82: Expecting Empathy From Loved Ones May Be the Worst Way to Get Support

If you’re grieving your dream of becoming a parent, you probably assumed at least someone amongst your family and friends would provide you with the support and empathy you need.  And yet, my own experience, and that of most of my clients, is that their closest friends and family - and sometimes even their partner - are not able to offer empathy or understanding.  

This is why looking for support among those closest to you – or worse, expecting it from them – might not be the best way to get the support you need.  

Here's what you'll discover in this episode:

• Why support may not come from your loved ones
• Why childless women tend to minimize or invalidate their feelings and struggles
• How to source genuine support
• What to do to truly accept and receive support

Impact Question: Have you deemed yourself, or your grief, not worthy of receiving support? If you've answered yes, send me a DM with the word "support" and I'll show you how to get the support you need, whenever you need it.

Where to find Sheri:

Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching

Website: sherijohnson.ca

If you want to create your best life in 2024, even without kids, download my free guide.  You'll discover how to find purpose, joy and fulfillment and what might be standing in the way. 
Click here for your free guide

Transcript

Sheri Johnson: 0:00

Hi, I'm Sherri Johnson, and you are about to discover how to embrace your life as a childless woman who wanted to have a family and never could. This is where we combine mindset shifting tools with practical tips so you can break free of outdated societal norms that condition us all to believe that women without kids just don't measure up to the moms. It's where we take action on processing grief and accelerating the healing journey so you can feel free. When childless women awaken their self-worth, they transform from hopeless and inadequate to worthy, accepting and purposeful. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of light bulb moments that will shift your perspective as a childless woman, about yourself, about your innate power to change yourself, your future and maybe even the world we live in. If that's what you want, then keep on listening. If you're grieving your dream of becoming a parent, you probably assumed at least somebody among your family and friends would provide you with the support or empathy you need, and yet my own experience, and also thought of most of my clients, is that we get very little support from our friends and family, and for some women, they don't even get support from their own partner. This is why looking for support among those closest to you or, worse, expecting it from them might even be the worst way to get the support that you need. In today's episode, I'm going to break down why this is and what to do instead. So if you're a childless woman looking for support right now, keep on listening. Start the podcast intro here. Welcome back to the Awakening Worth podcast.

Sheri Johnson: 2:02

Okay, so the title of this episode might have you intrigued or maybe annoyed. Or perhaps you're someone who already knows from your own experience that those people closest to you are not always the best at empathizing with you and your journey, and yet you might still be cursing your best friend for being so insensitive. Or maybe it's your mom or your sibling who just can't stop talking about their kids or their grandkids and just don't even know how to be sensitive towards you or how to support you, and I know why we think this. I expected support from my own family as well, and my friends were taught to expect support from them. That's what friends are for, right, but I want to ask you something.

Sheri Johnson: 3:05

If you take yourself back to the time when you were a teenager and you think about the things that you endure as a teenager, I'm going to use one example of the breakup. So you have your first, maybe it's not even your first. You get together with somebody for the first time or the second time or one of the first few times with a guy or girl that you really like, and they break up with you and you go to your mom or your dad or parent or a friend and their answer is oh, don't worry about it, there's plenty of fish in the sea. And what that says is your grief isn't valid, this loss isn't valid. Sometimes they say you're young, you'll find somebody else. You're invalidating that loss that you feel, the pain that you feel, and telling you ah, there's, you know, just move on, move on, there's more, you'll find somebody else. So it's not just our childless journey that we feel this lack of support.

Sheri Johnson: 4:25

I think as a teenager, I just didn't know how to recognize support or lack thereof. I felt annoyed, but I didn't really know why. When those things happened, even as an adult, this actually happened to me as not that long ago. It was probably about, oh, I want to say now, about six years ago, when I was still kind of in the thick of it and I was with a group of girls who were all mothers and one of them asked me how things were going. I was still in the fertility journey at that point. One of them asked how it was going and I started to tell this story of how I had broken down in tears that day, I thought I was doing pretty well and suddenly this thing. It just triggered all this sadness and grief and guilt and one of the girls said oh, you shouldn't feel that way, you shouldn't feel guilty. And I was so annoyed by that and I didn't know why at the time.

