The Power of Asking ‘What If They Are Suffering?’
Whenever my instinct is to assume the worst—say, a driver cuts me off on the road or a friend takes three days to respond to my text even though I know she’s read my hilarious meme—it helps me to ask myself: What if the person is trying their best? When I believe they are, I stay out of judgment and my mind stops making up unhelpful stories that likely aren’t true.
But on Human Parts, Jane Park offers a question that goes a step further. She wonders what would happen if, whenever we feel free angry or irritated with someone, we stop to ask ourselves: What if they are suffering?
Park describes a time when a stranger at the community pool was awful to her. After a heated and bewildering exchange, she thought a lot about anger and how it’s, as she describes, “the external expression of internal sadness and unprocessed grief.” She asked herself: “What can I do as a grown-ass woman to protect myself from the anger of others — which is likely not even about me?” A powerful strategy, she found, is to assume they’re suffering.
“Assuming suffering” goes a…
