Understanding versus experience

[ninja]

Why do we say, “you can’t understand until
you’ve been through it”? In an intellectual sense, experiencing something does not mean one understands and understanding can come from study.

Are we really talking about understanding as in having a similar set of feelings due to experiencing a similar event (I am thinking about sexual abuse)? Someone who has not been through a similar experience can empathize quite a lot and experience those feelings with us. But that’s not quite the same. Perhaps their experience of the feelings is more predictable, perhaps they can get more distance from it. Perhaps not. Loved ones can get quite messed up in the head from learning about some things that happened.

What is it that experience gives that understanding without the personal and direct experience does not give?

I find myself every once in awhile wanting to seek out the company of those who have been through similar experiences, not because I want to talk about it at all, just because I want to be able to sit at a round table with the company and not have to hide anything, and not have to speak to be understood.

 

[Tinyflame]

What is it that experience gives that understanding without the personal and direct experience does not give?

Maybe reality, plus nuances, and encompassing sensory-and-otherwise experential experience?

For example, something commonly people have possibly experienced, going hungry for a time (not out of choice). Versus imagining it, it may include ulcer-like feelings, light-headedness, sleeplessness or inbility to wake, thoughts about finding food, extra awareness and different decisions to get food, having to do things that one wouldn't do (ask or be humble; beg, lie, scrounging- altering one's principles on what is 'safe' or hygenic), while hiding how one feels (physically and otherwise to others), decisions possibly made in desperation, etc etc. Versus imagining hunger, or having a choice not to eat.

 

[LuckiLee]

Feelings. We can have empathy and sympathy but we can't feel the feelings. If that makes any sense? ;)

 

[shimmerz]

In an intellectual sense, experiencing something does not mean one understands and understanding can come from study.

Understanding and studying or watching in 3rd person is nothing near to feeling the hopelessness, the shame, the terror, or the psychological mind f*ck that comes with experiential knowledge.

 

[Deleted member 12723]

Why do we say, “you can’t understand until
you’ve been through it”?

People have no frame of reference to be able to relate to something that they have not experienced. It is not the same situation at all and we cannot know what they are feeling but if we have walked in the same shoes so to speak than we can relate to so much without have to explain or go into detail if this makes sense.

What is it that experience gives that understanding without the personal and direct experience does not give?

If you have not gone through something, you are not able to understand this is where communication problems appear in trying to comfort some who has had the experience. Say we all have PTSD here so many times we all share the same pains and symptoms different yet similar. There is an understanding that surpasses knowledge or study of a thing.

For instance when I was in college so many years ago I was a femenist who would go to a friends house to visit that was a mother to a child and arrogantly expound on the things I would do if I had a child and was unaware that I was insulting and her because I frankly was educated and studied but lacked first hand knowledge so our communications failed because in essence I was an idiot at the time not having a clue of what I was expounding on. I thought my way was better because I was studying and learning and she was not.

I had to go back and apologize after I had my own children. This is similar to the children who vow as children that they would never do that to their own children when they grow up. They lack basic understand and have no grasp on the reality of actually have experience raising a child and thus lack awareness of what they are talking about. I also said things like that as a child growing up and some things I did not do but some things I repeated because of adverse circumstances.

I think for me that is what this all means. If it does not make sense maybe someone else will come along and make a better explanation for you.

 

[Sideways]

Why do we say, “you can’t understand until
you’ve been through it”?

I’m gonna throw a spanner in the works here and say - I try very hard not to ever say that. For a few reasons...

First, because if you get down to it? Even someone with ptsd doesn’t necessarily have the foggiest notion of what I’ve been through, or what my lived reality is like. And same goes if I meet someone with ptsd? I don’t assume we’re gonna have some kind of magical understanding of each other. There’s plenty of people who have ptsd that I don’t get at all. There’s plenty of people right here on this forum who are experiencing ptsd in a completely different way to me.