Sheri Johnson: 5:25

It wasn't until later that I was reading. Actually, I was reading a book by Glennon Doyle called Love Warrior, and in that she talks about pain and the things that people say and why they say it. And what that friend was doing was invalidating. She was telling me, intellectualizing well, I shouldn't feel guilty. Well, I know that, but I still feel that way. So our friends do this and our family does this as well, and it's not just on the child's journey or the fertility journey or the whatever it is.

Sheri Johnson: 6:04

I think as a single woman, I heard this a lot as well. Oh, you'll find someone. Or stop being so picky, or you know, there's plenty of guys out there. You're going to find someone soon. It wasn't. They wouldn't allow themselves to just sit with me in the, the pain that I felt, the the shame that I felt as a single woman who hadn't yet found a partner. So this happens a lot and it's not just on this journey. It it probably has happened to you a lot of times in other contexts and you just didn't realize why you were annoyed or why you didn't feel like you were validated. And and yet it happens all the time.

Sheri Johnson: 6:57

And, what's more, I'm willing to bet that you've also been on the other end of that. So you've probably been in a position where maybe one of your friends shared her struggles with motherhood with you and you couldn't understand or refuse to because it seemed insensitive to you for them to ask you to listen and you probably didn't support her in, or maybe not in I shouldn't say probably. Perhaps you did. Perhaps you are are unicorn and and you were able to to do that. I certainly wasn't in the thick of my grief or my triggers. Now I certainly can, because I can try to, I can empathize, I can sit with them in their pain, but I definitely could not support my friend in her struggles because I didn't understand, and our friends and family don't necessarily understand what we're going through either. So this is I'm going to explain why, and then we'll get into what to do instead. So here are the reasons why our friends and family, the people that we expect support from, actually can't.

Sheri Johnson: 8:26

First, they're too close. They're too close to us, they're too close to our pain. So it's a little bit like I've ever been in this situation. Where I was in this situation, I had a friend. This has happened a couple of times where I had a friend, I had a friend, I had a friend. I had a friend. I had a friend who dislocated their shoulder Two friends this happened too, and maybe you even see this on TV.

Sheri Johnson: 8:51

If it's something that hasn't actually happened to you the friend me in this case or the person who's closest to them on the show, they're not the ones to ask to put that shoulder back in place. You know that putting a shoulder back in place is a painful thing. The family member, the close friend, that is not the person who can stand to see you in that kind of pain. It's always well. Ideally it's a doctor, but if that kind of person isn't available, then it's got to be someone else. You see this on in the movies when someone's got to pull a knife out of their friend, and hopefully this has never happened to you.

Sheri Johnson: 9:38

But whenever you're asked to cause pain or to deal with pain in someone who's close to you, it's the most challenging thing that you could be asked to do. It's so painful to watch someone you love in pain so they try to ward it off Emotional pain. It's like asking them to support you in your pain. To sit with you in your pain is like asking them to put your shoulder back in place. They just don't want to see you in that kind of pain, so they can't go there. And I know you might be thinking well, that's their job to go there. They can't. They just they can't even fathom it, especially a parent. It's really tough for a parent to do that. So that's the first thing they're just too close to us to be able to see us or feel our pain.

Sheri Johnson: 10:34

And when you sit with someone in their pain, that's what you have to do. You actually have to feel it with them. So the second thing is that they haven't been even taught to do that. So most people don't actually know. They haven't been taught to sit with someone else in their pain. They haven't been taught what to say. They haven't been taught to just deal with the awkward silence and allow you to cry or allow you to talk or to just allow you to feel that pain. They've been taught to fix, fix it or show us the silver lining.

Sheri Johnson: 11:21

So what you get when you look for support is often someone who says, well, have you tried this, or have you tried that? Or they'll say, well, at least, at least you don't have to worry about getting babysitters when you go for dinner or go traveling or whatever. At least you get to sleep in in the morning. They're taught to look for silver linings, and we do that too. I have Gosh. I've become so aware of this now and I've watched myself do it without even thinking. Someone was telling me about a really embarrassing moment that she got herself into at work. She did something wrong and she was really feeling bad about it, and I immediately went to my own experience and said, well, at least she didn't have to do this, at least this didn't happen. And then I caught myself and thought, oh, my goodness, I've just done exactly what I chastised other people for doing, which was to look for that silver lining, the at least that's what that is.

