Imagine for a moment that you are going through a hard time and feeling a lot of emotion when someone says to you: Get over it.
How does that make you feel?
Now imagine any time you share something you care about or are upset by, and someone says: get over it. That can make you feel like the person who said it—intentionally or not—is minimizing things that you care about or are going through. The use of those three words often shows a lack of empathy.
No matter how tempting, it’s not helpful to tell someone to get over it. Saying get over it to something that someone is trying to make sense of, isn’t worth it.
Don’t get me wrong though, I have thought it and said it. When I don’t understand, it’s far easier for me to write off someone’s experience than enter into it. Understanding someone else’s pain can be hard, but it’s worth trying.
Everyone has a different process and for better or worse—with the world we live in—we get to watch people process in person and on social media. When someone is going through something that’s different than you, or they feel differently about a topic, that’s okay. It’s not any less valid than the way you feel.
I think we can all agree, that no one likes being told how to feel.
Telling someone to get over something, invalidates what they care about, crushes how they feel and implies that—since they haven’t gotten over it—something is wrong with them. If they are talking about it, they haven’t gotten over it and telling them to won’t make them get over anything.
Empathy is vital to relationships. Expressing empathy helps us to understand people that we don’t understand. It gives us clarity, insight, and perspective. It stops us from saying insensitive things. People think what they think. People believe what they believe. Conversations about differences are far more effective than criticism and judgment.
Insecurity often causes us to panic when others are upset about something that we aren’t. Or when they care about something that we don’t. When we let our insecurities drive our actions, we can lash out and push our emotions and thoughts onto others.
We are all responsible for our own journey and our own emotional growth. When we want to control how someone else processes or feels, that’s when we run into trouble.
Instead of saying, get over it and alienating those who aren’t over it I would encourage you to step back and attempt to see life from their perspective. Empathy requires us to try to understand where someone is coming from and why they feel like they do. It doesn’t mean you have to agree with how they feel or feel what they are feeling. It means you come to a place where you see things through their eyes.
Loving people means caring about them where they are at, no matter if you agree with them or not. It means you don’t say things just to squish your own insecurities. It means choosing empathy instead of judgment.
There are some things that some of us might never get over. One of the keys to emotional maturity is the ability to get mad, sad, and then move on. Sometimes the moving on is getting over something, and sometimes it is simply moving past it whatever that looks like individually.
Not saying “get over it” applies to saying that to yourself too. Give yourself grace, patience, and empathy. Don’t stuff your emotions because you think you should be over something that is still bothering you. Don’t ignore your pain, learn to walk through it.
Some of the things that happen in our lives are too significant to move past on our own and we need outside help. That’s completely fine. That’s where going to see a professional counsellor can be a great asset to your healing process. We all need to move on from things, my point is that other people telling us that doesn’t speed up the process, but empathy can.
I challenge you this week to choose empathy instead of judgment and to allow people to be where they are at (yourself included). Focus on the things that you need to work on and overcome. What’s holding you back? What can you move on from today that will lead you down the path to emotional freedom?
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