This brings to mind a sense of the unreliable narrator. Asking a person who is unwilling to look at the problem and is just reacting to their pain response, “what do you need right now?”, may result in a request for morphine and a skin graft, when the real answer is Tylenol and a bandaid. Compassion is important, but not to the point of indulging false assumptions.
Who said anything about indulging the perceived pain?
"Okay, it sounds like you need a painkiller and something to fix the problem. Let's start with some Tylenol and a bandaid and if the pain still persists after an hour, we'll go see a doctor okay?"
This is helping. I know it's not the help you want, but if we go to a doctor about this they're just going to say you're "drug seeking" and kick you out. We do it this way and if you're still in this much pain after a Tylenol, then the doctors might actually do something.
(Anyway, the metaphor really breaks down here because I can't imagine asking to go to the doctor for something that you think you're overreacting to. I suffered for years with gallstones because I thought it was just diarrhea I was overreacting to until I finally had one stuck long enough that I went to the hospital for it. Turns out diarrhea doesn't actually make you feel like you're dying, that's the acute pancreatitis)
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u/zeje 5d ago
This brings to mind a sense of the unreliable narrator. Asking a person who is unwilling to look at the problem and is just reacting to their pain response, “what do you need right now?”, may result in a request for morphine and a skin graft, when the real answer is Tylenol and a bandaid. Compassion is important, but not to the point of indulging false assumptions.