Sheri Johnson: 12:28

And then the third thing is that we don't talk. So the number of times I've heard one of my clients say well, I don't want to put a damper on our dinner. When I'm out for dinner with my friends, I'm not going to start talking about my grief because I don't want to put a damper on dinner. Or I don't want to rain on their parade, meaning they're their happy family, they're happy with their life as a mother. I don't want to rain on that parade, and that to me is like walking around with a shoulder out of place and not saying a word about it and then expecting them to somehow know that you're in pain. So the reason that we don't talk is I'm going to talk about this later, actually, but just to give you a sense of what this number three is about is that we don't feel that our grief or our struggles are worthy. And yet you know others will come to us and not give it a second thought when they want to talk about their struggles. So I'm going to come back to that.

Sheri Johnson: 14:47

But we're on the Awakening Worth podcast. There is a self worth component to this where we either think we're not worthy or that our grief isn't worthy. So let me come back to that. Let me give you five things to do instead of actually expecting support from your family. Number one there is a way to find support from within. Call it from your soul, support from your source, support from God, whatever language is comfortable for you, but finding that support internally is actually entirely possible and it's very effective.

Sheri Johnson: 15:39

I grew up in a religious home and I actually never I could never really conceptualize what it meant when people said God is always with you. It was only in the last 10 years when I moved away from my religious, from maybe the rituals of religion, and started exploring spirituality. I started following Gabby Bernstein and Marianne Williamson and Wayne Dyer, and that's when I started to understand that I could source support from within me. And it's so easy. It's life changing and it can actually be quite a blissful kind of experience, at least the way that I teach it. I teach women how to do this, by the way, inside of the Women of Worth group immersion, my group program, and we use the Joy formula, which is a framework that I created to help childless women find peace and purpose beyond motherhood, and one of the pillars specifically focuses on finding relief from grief through my self-support system, through my acceptance model and through connection.

Sheri Johnson: 16:52

Okay, so let's move on to number two. So, number one find support from within. Number two ask for what you need. If you don't ask for what you need from others, they can't give it to you or know how to, or may not even know that you need support. They might not even know that you're grieving.

Sheri Johnson: 17:20

I had a woman approach me that I've known for probably 10 years and she was with a partner who had children of his own, and they didn't have any children together. And even I, coming from this place, I just assumed that she was okay with it, and it was only recently, when I really started talking about my own journey, that she approached me and said I feel this deep grief all the time and it broke my heart and it also made me realize I need to. I mean, I'm glad that now I am being more open about this so that people feel more comfortable about approaching me, but I also need to be more conscious of it as a childless woman and not just assume that someone is okay with it just because I've never asked them. But I opened the door for her to ask for what she needed, which was understanding and connection and support. But we also need to get comfortable asking for that from the people around us.

Sheri Johnson: 18:46

If they don't know what you're going through, they have no idea that you even need support and they can't give you what you need. And you might be thinking well, I have asked for that support, I have talked to other people and they weren't able to give it to me, and that happens as well. So I understand that as well, and actually the next number three I'm going to speak to that but it doesn't mean. I guess what I want to say about that is that if they can't give you that support or they don't know how to, that doesn't actually mean anything about you. It doesn't mean anything about you. It only means that they don't know how to give you what you need, and so you need to move on to somebody else who does know how to give you that or who is willing to try. So if you don't get that, it doesn't mean anything about you. It doesn't mean they don't like you. It doesn't mean they don't care for you. It just means they don't know how to give that to you. They don't know how to give you what you need. So that's number two. You still need to find the courage to ask for what you need.

Sheri Johnson: 20:01

Number three forgive the people who can't support you or don't know how. Most of the time when you ask for support or someone can't give you support or they're insensitive, they say something insensitive. They have no idea how you're feeling. They don't carry around that burden with them. They might not even know that they've upset you. It's you who carries around that anger or that hurt or that burden, and that only hurts you. You carry that inside of you. That has a physiological effect inside your body, and letting that go is how you achieve freedom.

