nobody knows how I feel
“Nobody knows how I feel!” It was a scene from a sitcom. One brother was struggling with an alcohol addiction. His compassionate brother kept saying, “I know just how you feel!” But he didn’t, and it drove his drinking brother crazy.
I’ve never forgotten that scene. I still smile. But I don’t know that it has ever impacted me the way it has recently.
The truth is, I don’t really know how anyone feels. I may think I know how I would feel if I were in their circumstances. But I’m not them. And for years, my working assumption without knowing it was that everyone did or should react like me. I want to call that self-centeredness. I see the world through the only set of eyes that I have. That is my experience of the world. So intuitively I assume you do too. And I assume that my experience of it is accurate, the correct experience.
And the next truth is that my natural reaction to you feeling something uncomfortable is to want to fix it. My mind jumps to what might or should fix that feeling in me – and then I share that with you.
And guess what? That never works either. We are different, wired differently, with different feelings and different stories. So, when I share my answers for my feelings, it really shouldn’t be a surprise that my attempts fail to make you feel better. They come from my experience of the world and of God, from my self.
What do I do with this discovery that I am self-centered? In my evangelical world, self-centered has always been equated with sinful. It means that I am out for me, as opposed to being concerned for you. But I am suggesting here that at a foundational level it is simply an objective truth. I am limited by my own skin, my own story, my own assumptions about life. I am limited by the ways I have tried to deal with my own life. I am limited. And that is the human condition.
Why do I share all of this? It has been really helpful for me to face my self-centeredness as a natural state of the human condition, rather than always a statement of moral failure. I am limited in what I can know and understand in you. I naturally make assumptions about your feelings because the only feelings I really know are my own. I want to help, often from a very good heart, and so I offer what would help me. But when it doesn’t, I often get irritated or get my feelings hurt. And that is where sin comes in. When you don’t respond well to my wisdom, I get angry. You should. It feels like you are either rejecting me or my advice. And somehow that shifts me from being for you to being against you.
I am finding that owning the limitations of my self-centeredness, the fact that I see the world through my eyes, can lead me to be more gracious to me and to you. The fact that no one can really “know” how someone else feels can free me to be curious about your feelings and how you deal with them, rather than assume that you should feel things the way I do and deal with them the way I recommend. It frees me to be humble and interested and try to understand. And usually, that direction feels more loving than the advice that I wanted to give.
On the moral failure side, it helps me to see that my inability to “know” your feelings is not a statement of my failure to love. It is a statement of my limitations as a human being. But the part of me that demands you hear me, or be helped by my observations, is very sinful. When that happens, I have shifted from the heart of my advice being for your good to my advice being a validation of who I am. I need you to listen to me for my sake, not for your yours. And that’s when I need Jesus – and I have Him.
Palmer Trice is an ordained Presbyterian minister. He is married to Lynne, has three children and has been in Charlotte since 1979. In his spare time, Palmer enjoys golf, tennis, walking and reading.
