“I know just how you feel” (No, I really don’t)

March 2026

I love this card. Two individual dogs, same mud, different experience.

It’s pinned on a board, at eye-level above my desk. It reminds me to be humble. And to listen.

Because until they tell me, I do not know how people are feeling. I do not know what they are experiencing.

I sit with that for a minute. Even now, I can sometimes run the risk of assuming, whatever their loss, or grief, or change, that people will feel and act as I would. And that when different individuals go through the same or a similar experience, their reactions and behaviours will be understandable, recognisable, familiar. Acceptable.

As though my judgement of how they are ‘handling’ their grief is more important than their experiencing it. As though grief were something to be got through, a period of time, before moving on, before ‘getting over it’. A reminder that loss can change a person on a cellular level, and that change can carry invisible price tags.

This is why I sit with clients, in a place where they feel safe to bring their guilt and rage and shame and heartbreak, and their ‘love which has no place to go’. Where their behaviour will be heard without judgement, however ‘rash’ or ‘risky’ it may appear, and their thoughts and actions can be brought into the open. Where their own individual experience is valued and witnessed.

This photo also reminds me to have compassion. We are each one of us a work in progress.