Second, because certain people have been around it enough to have a pretty close proximation in their mind about what it is I’m going through, and I’d be underestimating them to tell them “You don’t understand”. And it isn’t necessarily because they’ve had trauma like mine, or even have ptsd. I’ve befriended some people along the way who get me and what’s going on with me almost better than I understand myself, and their life story reads nothing like mine. People with a loved one who’s been through it, people who have spent their life’s work helping people like me? They can sometimes have a pretty good idea about exactly what my suffering is like. Often I find someone, especially my T, explaining me to myself, because she understands better than I do. I experienced it, but I’m a long way from understanding it!

Third, because there’s a not too subtle “You haven’t suffered like me” message being given if I tell someone “You wouldn’t understand because you haven’t lived it”. Actually, I don’t tell most people my life story, and most people I cross paths with haven’t given me a complete autobiography of their life either. So, there is the possibility that the person I’m talking to? Has actually walked in some shoes that are pretty darn similar to mine, and I’m just making the assumption that they haven’t.

I don’t believe that you necessarily have to experience something first hand to understand it. It definitely makes it a lot easier to understand if you’ve been through it, but some people have the capacity to understand some pretty complex and intense stuff without necessarily having to tick the “Been there, done that” box.

Every now and then, someone starts to blatantly assume they know all about me when it’s obvious they don’t. In that sort of situation, the “You don’t understand because....” can be helpful. But it’s a rare occasion that I’d use that line, because people like that? Aren’t going to hear the words coming out of my mouth regardless of what I’m saying, so something more to the point (like, “You’re an eejit and I don’t want to talk to you”) will do just as good a job!

 

[Deleted member 12723]

“You haven’t suffered like me” message being given if I tell someone “You wouldn’t understand because you haven’t lived it”.

Thank you so much Ragdoll for your really great points. I so agree with what you had to say.

 

[DandylionWishes]

It’s the difference between life and tv.
We don’t experience or sympathize with actors or characters even though we may empathize with them or become involved in the story.
“Life” isn’t like the movies.

 

[DandylionWishes]

Feelings. We can have empathy and sympathy but we can't feel the feelings. If that makes any sense? ;)[...

I can't remember where I read this (probably here) but I feel this sums it up nicely:

I can tell it to you
I can't understand it to you
I can't live it to it to you
I can't experience it to you
I can't feel it to you
I can't survive it to you

~ Namaste

 

[Tinyflame]

I think some people understand, some not really.

And this:

I experienced it, but I’m a long way from understanding it!

I think we all can potentially empathize or understand a little better if we add in to consideration knowing a person's personality, and character, or history, the context, have a frame of reference, and listen to the other's feelings and words, and see if that is indeed how they've experienced things, or not.

Sometimes there's no words, because there are no words. Just support and to stand together, whether it's shared trauma, traumas that have similarities, or the unfamiliar.

 

[ninja]

Thank you all.
Dear blah.. my thoughts are doing somersaults over each other.
Someone pointed out to me that perhaps we seek out the company of others who have been through similar experiences because those individuals may be less likely to judge our circumstance, our response.

I guess to me it really does seem like the inability to "get away" from an experience, the lack of choice, the terror and powerlessness. And the fact that those experiences can be so influential they change our actual perception of ourselves and others in a deep enough way that it becomes automatic to think that way, and thus to revise those belief takes time and a whole lot of sorting out and feeling the physical feelings. Perhaps to a loved one listening to negative experiences, those experiences are put within the context of their own worldview, through their experiences, their maturity etc. The actual empathy those individuals may feel (in part through imagining what it may have been like) may be born out of care for the individual who went through it, love of them, belief in them. And so this is one way empathy provides a different experience from direct experience. Perhaps as we are able to get enough distance from the experience via starting to feel empathy for ourselves perhaps through understanding, the healing progresses and our perception evolves and the experiences are placed within a context that is chosen by us.

Perhaps the statement "you haven't been through it you can't understand" is used to communicate a number of messages, and part of what I find difficult is that. Sometimes I think it is a way to get someone to be quiet, "you do not have the authority over this experience". \

This does not make nearly as much sense as I'd like it to, but it is helping me get out of my own head and to put in balance these two aspects, mind and body, of being a human.