Intentions

One thing I sometimes struggle with hearing as I carry on wading knee deep through grief is that I should always remember that people have good intentions.

It’s a difficult one to talk about honestly without sounding grumpy or like I’m having a massive go at people. Usually the point is made in response to something I’ve said – that a particular comment deeply hurt, or that certain lines of questioning trigger a trauma response. Sometimes I have expressed this in frustration, but more often I try to be matter of fact. The response about intentions is often made in a defensive tone, because it’s difficult to hear when you’ve had a negative impact on someone, especially when that was the very last thing you wanted to do. Nobody likes to hear that, I certainly don’t. But it’s so important that we become able to listen.

I know that the vast majority of people do not go around with bad intentions or mean to do harm. There is an astronomical difference between someone that intends to troll another person, bully them, abuse them, and someone that makes an honest mistake in something they’ve said or done. Almost every grieving parent I know, knows this as well. But we are often in a position of needing support from each other to manage the pain that can be caused despite good intentions being at play. The world of grief is complex and the world of baby loss is taboo; we are not set up socially or culturally to know what on Earth to do when someone we know goes through something like this. Everybody puts a foot wrong every now and then, including me, even when I am speaking to other bereaved parents. Being in the bereaved club yourself does not necessarily mean you always know the exact right thing to say to another bereaved parent (although perhaps we are better placed to know what to definitely not say). We are all different, unique, individual in our personalities and beliefs and pasts. Our babies’ stories are all completely unique, no two stories are ever exactly the same even if they share lots of elements. However, I find that the pain of having someone say something accidentally hurtful is erased pretty quickly if the person simply says “oh shit, I’m sorry, I totally didn’t realise my words could be interpreted that way” or some such response.

What compounds the pain and stamps it indelibly on my heart is to be told that my reaction is unfair because the person had good intentions. Weirdly enough it usually makes the “well-intentioned” person sound like their only intention is to come out beyond reproach, which unfortunately doesn’t constitute a good intention. A lack of actively bad intention also does not equal an actively good intention. Recently I posted a mini sound-off about the sheer number of times I get asked about my family planning in a week (“Just the one child? You’ll want to hurry up and give her a sibling soon…” that sort of thing). One response basically said that people didn’t mean any harm by it and it was up to the individual how they respond – the implication being that my view was unfair.

Three problems with this. Firstly in trauma it often isn’t up to the individual how they respond, unless they are already out of the other side of some very effective therapy, and even then a controlled response is not a guarantee. I am 15 months into living with trauma and sometimes I still have my breath taken away by how little people actually understand about what happens to you as a human being when you go through an event that is both traumatic and results in the death of a beloved, cherished child. I am far enough in now that I can’t really remember what it felt like to be a person that didn’t understand the impact of trauma, even though I spent 34 years in that blissful unawareness myself. So in the world that I inhabit, that part of the above response was factually and emotionally incorrect.

Secondly, in the above example of being questioned about the number of children I have, I find it difficult to see find the actively good intention. I can definitely see the absence of a bad intention; I assume the person is usually trying to make small talk, perhaps build a connection with the other person. OK, on reflection perhaps that is a fairly good intention, which I admit I sometimes overlook because of my desperate discomfort with small talk. When the conversation goes “how many children do you have?” followed by asking her age, what is she like, what things is she into, that feels like well-intentioned, interested small talk. When the more judgy “you’d better give her a sibling” or “you want to hurry up and get started, you’re not getting any younger” starts to creep in…how is that well-intentioned? I think I’m asking that as a genuinely open question, because in these instances I simply can’t see how anyone with any self-awareness can think they’re being anything other than intrusive and judgemental. To my mind the “good intentions” argument does not stand up to scrutiny here.

The third problem is that being kind, really genuinely behaving kindly on a regular basis, relies on an awful lot more than intention alone. I love an equation, and my kindness equation would look something like this:

We’re all human, and as such we all have it in us to behave accidentally unkindly or hurtfully from time to time. Kindness can be more nuanced than simply being labelled a “kind” or “unkind” person. If you have lovely intentions but what you actually do is something harmful, even by accident, then the willingness to reflect and learn needs to kick in so that you can bank the event in your brain and do something different next time. When someone points out that something you’ve said is hurtful, and your response is that the intention was good and therefore you should be immune from hearing such feedback, then unfortunately the good intention alone doesn’t get anyone very far.

