does it make me a bad person

Loneliness, Depression & Relationship Forum

Help Support Loneliness, Depression & Relationship Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
T

Trent

Guest
if i get annoyed when people i don't know tell me that someone close to them just died and then stand there and wait for some show of sympathy?

don't get me wrong, i am an empathetic and sympathetic person. and i offer sincere condolences, words of encouragement, and offer to keep a person in my thoughts and prayers.

but still...sometimes that doesn't seem to appease. how much sympathy is it reasonable to expect from a complete stranger that you are sharing incredibly personal details with?

maybe this annoys me because i would never do it. i don't share my burdens with people. i keep my losses to myself. i don't look to strangers for encouragement or solace.

i must be a bad person, but this offends me. to me, it's no different than turning around in the grocery line and saying "i honeysuckle this morning, it was mushy, i call it mudbutt, and i had to wipe three times as much, my finger broke through, i accidentally anally sodomized myself, and had to wash my hands three times"

i'm sure it's true, but i don't want to ******* hear it.
 
Trent said:
if i get annoyed when people i don't know tell me that someone close to them just died and then stand there and wait for some show of sympathy?

don't get me wrong, i am an empathetic and sympathetic person. and i offer sincere condolences, words of encouragement, and offer to keep a person in my thoughts and prayers.

but still...sometimes that doesn't seem to appease. how much sympathy is it reasonable to expect from a complete stranger that you are sharing incredibly personal details with?

maybe this annoys me because i would never do it. i don't share my burdens with people. i keep my losses to myself. i don't look to strangers for encouragement or solace.

i must be a bad person, but this offends me. to me, it's no different than turning around in the grocery line and saying "i honeysuckle this morning, it was mushy, i call it mudbutt, and i had to wipe three times as much, my finger broke through, i accidentally anally sodomized myself, and had to wash my hands three times"

i'm sure it's true, but i don't want to ******* hear it.

No, it doesn't make you a bad person. As someone on the other side, I don't expect, or even want, sympathy from people I don't know - The people who know me well didn't know what to say. In fact, the day before Jackie's funeral my dad said "there will be a lot of people tomorrow who aren't going to know what to say to you, and I'm probably one of them" - so I know that people who don't know me won't have any clue what to say
 
No. I seriously don't think so. I've Ben in the same situation & they actually pause after a while like they want to hear something nice but it usually results in me walking off or saying at least they don't have to be on is earth anymore & then it just makes things worse. It just feels like they want the attention & so sometimes it pisses me off. I actually thought for a long time it was me who had the problem.
 
OddlyUnique said:
No. I seriously don't think so. I've Ben in the same situation & they actually pause after a while like they want to hear something nice but it usually results in me walking off or saying at least they don't have to be on is earth anymore & then it just makes things worse. It just feels like they want the attention & so sometimes it pisses me off. I actually thought for a long time it was me who had the problem.

YES! they pause...

like a puppydog waiting for a treat.

i'm not saying all people do this,

but there are people out there who seem to clearly (and shamelessly) seek sympathy from strangers by announcing their losses

it's the PAUSE that gets me.
 
I try to be that person that gives the time of day. Especially to those that are grieving. It is a deep pain to lose someone you care about in this life.

I know kind strangers have left a powerful impression on me in the past and have made all of the difference.
 
potato said:
I try to be that person that gives the time of day. Especially to those that are grieving. It is a deep pain to lose someone you care about in this life.

I know kind strangers have left a powerful impression on me in the past and have made all of the difference.

me too (i give the time of day, i've suffered losses)

but the point of this thread wasn't whether or not i'm a nice person

it's whether or not fishing for sympathy in a weird/awkward/borderline-inappropriate fashion is cool or not
 
Trent said:
YES! they pause...

like a puppydog waiting for a treat.

i'm not saying all people do this,

but there are people out there who seem to clearly (and shamelessly) seek sympathy from strangers by announcing their losses

it's the PAUSE that gets me.

