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I’ve learned there is a huge difference between doing something together vs. going through something together. The former is almost certainly experienced with little emotional attachment – just people pulling together to get something done. Even those more task-oriented have different scales for involvement and effort – one approach doing enough to just get it done vs. giving it your all, a personal commitment or conviction to do the best they could do no matter how trivial or mundane the task may seem. This is not to say there is no psychic or emotional reward. Maybe at the end of these doing something together experiences, there is some amount of joy or satisfaction in the accomplishment, or perhaps in the working together, the back and forth of helping each other, the coordination of the efforts, and the appreciation for another hand to ease the workload. We all have different emotion scales - one could revel in the partnership of completing the task, while the other is just happy that it’s done - “cross that off the list and move on to the next thing”. But, at the end of the day, while there might be differences in what the experience means to each of us, for these kinds of involvements, there is likely little discussion of them afterwards; they’re just another of those things that got done and are now off the radar. Contrast this with going through something together. By this I mean those things that are larger, more significant life events, and ones that wrap together the participants going through it. The reasons going through something together are varied and infinite – it could be an important life event for the family, something a collection of neighbors might share, what folks at a similar stage in life are experiencing, bearing witness to a tragedy or miracle, the unenvied ordeal that soldiers on a mission might go through, the highs and lows that teammates experience over the course of a season or even in one game, co-workers involvement in a major corporate development, or the heroism a team of medical professionals earn as they negotiate their way through an emergency, or a pandemic. The list goes on and on. These shared experiences have a deeper emotional effect on us – a natural human response that is unavoidable, uncontrollable, raw and real. While the experiences might be shared, the level of the emotional impact isn’t necessarily. We all feel and process things differently of course, have our own ways of and needs for dealing with the emotions of these issues and different ways and means to talk about them, if we even can. And then there is the other side of the coin – the listening, really listening to others as they need or want to talk about it. These connections can develop into genuine and special interpersonal bonds, especially so when this practice of sharing and caring results in opening up with each other about other life events that are experienced separately. But, just because we’ve gone through these things together doesn’t mean the tie that bound us together in that moment will last. Over time, the effect wears differently on each of the participants. Being aware of this dynamic is one thing; being understanding and accepting of it quite another. What hurts , though, is when we realize we’re still feeling things deeply and others have moved on seemingly unaffected - the entire experience like a cloak that has been cast off. And, in that “freedom” they might never think about what we might still be feeling. This hurting is especially acute when the others with whom we’ve gone through these experiences are closest to us, once were, or should be still. Maybe they will be again. |