With the recent sad death of Caroline Flack, there is a lot of talk of kindness on social media right now. I will confess that I didn’t actually know who Caroline Flack was before this week (yes, I do live in a cave). I have gleaned enough from the news and social media to see that what happened to her is horribly sad and I genuinely hope that talking more about kindness makes a difference. What niggles at me is that some of the people advocating kindness on their Facebook walls are the very same people that sometimes struggle to treat grieving and traumatised people with compassion and understanding (some, I hasten to emphasise, and not all, not by any stretch). What I’m talking about in this post is very, very different to active trolling and bullying; I hope it’s obvious to us all that that sort of behaviour is disgusting, although it happens frequently to broken-hearted parents simply trying to make their child’s impression upon the world. Seeking comfort from the social media accounts of people in a similar situation to me, I’ve seen comments from trolls that made my blood boil and my stomach turn. What I’m talking about here though is much more subtle, much more complex because nobody is at obvious fault in the same way. But – and if you only take one point from this post I hope it’s this one – it still hurts. Sometimes it really, really hurts. When a grieving person points this out, they are not trying to make you feel like crap. They are trying to protect their shattered heart and their overwhelmed soul, and make it just a little bit less daunting to get out of bed and go out into the world the next day.

If we genuinely want a kinder world, then we need to recognise that intentions alone are not always enough. Good intentions need to be backed up by good actions, which are informed by an openness to feedback and a willingness to understand why even well-intentioned actions can sometimes cause harm. I semi-joked in frustration to a friend this week that I wanted to get the saying “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” printed on a t-shirt. I would wear it under my clothes at all times and whip up my jumper (no doubt causing some alarm and horror in the process) every time I am confronted with the “good intentions” argument. It places sole responsibility on the grieving, traumatised person. It is up to the already struggling person to not feel pain when something painful is said or done, to completely control their thoughts, emotions and reactions. Whereas the other person removes all responsibility from themselves – their intentions were good, so their job is done – and places it squarely on the shoulders of the struggling person. Again none of this is done on purpose, but it can leave the grieving person reeling. There is a saying that we judge ourselves by our intentions and we judge others by their behaviour. That is human nature. Yes, us grieving folk do work hard, we work extremely hard not to be hurt, not to react to things that we know are not meant unkindly. In a world where we are poorly equipped to handle people’s pain and suffering, where there is immense pressure to always see the rainbows even when you’re elbow deep in quick sand, I’m afraid some re-education in how to talk to grieving and/or traumatised people is necessary. And for our world to be a genuinely kind one, surely we all need to be responsible for both cutting each other some slack and paying due care and attention to the things we say and do ourselves and the impact they can have.

I know that people worry that they need to be perfect, to have the perfect thing to say to someone that has been through something horrific. That pressure is horrible and difficult…and unnecessary. Nobody expects perfection. No grieving person expects to go through the world and encounter zero difficult or triggering conversations. Some of the best and kindest people in my life have had absolute foot-in-mouth moments and I have watched as the look of horror crosses their face as soon as the sentence is out in the air. In fact, sometimes they have said something, reacted in horror, and the thing they think will hurt me has sailed completely over my head. C’est la vie. The point is that their kindness comes in the form of their “oh god what have I just said?” moment. I have said things to other grieving parents, thinking that it’s the kind of response that would comfort me and finding is hasn’t comforted that person at all, proving that perfection is not possible. Perfection is not expected. All I am asking is that people are open to feedback, with the quid pro quo that the feedback is delivered gently and sensitively too. I am asking for a willingness to reflect, learn and adapt – and an ending to the expectation that it is up to the grieving to silently swallow our pain. It is a big ask, and it demands a lot from us all mentally and emotionally. But, to me, this represents kindness in its truest, deepest and most effective sense.