There was this one time I was staying at a lovely little boutique hotel. The hotel was in a converted mansion full of polished blonde oak and wide staircases. The check-in desk was a real desk positioned in the front hallway between the large beveled glass entrance and rear doors. There was always a person at that desk who remembered your name as you came down the stairs or helped you get dinner reservations at a coveted restaurant.
As I came down the stairs one morning, I could hear a woman’s raised voice mixed with the placating tones of a man’s. I surmised that a guest was complaining to the desk manager and was surprised to find as I rounded the corner that it was one of the hotel housekeepers. She was angry about something, that much seemed clear, and she was venting to the young man at the desk. As soon as they saw me, she toned it down while I crossed the small lobby out to my car. I was back only a few minutes later, a bit surprised that the housekeeper was still there and still upset. Again, the conversation stopped, to be replaced by a sheepish “welcome back!” as I passed.
I began to worry about the front desk person. He was a young fellow in his late twenties. Something about the snippets of interaction I saw as I had passed told me he was “that guy.” You might know the type: open, good listener, friendly, compassionate in word, and posture. These all sound like wonderful high “emotional-quotient” behaviors unless you realize they often come with baggage. I’d seen enough of these interactions elsewhere to guess that because the housekeeper thought it was acceptable to have a gripe session in the lobby, the front desk manager might be serving the role of the staff’s go-to confessor, which implied he was everyone else’s pain-repository as well. It’s far too easy to go from being a “good listener” to becoming a victim in one’s own right. You can lose yourself in the process. That’s a difficult way to make a living.
Later on, as I was checking out, I offered him a bit of advice. First, I told him what I had seen when I was walking through. He became upset and told me he was sorry I had seen the “incident.” I told him it didn’t bother me at all. I also told him that I believed it was a normal thing for him.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re the one everyone comes to complain to, even if it has nothing to do with you. Some days you wonder how you became a psychotherapist. It even happens with your friends when you’re not at work. You don’t know why they tell you all this stuff, and it’s hard to see how to make it all right for everyone all the time.”
He looked surprised and agreed.
I said: “You did really well with her. Where’d you learn how to do it?”
I’m never shocked when they tell me it’s their role in their family. He was a middle child of four: the one who just-does-it. I then guessed his parents lived close by and he was the one, almost by default, whom the siblings had left to check up on them. I was right on this guess too. Sure enough, he was a “fixer.”
“You sound like you know me really well,” he said.
I’m not nearly as clairvoyant as it might seem: it takes one to know one. Total strangers wanting to share their pain with me can happen anywhere; in a grocery store line, in a taxi, filling the car with gas, at the farmer’s market. The things people will divulge to try and get rid of the hurt seems never-ending. To try and hold all of it, for everyone, is crazy-making. Just to cope with all of it, I have had to learn some strategies over time.
“Can I give you some advice?” I offered. “I want you to remember that in all of these conversations, all of the stuff people want to give to you… I want you to remember that your ocean is bigger than their firehose.”
It was the best I could offer in a minute or two standing at a desk in a public place.
Here’s the dynamic: someone gripes for the relief of the act and someone lends a sympathetic ear. There is a spectrum of engagement in these types of conversations, and we often forget what role we are playing when someone is expressing their pain. There is a tangible difference between sympathy, empathy, and compassion. My experience is that the vast majority of conversations that involve pain transmission (griping or complaining) are only looking for the sympathetic (“I care about your suffering”) ear. The transmitter just wants to know that the receiver heard them. The act, the conversation, is the relief.
The problem for the young desk clerk was (and this was a guess on my part) listening with a compassionate framework in mind; he’s a fixer (“I want to relieve your suffering”). The desk manager didn’t appreciate that he could listen and feel without carrying the pain himself. I tried to give him an image to hold onto that contextualized his agency in the conversation. The housekeeper’s firehose of hurt can be pointed at a big ocean of shared suffering — genuine empathy — and at the same time, stop short of being personalized in real acts of compassion. Put another way, he had a choice in how he dealt with the way people wanted to share suffering.
I hope he took away a little more space from the conversation. I have a feeling that in this age, knowing the difference between pity, sympathy, empathy, and compassion is going to be a critical survival skill.
Note: for those of you interested in learning more on this topic or others like it, please read anything by Dr. Neel Burton. Specifically relevant to this post is “Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions”.