Yeah it's that usually makes me think their pulling that card for attention. What makes it even worse is when they don't even wait long enough for you to get away before you hear them telling someone else. I've seen that happen before
 
It's a tough spot.

Fishing for sympathy can be a guise for so many things: Loneliness, internal pain, perhaps just a way to let off steam. Granted, don't let yourself become an emotional trashcan. However, I'd rather see someone trying to talk to others about their woes, fishing for sympathy, rather than turn inward and/or go into a destructive down-spiral for it and lose faith in humanity.

It's harder to keep my cool when people say, "No one has it as bad as I do", "My life is worse that everyone else", etc. I have to work on truly hearing some people out, because my patience goes out the window when I hear things like this. Bottom line: Pain is pain.

If someone is reaching out, it is for a reason. But there is a point is well beyond simply listening or anything you can do and the person just needs to seek help from a therapist or other professional.
 
people tell me all day long every day...

how they had/have it harder than me in life

strangers

can you imagine?
 
You just lack sympathy. That's what it comes down to. Maybe your own pain has made you callous to the pain of others.
 
No. You're not a bad person. You can only offer so much sympathy for someone you don't know. Anything more than that to appease the one who lost a loved one would just come off as insincere. If a celebrity like Michael Jordan died tomorrow. I would offer my condolences to the folks who lost him, but I wouldn't fall to my knees crying my eyes out like I would if one of my own family members died.
 
I tend to do what the OP is bothered by. I realize I do, but no matter how much I try to change it, I do it anyway. If I ignore people and don't talk to anyone, I end up making social situations awkward and uncomfortable for everyone, and if I do talk, people get bothered by me because I just talk about my problems.

I also find that when other people talk about their problems, I feel nothing. I attempt to feign sympathy, but I truly feel nothing because I have no context. Or if I try to relate and say I understand what they are going through, I know what it's like, they tend to ignore me and close up as if I couldn't possibly know, only they could know how bad it really is for them, which is probably quite true, I can't know, to the larger extent, I'm not them.

I do find, though, that there is a certain context and set and setting. For example, perhaps with a close friend.

I think it's a matter of something being constantly on your mind, and you are searching for some one who has time to spare to give you there full attention and or can actually be fully capable of giving you their time and full attention. Some one who can actually feel for you. What conditions are responsible for fostering such a situation are not completely clear to me as this rarely happens, but it does happen some times. I think we are able to feel a true connection with another persons pain when we are in an equally painful experience, that is to say, the emotional setting in our minds is the same. Some one who shot themselves in the foot may be feeling the same amount of pain as some one who got shot in the leg, but the emotions and the type of pain, the context, is different. One would invariably say to the other, well you shot yourself in the foot, that was your own fault.

I can think of one situation in which people tend to be able to share themselves, give and receive, equally. Hostage situations, especially where the hostages have bonded with the person who took them hostage. They all share the same sense, the same feeling, the same relief yet unanswerable guilt for the way the situation ended up resolving itself.

I think these types of situations are governed by the limits of human point of view, which at it's most accurate level of measure may not at all even be completely possible to know what another person is going through, ever...

Yet despite this, we do manage to relate some times, we do manage to have sympathy, empathy, compassion, and understanding. That in itself is at least quite interesting.
 
Trent said:
people tell me all day long every day...

how they had/have it harder than me in life

strangers

can you imagine?

That honeysuckle's me, when people do that.
 
Parabolani said:
Trent said:
people tell me all day long every day...

how they had/have it harder than me in life

strangers

can you imagine?

That honeysuckle's me, when people do that.
That pisses me off too. For some dumb reason it gives them a sense of superiority. I use to hang with a guy who made it clear every day that he has to roll his own cigarette butts when he runs out of tobacco. Just because I had the money to buy TM's and he didn't.
 
Trent said:
people tell me all day long every day...

how they had/have it harder than me in life

strangers

can you imagine?

Aye. You can never really confide in people who think that way because they turn most things into a competition.

Exhausting, really.
 
Oh your Mom just died? Guess what I never knew my Mom she died before I was born!!!
 

Latest posts

Back
Top