Have you ever poured your heart out to somebody and they did not understand you? If this has happened to you then you will understand that one of the sterling qualities in the character makeup of the helping funeral professional is to understand other people to the best of our abilities.
In this article I am going to cover three aspects in the process of human understanding.
SELF UNDERSTANDING:
The first way to start to understand other people is to understand yourself and this most times is a painful exercise in character building which usually starts with our taking a long hard look in the mirror; not an easy assignment.
The funeral professional ideally is a student of self-improvement and about death, loss, about the values of rituals and ceremonies, about life realities and life challenges, about grief. This is indeed time well spent.
This article is not centered exclusively around the funeral professional becoming more acquainted with their own personality per se, but it will suffice to say that of the three types of understanding we are addressing self-understanding, self-awareness, and self-realization are the most difficult to embrace.
Personality inventories, attitude surveys, and personal assessments are on the internet in abundance and free to help jump start a beginning attempt for an individual to start answering the question “Who am I?” Another way to find out information about who you are is in simple conversations with trusted family, friends, and professional colleagues. These interactions can be an effective approach in our process of looking hard and long in the mirror. All of these avenues are readily available and for the serious life student should be taken full advantage of.
Here is a case study. For several years I played host to a group of nursing students who came to the funeral home I managed to take a tour. The nursing students did this twice a year. It has always fascinated me to watch people take a tour of a funeral home and the nursing students were no exception. The process is usually predictable: the group hesitantly enters the building, sometimes giggling, bumping into each other, trying to act mature, but then defy their act by laughing at inappropriate times and over inappropriate subjects.
Then I introduce myself. Any reader who knows me knows that I am a “big boy” and have a shock of white unruly hair, and a deep bass voice, that one of my speaker associates dubbed as “the voice of Todd.” In other words I am innocently intimidating – I don’t mean to be, but that is the way it is, of course until people get to know my loveable personality (that is a joke folks).
The nursing students, naturally don’t know or understand anything concerned with anything about our beloved profession, absolutely nothing, and even if they “think” they know something the odds are always on the side that what they think they know is wrong. They also know absolutely nothing about TVB, so I know they are not looking at me as a feeling human being, but as an odd and strange fellow who is working in this odd and strange place.
So off I begin, and you know there is absolutely nothing I love to talk about more than funeral service and just how bloody great this career path truly is.
I move them across the threshold of funeral anxiety into the world of funeral interest, and once that happens watch out, because the young nursing student’s, as most people do, move quickly into an arena of active interest and then questions start coming fast and furious. I believe this is the premier reason why funeral home tours are so important. It is the best way to move anxious people from funeral and death anxiety to funeral and death interest – I firmly believe, since the death rate is a perfect 100% that this activity is always a good thing!
I have also discovered on these tours that while the different groups are interested in embalming, caskets, vaults, and such memorial items, what they really are interested in are themselves, and their own personal understanding of the world of death, dying, bereavement, and grief, their personal relationship to this reality, and how it makes them feel. And this is always a good thing, and happens most authentically inside of any funeral home anywhere on the globe.
The nursing professor always requires each student to write an assessment of this experience, and truth be told the nursing student’s written words, after their experience of standing in the presence of death is simply astounding to read, and this happens on tour after tour after tour. Their writing reflect their new found introspection, discernment and maturity concerning the most certain event in their life after their birth – their death. The giggling has stopped and true understanding has happened. It is a marvelous thing to witness and be a part of.
UNDERSTANDING OTHERS
The second way of understanding is to understand the other person, not through the eyes of others, but through our own eyes. Since this is the method by which we most frequently understand others, it deserves further scrutiny.
When I understand you or fail to understand you, I use the resources at my own command – no one else’s: my perceptual apparatus, my thinking, my feeling, my knowledge and my skills. I understand you or do not understand you in terms of myself, my life space, my internal frame of reference. If we do not speak the same language – although we may both be speaking English – I may not understand you at all. This happens constantly and is most often the causal agent for wars between nations, relationship breakup, and interpersonal conflicts.
In brief, when I understand you or when I do not, it is in terms of my background, my experience, my imagination. Most often, I suppose, we cannot do otherwise and at best can only be aware that this is what we are doing, but even a sensitive awareness that this is what is going on is a great start in improving our ability to understand others. Let me give a short example to clarify: “I don’t understand you. It’s so hot in here, and yet you keep complaining that it’s cold.” This is simple and obvious. I cannot understand that you are cold when I am warm – this “stuff” happens constantly in human interactions.
Interestingly for our profession grief is universal human emotion. It is true that “pain is pain and grief is grief” the world over. Hence one binding connection that members of our great profession possess that eludes many other vocations is that no matter what you and I can probably understand the most difficult person by connecting with them in empathetic grief counseling, and we are very good at this.
While this deep connection is a valid and real possibility yet many times some in our profession continue to tend to understand these deep emotions only in terms of themselves instead of the person expressing them. Because of this authentic understanding of another person takes a tremendous amount of good old fashioned work, and this is also just possibly why veteran funeral directors seem to possess magical understanding of a myriad of grief situations because they have just worked at understanding this emotion and communicating with people experiencing this painful emotion for so long.
Understanding another person can be exhausting. For this reason lazy people usually fail at understanding others very successfully. The most un-ambitious expression which indicates a lazy person’s interest in working to understand another is this phrase: “I don’t care.” Ever heard that one?
Such an internal attitude as “I don’t care” is anathema to everything which we hold near and dear in our heart concerning our love of funeral service. Here is a haunting question: Have you ever heard anyone in funeral service say “I don’t care?”
Another helpful and wise step in our understanding of others is that if we do not understand people, we may well want to find out what is causing the barrier. In some rare instances in funeral service, we may have to accept lack of communication as inevitable under certain circumstances with the result being that the client family leaves and engages another funeral home – this happens but fortunately it is rare.
As distasteful as the “lost call” can be at least we can attempt to cope with what we do not understand in losing a client family and take some comfort in the fact that if the family had stayed it might well have been worse with days of repeated failings to communicate and hence understand them time after time which results in stress and turmoil for everyone involved. In a very real sense true understanding of certain situation results in the blunt realization that this client family in truth should be using another funeral home.
The upside to awkward situation is that although the barrier (why the client family left) will not have been removed with their absence neither will it have been fortified. The situation of the lost client in most funeral careers is so distasteful and stressful that the third way of understanding deserves our utmost attention.
UNDERSTAND WITH ANOTHER PERSON
The third way to understand another person is the most meaningful but at the same time the most demanding. It is to understand with another person.
This calls for putting aside everything but our common humanness and with it alone trying to understand with the other person how they think, feel, and see the world about them. This way of understanding means it is ALL about the other person – it is selfless pure and simple.
This means ridding ourselves of our internal frame of reference and adopting the other person’s internal frame of reference without any mental reservation or compunction.
This skill is rare indeed. Here the issue is not to disagree or agree or even like or dislike the person but to understand what it is actually like to be that other person. This sounds quite simple though in reality it is extremely difficult if not impossible to achieve in life, with years of practice and discernment, let alone have it present within the boundaries and limits of the funeral conference.
Feeling what it is actually like to be another person requires training and extended education in the skills and procedures of the empathetic relationship. Customarily this skill is relegated to licensed therapists who form and maintain longtime working relationships with their clients.