We are all familiar with the thin line between explaining something (Sorry I'm late, there was an accident on the 10) and trying to justify bad behavior (Seriously, traffic was awful, omg!). It can be hard to manage as both the receiver and the giver of such information and often comes down to trust in motivations.
I think this can be harder for behavior that is legitimately motivated by something beyond the person's control, but about which they feel guilty. I've seen this among friends and others I know who have various mental health issues, like depression, anxiety, and PTSD, especially if they are considered "high functioning". The person who suffers feel awful for letting it take control of their behavior, for acting in a way that they know is unacceptable, but in the moment they didn't have a lot of control over. This is the side I'm familiar with and can attest to the fact that it's awful. When you try to explain what it was like, you still feel guilty and you feel like you're justifying bad behavior. You end up making a lot of statements like "I know that this action is unacceptable, but let me try to explain what was going on in my head".
A friend said to me today that no one with any empathy can hold that kind of behavior against you if they know what's going on. I like the idea, but I don't know if that's true. All you can do, I guess, is to hope that the offended party is open to listening, and that they will see it for what it truly is. That they will recognize that these kinds of problems are fights that exist in you every day, and that some days are better than others, and some days you lose. For some, losing is hiding under the covers all day and letting the depression take over, hoping that tomorrow will be better, and trying not to feel the crushing guilt of not being productive. For others, losing can have much bigger consequences and effect the people in their lives, even running them out of it. In the end, we have to hope that our next bad day won't be as bad as the last one, and that the people we love learn to forgive, accept, and not see us as a sum of our bad days. Because if other people are anything like me, it can be hard not to see ourselves as that, especially when we don't have someone there to tell us otherwise.
Wow, this feels like a description of my past month.
ReplyDeleteSome days it does also feel like you're good days don't line up with anyone else. So then people look at you sideways and label you "weird."
I was talking about this recently with a friend and we discussed the difficulty of connecting with other people who don't understand, since their perceptions are usually based on fictional portrayals of our reality. How hard it is to understand the subtleties of mental illness when your frame of reference is Rainman and One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.
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