This blog is a follow-up to my last post, "You Poor Thing."

My friend Kathy, the motivation for my last blog and who shared her experience of the pity-oozing phrase, "You poor thing," shared a demoralizing follow-up experience.

Imagine you've had a conversation that ended with, "you poor thing," and now you're telling a friend or loved one about your experience. You share your shame, hurt, and feelings of judgment and dismissal with this second trusted person. You tell them that hearing "you poor thing" spotlights the words poor (inadequate, inferior, and pathetic according to Power Thesaurus) and thing for you—you're a defective object, not even human. Finally, you tell your confidant that the conversation ending with "you poor thing" has poured salt into your already festering wound.

Then, impossibly, the response you hear is, "Oh, I'm sure they didn't mean anything by it," or "You're reading too much into it," or "You're just oversensitive right now."

Wow!

First, feeling dismissed by someone unable to offer anything but pity, you share your distress with another trusted soul. Then, shockingly, while sharing your dismay and hurt with someone you trust, your feelings of dismissal are dismissed, invalidated, and excused, creating yet another agonizing layer of shame.

Think about it: What's going on here? There's no compassion or humanity in pitying, dismissing, or minimizing a person's experience. On the contrary, there's cowardice, stinginess, and othering. 

Pause and Reflect: In what ways might you hurt others to protect yourself?

In my book, Witnessing Grief: Inviting Trauma and Loss to Our Coaching Conversations, an Enneagram Perspective, you can read more about what not to say and why. Witnessing Grief is available on Amazon.

Image credit: The House On The Rock