A coworker committed suicide today...am I not supposed to care?

I too think your reaction was not outrageous. There is a time for everything, and mourning for a person's death albeit a stranger is in my mind nothing strange. There is no shame in this. Don't let the others get you down or make you feel alienated for this. I read this, I felt sympathy and the needless loss of this human being's life. I did not cry, but the emotion was there. Not everyone experiences emotions in the same way. But it was definitely heartless and tasteless of those people to make such horrible comments and to disrespect him so much by making a spectacle of his death.

Fira said:

How sad is that! That's horrible :sad:
Reading this brought tear to my eye too..
Your coworkers sound like zombies! And that's sad.. but that's reality. :sad:
I think you did nothing wrong... it's admirable to see someone compassionate and caring.. someone not so selfish self-centered or indifferent... You're a human with feelings...
I hope you are doing better now! I really wish you everything good... you're worth of it..

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I feel so much better...I took the next day off of work to recharge my energy. Thank you!

unleashthehounds said:

Most likely they are in shock. They don't know how to react to the situation or to your reaction yet. I don't think there's anything wrong with the way you reacted.

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I agree on both counts. I've dealt with emergency situations before and with some involving fatalities. Seeing another person die right in front of you, or experiencing it in proximity (such as viewing the body immediately thereafter) naturally causes a state of stress for most well-adjusted people. It kicks our primal defense mechanisms into high gear. The brain is saying hey there is danger here - defend yourself. So you get that flood of stress-related chemicals. The senses become heightened, the pupils dilate to focus vision etc. Everything your body and brain would have done if the danger had been from another source and not self-imposed.

After that first acute stress reaction (Fight, Flight, Freeze, Flurry) I believe based on my own observation that what happens next for most people is that they instinctively dig deep into their cognitive preferences. So sensors are going to be responding to heightened sensory data, iNtuitives will be processing heightened intuitive information and so forth. After the initial shock people are still in high gear for a bit, but it is being processed through an extreme of their Type. It's probably even tapping into their shadow functions since the whole brain is in a heightened state of activity. It takes time for this to wear off as people slowly work through integrating it throughout their total cognitive mesh and not just one part of it.

So the reaction you see from other people (and remember we NFs are way outnumbered by Sensors) is an acute stress reaction. It isn't a measured reflection of how they will eventually process the event in terms of NF concerns of empathy and so forth. They will process that later.

Your reaction was normal for an NF, their reaction was probably normal for their type as well. In time and with greater reflection the mutual understanding of the event should return to a mean.

Just my observation from having worked in a field where I was exposed to that a lot. I'm not a medical person but I have a lot of first hand experience with it.

You reacted the way you did because you are human, and in touch with your feelings. People who aren't act in some pretty strange ways.

I used to volunteer in a hospital emergency room. There are two major trauma centers in my city, so death actually was not something one might see every day in this ER. However, there was one day I did witness a death.

The medics wheeled in a guy who was possibly in his early 30s. The doctors and nurses began injecting him with drugs to stimulate his heart, and they began CPR. They worked on him for twenty miinutes, which is the amount of time required by law in my state, and when they finished, they turned everything off. I noticed their angry gestures when they peeled off their gloves and threw them in the trash can. The body lay there, covered with a sheet, for what seemed an interminable time. The staff just rushed around, attending to other patients.

I asked the head nurse what was the matter. Didn't anyone care? This man was a human being, too, wasn't he? Well, she said, this man overdosed on drugs. It makes us angry that he wasted his life like this.

Cyberhugs to you, InTuned78. I also lost a coworker to suicide; he was a very close friend. Another story for another time. Just don't be afraid to be human; don't be afraid to feel; don't worry about what your coworkers think of you.