Sheri Johnson: 20:52

Forgiveness is not about the other person. It's not about condoning what they have said or what they have done or what they have not done. It's about letting go of your burden. It's letting go of the anger that you feel. It's letting go of that negative energy, and it's so freeing when you're able to do that. That is actually. It's something that I know is really hard to do and you're probably resisting this right now. Our ego, your brain, wants to protect you and it will sometimes force you to hold on to a grudge or to not allow for that forgiveness, and that's just that's the human ego that wants to. That's your brain trying to keep you safe, but it actually does the opposite. So when you let that go is when you feel freedom. That's when you open up your heart to allow in what you do need. When you let go of that negative energy, it creates space in your heart for support. Number four so that's number three forgive the people who can't support you or don't know how to. Number four find connection. We grieve in connection with others. So find the people who you can connect with, who do understand what you're going through, who can provide you with that support, who can sit with you in your pain, and that maybe you may have a friend who is a mother who can do that, or you may find someone in the childless online community who can do that for you. Find someone who can do that.

Sheri Johnson: 22:50

Now I do like to give a caveat with this one, because sometimes what I have noticed in some of the online support groups is that others might still be too far in the thick of their own pain to be able to support you, and the way that that comes out is. It might come out as something like oh, you shouldn't feel that way. If someone expresses how they're feeling and someone might say something like you shouldn't feel that way, one of those should involve there's invalidation. They might say, you know, you might be tempted to vent and what you'll get back is other people relating to that and saying yes, you are so right in that judgment of that person who doesn't know how to support you, and that is someone who is still in their lack of forgiveness. They are still in their pain. They're still in their own.

Sheri Johnson: 24:02

I know this is a sensitive word as well. They're in their victim mode. They're giving their power away to other people who are not supporting them, and that's what having that expectation, or that's what asking people to stop making insensitive comments. You're giving your power to those people to stop making the insensitive comments. You're giving your power to them, and that's victim mentality and it's okay to be in that for a time. We all are I was too but there comes a time when you want to begin to heal. You need to begin to empower yourself and begin to let go of asking other people to stop triggering you, asking other people to be more sensitive, expecting that from other people, because you really you can't Other people, you can't control their behaviors, you can't control what they say. There's always going to be someone who triggers you, always.

Sheri Johnson: 25:02

Okay, so that's number four. Find connection with others. So let's sum that one up, actually minus caveat. So others who are still in too much pain may not be able to support you, but you can find so much solace in connecting with other women who know how you feel, or other men or other people who know how you feel and have been in your shoes, so that grief can provide connection in and of itself and healing as well.

Sheri Johnson: 25:44

Number five Find a coach or therapist who is also childless. I can't tell you the number of clients and colleagues in the childless space who have told me that they've seen a therapist who had children and they did exactly what we're talking about here they invalidated and that it completely breaks down the coach, client or therapist client relationship. So when you're looking for someone, if you're looking for someone, they don't necessarily need to be childless but ask them how they will handle that, how they will support you. Find out if they are the right person for you. Interview them, make sure they're the right person to support you, because it will be counterproductive if they don't know how to handle that grief, or if they invalidate it, or if they can't believe that it's there, or whatever the case may be. So those are my five tips.

Sheri Johnson: 26:58

Let's recap and then we'll come back to the self-worth piece. So number one is to find support from within. Number two is to ask for what you need. Number three is forgive the people who can't support you or don't know how. Number four is find connection with others. And number five find a coach or a therapist who is either childless or knows how to deal with that kind of situation, that kind of circumstance. So there's one thing that's going to stand in your way of doing any of this, and that is your own self-worth.

Sheri Johnson: 27:45

So, coming back to what I was saying earlier, if you don't recognize your grief as worthy of support, you won't allow yourself to receive that support. And if you don't deem yourself worthy of being supported, you don't deem yourself as deserving of support. You won't allow yourself to receive it. You'll just say, well, I don't want to reign on their parade. Or you'll say, well, I don't want to put a damper on dinner.

Sheri Johnson: 28:17

And if you're saying those things, ask yourself have I decided that I'm not worthy of receiving that support? Maybe you're buying into society's conditioning that losing a dream is not a valid reason to grieve. So ask yourself that. If you found yourself saying I don't want to burden them, I don't want to reign on someone else's parade, ask yourself have you deemed yourself not worthy enough to receive the support that you need? And if that's you, if you've answered yes, then send me a DM with the word support. I would love to support you inside of the Women of Worth group immersion and I will share with you. We can jump on a call and we can map out what your self support system looks like. So send me a DM with a word support if that's something that you need and are looking for, and you can find me at Sherry Johnson Coaching. I'll link that up in the show notes. That's it for today. Bye for now.