shedoesnotcomprehend: Reading more SSC archives,...

Monday, June 12, 2017

Reading more SSC archives, and came across this:
I remember, one of my first few months of internship, listening to a patient – not a PTSD patient or anything, just someone presenting with something totally different like bipolar disorder or drug addiction – explain the brutal abuse he suffered as a child. And the whole time, I was thinking “Oh god oh god this is the worst thing I’ve ever heard I want to go home and cry.”
And then he finished his story and I had to say something. And I didn’t want to say “Oh god oh god this is the worst thing I’ve ever heard I want to go home and cry”, because I was supposed to be Competent Medical Professional, and Competent Medical Professionals don’t go home and cry every time they hear a sad story.
[…]
So I said: “Gaaaaaaaaaah!”
This may, in retrospect, not have been the most appropriate comment.
and I realized I had the matching half of this anecdote and needed to share.
When I was fifteen, a 70-year-old guy whom I had never met before decided that we were In Love – despite my and my parents’ protests to the contrary – and started doing various creatively creepy things, like writing me long letters about how Pure and Definitely Nonsexual his Love For Me was, and stalking me online, and asking my parents’ permission to court me.
This was exactly as creepy as it sounds. It was really not improved by the fact that various community members, including all of the relevant authority figures, decided to take positions ranging from “none of our business” to “there are two sides to every story” to “you must have done something.”
(Thankfully, my parents were completely absolutely 100% on my side. I don’t think I could have coped, otherwise.)
Anyhow, eventually we went to the police, and so I got to be sixteen and sitting in the office of a local detective watching her look through the casefile my mom had painstakingly made up on this guy in a desperate attempt to get someone to take this seriously.
And as I was sitting there trying not to cry and wishing my parents hadn’t decided I was old enough to talk to the detective alone, she got to the photocopy of the first creepy love letter the guy had sent me.
And I swear to god the detective flinched back from the paper a little and said “Gaaaaaaaaaaah!”
…and I nearly broke down crying on the spot, because it was such a massive relief to finally have someone acknowledge that this whole thing was absurdly horrifying and creepy, instead of having to wonder if I was just crazy or oversensitive or something.
And then of course she apologized and said something much more professional about the casefile which I have long since forgotten. But over the next couple of years of dealing with that guy, I honestly cannot express how often I thought about that professional competent detective going “gaaaaah!” at his letter, and felt reassured that I was not the crazy one, and that the legal system was going to look at this case and go “gaaah!”
I will take that over all the carefully taught Certified Empathy Responses in the world.