. I cannot get my head around their experience, just as they cannot know mine. What we have in common is this failure to understand. This is important because it is the starting point of these conversations—the mutual recognition that neither of us can fully comprehend what the other has been through, or is going through.

Let me give an example. Most of us have been through periods of insomnia—those nights spent churning over past experiences and future anxieties, the collision between the two creating a feverish restlessness that feels like a form of madness. Yet when someone else is describing their sleepless torment, it is not particularly helpful to say something like, ‘Oh, I hear you, tell me about not sleeping…’, and then to tell of your own insomnia.  Some people would argue that the sense of a shared experience is comforting—and yes, there are many times when it is, but not in this sort of situation, when someone is trying to unravel their story. To claim to understand diminishes what they are trying to say.

It is so important to understand what it means not to understand, particularly when it comes to people who are trying to live their lives together.

I am going to use a very specific example, serving military personnel and those they leave at home when they are on deployment. In this case both sides are existing in different forms of hyper state while they are apart. Those on deployment have been trained to override the deep patterning in human nature to flee from danger. Their ‘fight, flight or freeze’ response has been ritually drilled so that they can perform in situations that should be impossible. They function at a level equivalent to Olympic athletes. What they are not ritually trained to do is to come home after being in ‘theatre’.

On the other side of this are those who are left at home during a deployment. They are existing in another kind of heightened state—that of constant anticipation. Every day of deployment means another day trying to balance the ordinary rhythm of life with the constant drum beat of threat banging away in the background.

When those whom come home from a deployment mix their state of hyper function with the heightened state of those who have been waiting at home it can get complicated, very quickly.  These two altered states are not good at finding a common language while both are still in survival mode. The subtle thinking brain has been overridden by the survival brain. At this point, trying to talk it out is unlikely to work. The emotional heat is too high, and the ability to listen to any kind of deeply felt conversation is low. There is an overriding need to decompress. It is why the reunion moment can go wrong, and so quickly, resulting in two people shouting at each other, then letting off steam, separately, with the chance of a mounting sense of injustice, and perhaps resentment as well.

Why dogs shake

After dogs have been fighting, they pick themselves up, shake vigorously and trot off. What they have done is shake off the excess of adrenaline (epinephrine), the primary stress hormone. This is the trigger hormone, secreted by the adrenal glands. It pumps the heart faster to get to blood to the fight or flight muscles, and to the muscles around the vital organs to protect them in the face of injury. It increases lung capacity and accelerates carbohydrate metabolism. All this to up our chances of survival. Adrenaline does not discern whether a threat is actual or perceived. It triggers in the same way whether someone is heading into a firefight, or if they hear the phone ring when a call could mean bad news. The survival response is the same. The shaking dog is getting rid of the excess of this stress hormone, just as most animals do in the same situation. We humans are less good at this, to our great disadvantage.

Our own dog shake

So, what creates the equivalent of the dog shake when two people are meeting again, having come of out of two very different situations, as in one on deployment, one waiting at home.

• Understanding that they cannot understand what the other one has been going through is a very good foundation.
• Doing something together that allows the hyper-state to cool down—anything from taking the dog for a walk to bouncing about with kids, and that really does mean just jumping up and down together, for the fun of it—because you can. It beats a fight over the iPad. When tempers are about to boil over almost any kind of physical movement helps the adrenaline to release. One caveat here: sex is physical, of course, and a huge release, when two bodies are in synch. It is just that the emotions around a heightened reunion can lead to hurt and all the other drama that can go with disappointing sex. Physical attraction can overcome a lot, but the intensity of these reunions can be too much, even for high octane chemistry. Good sex has more of a chance once people have spent a bit of time around each other again, just being at ease with each other.  Finding physical trust again is often the best kind of foreplay when psychological and physical emotions have been running high.
• Knowing how easy it is for heightened emotions to boil over helps, as does accepting that these are just a very normal part of our human design.
• Another good starting point is knowing that this vulnerable, hair-trigger state is temporary.
• Understanding that you may both adjust at different rates. For those who adjust fast, patience is a byword. For those who take longer, know that trying to catch up too quickly can trigger a whole new round of anxiety.
• Tenderness—a word that often makes people squirm, but tenderness and patience are great allies in the face of any kind of heightened reunion.