Mental Health
When Someone Smiles at Your Pain
Interpreting human facial expressions requires going beyond the cover of a book.
I can imagine few things more disheartening than a child going astray, except witnessing the concerned trouble, or the pain the parent carries. Sometimes in mental health, adults are accompanied by their parents, as if these adults are still children. Sometimes the adult child lies. The parent gets angry, tries to correct, and the counselor assures them they are aware the disparity. Parents don’t even have to speak to throw their children under the bus. I see their reactions to the answers I am getting. Sometimes the parent could be crying and the adult/child is smiling. You might suspect they think it’s funny, that they’re actually amused by the pain they’ve caused. The smiling one is often suffering more than you know.
Incongruence can come in many forms. It can be interesting to witness. Let’s say there is suspicion of trauma and you ask, ‘did you experience child abuse?’ Person speaks the word ‘No,’ while nodding ‘yes.’ More often than not, in that instance, the gesture is likely more accurate. Saying, I am confused- you’re saying this, but you’re gesturing that, sometimes results in congruency, and lot of pent up tears being released. Sometimes not, and the verification of trauma comes from an accompanying sibling or parent, and they say- yeah, there was childhood trauma, X happened… The person will argue, “That didn’t happen.”
It probably happened and one of things to address would be the disparity between reality and the fiction, because that is often what lead to them presenting in your office. These folks usually don’t stay in therapy because they think their problem is the sibling and or parent, not there own cognitive dissonance.
That is much different than someone displaying happiness on their face, when they’re experiencing sadness. People might even say they’re sad, or depressed, but they’re smiling. This is interesting to witness from a therapist perspective.
From the parent’s perspective, you’re addressing a behavior of your adult child, or even your child or teenager, and you’re saying ‘this is hurting me, I don’t want this for you…’ And they smile. Their smile feels like a knife through the heart. You might even want to slap them!
Dealing with incongruity is one of the most challenging things a parent, or loved one, even a therapist! might face. All to often we look for signs of remorse to determine whether we will be harsh or compassionate, but looking for visual cues is more often than not the worst measure of truth.
How to short circuity our own response system.
Contrary to popular belief, most communication is telegraphed visually. The voice only transmits about 20 percent of the information necessary to make a determination for response. Phone therapy is harder than video therapy which harder than in person therapy. Each medium removes a brains ability to assess data.
People do lie. Incongruence in this instance is not that. We know people lie. Gene Wilder, playing Willy Wonka, seems pretty angry when he yells at Charlie at the end of the movie. “You stole my gobstoppers. You are just as bad as those other kids! You touched my ceiling, you wasted my time and money, spit in my face for my generosity to you…” It’s an uncomfortable scene because Wilder is convincingly angry, wild, and unpredictable! He is also the guy we want most to love us. Just his fake limp in the beginning, that was a character lying to make you think ‘oh, poor him,’ only for him to say ‘I got you!’ He is applauded and cheered for the joke. But what you don’t know is that it set the tone for all future interactions with him. The rest of the show, you don’t know if he serious or joking. It created an instability that makes that yelling scene all too real!
Wonka can be excitable, or completely disengaged. “No! Not my chocolate,” followed by “Oh, it’s too late now, the suctions got him.” “The suspence is terrible. I hope it will last.” Contrast that to later, as Violet is blowing up like a blueberry, in a subdued, monotone delivery ‘no, please, stop…’
Did you know they didn’t tell the child actor that Wilder intended to rip him a new one? If Charlie looked surprised and scared, it was because he was not acting. Even the actor that played grandpa, he was genuinely emoting in that scene.
If a judge gave an actor a lighter sentence because the actor looked remorseful, well- was that real remorse? Truth is, you can’t measure remorse.
This is also evidence by the fact different cultures do not respond visually to the same emotion. Japan is particularly known for being stoic, and so if a Japanese businessman is smiling at you, that could be because they’re angry. You will likely not know it till the Samurai sword pierces your heart! An exaggeration, sure, but you get my point.
People around the world do not emote the same way for the same reasons. This also reveals why we should slow our roll when it comes to determining what’s going inside a person, realizing even social context may not be enough to know what a person really feels.
People who have experience trauma and or mental health problems may not be able to show congruence with their internal emotions. In my house, if you cried the beating was worse. It was spoken in our family, “Keep crying and I will give you something to cry about.” In this instance, we learned to put on masks.
Some conditions, like substance use, and Bipolar, results in incongruency. Bipolar doesn’t just mean a person will experience rapidly cycling emotions. The best way to understand a mood dysregulation disorder, which is what Bipolar really is, would be to think in terms of the following analogy. Imagine the house’s thermostat being broken. You get hot when you need cold, and vice versa. Bipolar by definition means the thermostat in the brain that regulate emotions doesn’t work. The temperature may fluctuate because of that, or the person with conditions may be broadcasting one emotion, but feeling another.
So, if your child, adolescents, or adult child seems to be smiling at your pain, but you know they have been using drugs and or they have been diagnosed with a mood dysregulation disorder- you have to short circuit your own brain with knowledge so that you don’t respond to the information they are telegraphing to you!
If you, as the parent, also have past trauma, and the belief that no one ever listens to you- you are more likely to respond automatically to evidence someone is laughing at your pain. People with past trauma have to be more cautious in interpreting data simply because of our reactivity. I, too, must be extra guarded in my reactions. Sometimes people think I am completely dethatched- but in truth, I am super analyzing my own response system.
When it comes to my own family, I have more difficulty doing this!
You will not beat a person into emoting the emotion you expect to see if this is substance use or a mental health/behavioral condition. You will not extinguish this through negative or positive punishment. If the substance use or MH or behavioral condition is the result of trauma, any form of punishment will likely exasperate the thing you want to extinguish.
Putting people in jail because you don’t think they’re remorseful enough will likely just guarantee you will still be dealing with this again later. Seriously, putting people in jail for substance or mental health and behavioral conditions only traumatizes someone who is already experiencing difficulty being in alignment with what they want to be.
I promise you this, most people most the time want to be well. A survey of people in prison suggests that most support corporal punishment as a form of correction. Surveys also show that most people in prison experienced corporal punishment. Most the time what they describe as just being normal punishment, by every measure of reasonable society, the punishment they got would be deemed abuse/trauma.
It’s a problem society needs to look at. We also need to remember the parents of these folks, and the loved ones. I am writing about this because I encounter this.
I encounter the parents who feel like they failed and released a monster on society because they’re hurting, and the adult child is ‘smiling’ into their pain. They have not learned that that smirk does not mean what they think it means.
We are socialized to believe what see is reality. We also know people lie. I do. I can’t tell you how many times I went to work with a smile a face when I wasn’t smiling on the inside. I can’t tell you how many times someone came at me, “Hey, John! How are you?”
“I am fine. How are you?”
And they believed me.
If you related to that you can relate to the idea that what gets transmitted is not always congruent with reality. Sometimes purposely! In truth, sometimes people don’t need my truth. If you are client that has come to work on your own stuff, it’s inappropriate to make your session about me! Sometimes transparency is helpful, too often doing that blocks therapy.
Sometimes we lie out of habit.
And sometimes the incongruity is against our will.
