Can you ever truly understand something you don’t have experience of? I’ve found that people who have never experienced mental illness can’t truly understand what it’s like to have it. There’s something about the depth and despair of depression that maybe you can’t possibly imagine until you have it.
People with cancer don’t feel understood except by others with cancer. Alcoholics form support groups with other alcoholics. Maybe it’s the way of things. Maybe you have to experience some things in order to understand what that life is like.
So perhaps parents feel that those who do not have children have no idea what they go through. No matter how much they might try to explain.
So if a childless person offers a parent advice, the response is, “What do you think you are saying? You don’t really understand. You’ve never been in this situation.” Then the parent might lecture the childless couple about their situation.
Of course, this isn’t the only place where this happens. As I mentioned, there are large areas of experience where either you have it or you don’t, and it seems like the ones who don’t can’t possible understand. But is that true? Do the childless have nothing of value to say about parenting? Do the mentally healthy have nothing of value to add to conversations about coping with bipolar? Can a teetotaler tell a drunk anything useful?
I’m not sure I know the answer to these questions. I want to say that of course we have things to say to each other that can be helpful. But there are certain things I hear mentally health people say over and over again that indicate to me they don’t know what it’s like, and therefore it makes their advice kind of pointless.
I don’t know if this is true in other areas, like parenting. Non-parents can make excellent teachers and care-givers. But it does seem to me that there are things you can only learn with experience with kids. I can’t even explain what these things are. It’s almost like it’s an aura of parenting. So much happens with children. It’s impossible to articulate it all, but it is very apparent (sorry about the pun) when someone hasn’t had experience, because they couldn’t possibly say that if they’d ever lived with a child. Or so it seems.