Reach Out and Touch Someone

What a remarkable gift it would be for all of us to volunteer to provide comforting hug and consoling words when we’re afraid or disappointed! To make that possible we all need to be willing to be the support for others but also to feel comfortable accepting the support when it’s offered. Humans have always relied on their communities to be successful. But our success in this endeavor will be based on looking at the whole person, not just their physical safety.

I remember very distinctly the first couple of times I watched the movie Hook. I’m sure most of us remember the show. It’s a classic extension story based on Peter Pan starring Robin Williams, Julia Roberts, and Dustin Hoffman including many others. I’ve seen the movie so many times since that first viewing, but I still remember a particular scene that puzzled me as a kid.

The scene has Jack, Peter Pan’s son interacting with Captain Hook soon after Peter Pan’s failed attempt at reaching out and touching the outreached fingers of his children: the very simple action that Captain Hook required from Peter to save them. It wouldn’t make for a very compelling story if Peter had jumped from the cross beam on to the fishing net holding his children, although I think most parents would instinctively do that.

But the part that puzzled me growing up was when Jack bursts into tears because his Dad wasn’t able or willing to save he and his sister. Jack’s tears seemed to not come from his desperation of being stuck in the hold of the pirate ship for the rest of his life. No, those tears came more from disappointment and frustration directed toward his Dad that he didn’t care enough to do what it took to save them. Captain Hook plays on this frustration to try to win Jack over to his camp later on in the show, button this scene he also tried to explain to Jack that maybe Peter couldn’t save Jack or his sister Maggie. That, Jack simply refused to believe.

Caring parents and adults who interact with kids try to help them navigate through those often sophisticated layering of feelings of disappointment and betrayal that we deal with growing up. We are very quick to put an arm over the should of a weeping child, hug them close, and comfort them by telling them that everything will work out. And most of the time, saying that it’ll all work out isn’t a lie in the kids’ situation because most of the time, things do eventually work out and we realize that we didn’t see the whole picture well enough to foresee how things would play out.

But when we become adults, there’s some sort of unwritten and unspoken expectation that we have our emotions and fears figured out. So, although we are free to cry in certain situations as adults, those tears are usually expected to be based on feelings and emotions that we understand and know how to process. But this become problematic because I know I’ve felt, and I trust most adults have felt, large emotions in my adult life that have taken years to process and some I still don’t fully understand or feel fully comfortable with. In those moments of powerful emotion—either joy or despair and everything in between—we can feel even worse because we know we should be able to handle things like these. After all, we’re adults, right? That’s supposed to be a part of the adulting process.

The thing is, though, having a couple of extra decades behind our belts might help us recognize and place certain emotional experiences based on past experience, but we also get entirely new experiences as adults that in some ways can be even more confusing and distressing than the kinds that we experience as kids. Except so often we’re asked to face those emotional headwinds alone. And that’s just not right.

I’m so grateful that I had a psychologist for a Mom who is the best listener and who has helped me make sense of a lot of those stressful times. But most of us don’t have a clinical psychologist we can call up any time. So what a remarkable gift it would be for all of us to volunteer to provide comforting hug and consoling words when we’re afraid or disappointed! To make that possible we all need to be willing to be the support for others but also to feel comfortable accepting the support when it’s offered. Humans have always relied on their communities to be successful. But our success in this endeavor will be based on looking at the whole person, not just their physical safety.