Special Needs Parents and their Power of Empathy

It shocks me to this day how much I understand the concept of empathy more now than I ever have. There’s a very few number of people who have gone through something EXACTLY like you, so empathy is hard to find. Even if you have the same experience, it is all very different. 

However, as a special needs parent, I feel like this has shifted a bit. There was an unseen “bubble” of people in the world that I never thought of, and didn’t appreciate. This bubble is the special needs world. 

The best way to explain the feeling is walking into a hospital complex care clinic and feeling at home. I see the 5 year old with a walker with his AFO’s on and his mom walking close behind. I see the mom and grandma hooking the Infinity pump up to the stroller in order to feed the baby before the appointment. I see the stroller come in, the pulse-oximeter glowing in the undercarriage. I don’t know them at all, yet I feel like I’m right where I belong. 

The daily tasks of having a g-tube and trach child don’t really vary from child to child – the basic needs of suctioning, feeding with a pump or bolus, cleaning the G-tube, cleaning the trach, doing trach changes – no matter what disorder your child has, we all have to do the same thing. We may have different ways of doing it, but when it comes down to it we all have to hold our child down and clean the area where a stoma is – a stoma that we never expected our child would have. 

In a sense, you feel emotionally connected with every single parent. You know the feeling of terror, you know the feeling of pain as you watch your child suffer. There really isn’t anything like it. The day to day needs of having a special needs child is one that nobody else understands, except for other parents in the same shoes as you. 

I’m still coming to terms with the fact that no amount of explanation can help someone else without a special needs child understand my day to day. You cannot even begin to explain every thought process, the importance of little things, and most of all the emotional burden it takes. I emotionally “blunt”, my therapist calls it – I protect myself from emotions, and therefore sometimes I don’t react as normal. I can’t explain that to many people, but I can openly talk about it to another special needs parent.

There is simply a gap – a gap between special needs parents and everyone else. We aren’t better, we just have a different perspective. We are not perfect, in fact we probably have a lot more mental struggles than you realize. But one thing we do have, is a connection with one another that I’ve never imagined myself to be a part of – until now. Weirdly, I’m so glad to be on this side of the aisle – it has humbled me more than any other experience in my life.