Compassion: what are we waiting for?

I know I said I was going to visit the existential theme of Responsibility next, but I have been motivated to write on a different topic.  I will write plenty on responsibility, believe me. Moving along….

I was reading a book that my wife took out of the library the other day called Above All, Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times, by Zoe Weil. I know, my posts are starting to have a theme of starting off with some passage of a book or some idea from a book.  It’s a good place to start – someone else’s ideas that is. I was just sitting with my 2-year-old daughter as she was in her bath this evening, and picked up that book to glance around.  I ended up reading a story the author told about a boy with mental and physical disabilities who wanted to play baseball with a team.  Up until that point his father was protecting him from embarrassment and only played ball with him in their back yard together.  One day the father came home and began to play ball with his boy and the boy just stood there with his head down.  His father asked what was wrong and the boy said, “I want to play on a team daddy.”  The father realized he had to take a risk and took his son to the local baseball park.  There was a game going on with the boy’s peers and one of the coaches allowed the boy to bat for their team.  The pitcher of the other team, not knowing the boy, realized his disabilities and walked closer to offer slower, under hand pitches, and after the boy finally hit one that did not go very far, they allowed him to run all the bases and score a run.  The boy was just ecstatic!

The point is that we can raise children to be like that pitcher and the rest of his team.  What stands out to me is why do we have such a hard time being this humane with one another in everyday life? We are so mean, cold, and cruel to one another. To be honest, I would normally read that story and feel manipulated to “feel compassionate”, but for some reason it struck me this time as a phenomenon that does not occur enough in our lives as humans. Instead we get angry driving, we react to coworkers in negative ways, we complain about our loved ones, and we assume others will hurt us. Many of us have experienced moments of compassion at some point in our lives but it happens much less than moments such as the story above.  What if our world could bottle up this type of understanding, compassion, and love, and spread it around? Even writing about this feels overly sentimental and my “realistic” side says, “oh cmon, that’s not going to happen.”  Why not?  Why do we have to live with so much negativity, anger, and divisiveness?

Addiction brings about the entire continuum of compassion, or lack thereof. Many humans in addiction find community, belonging, and friendship in other “users”. They take care of each other in more humane ways than the “together-folk”. We judge what we don’t know and feel uncomfortable with, and this happens quite a bit toward a community (addicts) that craves connection, love, and humanity. Granted, substance abusers can also live on the other side of this continuum and hurt others, steal, abuse, and neglect those they love. But working in addictions brings this need to life like no other. Working in a treatment center brings this to life as well.  Sometimes I watch clients be so gracious and helpful to one another, or hear stories of the like, that re-establish my belief in the goodness of human beings. One of my hopes is that we can facilitate this type of compassion in our center and program that wakes up and enlightens our staff and clients to remember our deepest human need: connection.

As people, can we not push through our own bullshit, our own past hurts, our own projections, and find ways to connect with one another? We can, but ultimately it is one scary endeavor for many.  If we truly connect and love, this requires transparency and vulnerability, which could end up in us being hurt. Most humans, addicts or not, have been hurt by other humans, whether it was in childhood, adolescence, or adulthood.  More times than not, it has been deep hurt. This makes it quite difficult to allow one’s self to connect deeply to another, and yet this is one of the very things that helps us heal. Group therapy is very healing for our clients who find themselves sharing with strangers more intimate details than they ever have before?  Why is this? Because we all crave closeness, intimacy, and authenticity, and once we see it we are willing to risk. There is nothing more powerful than numbers and many times there is nothing more healing and powerful than a connected and transparent group of humans sharing from their hearts their deepest hurts and regrets. This, in turn, brings out the raw humane compassion that occurred in the story at the beginning of this writing, and something I hope for in the relationships I find myself in, and the world at large. A man can dream.

Life is Difficult

M. Scott Peck wrote in his first page of The Road Less Traveled:

Life is difficult.

This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult – once we truly understand and accept it – then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters. Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily, or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species, and not upon others. I know about this moaning because I have done my share.

Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children to solve them?

This is an issue that runs rampant in our North American society and is most aptly represented in the social issue of addiction. It is also quite a stumbling block to healthy living and lasting recovery for many substance abusers. We can offer many tools to help with relapse prevention, we can offer tools for better communication, emotional expression, and spiritual connection, but there are some fundamental, or existential, truths that are a part of human life such as “life is difficult,” and without these we are not truly helping some people.

“Pain.” “Fear.” “Difficulty.” “Uncomfortable.” “Anger.” We tend to call these “negative emotions.” Isn’t that interesting? We should be embracing all emotions as messages from our true self, our soul, our inner being, whatever you want to call it. Why do we run so quickly from pain or difficult emotions? Many people run from happiness for all its worth! But as Peck describes, we must accept that pain is a part of our existence, and when we do accept it, it becomes a non-issue, it dissipates. Next time you even feel physical pain, go into it, sit with it, explore it – let it wash over you. Do the same with fear, anxiety, or anger. You won’t die, but what you will find is a sweetness in your connection to a deeper self. We are so afraid of ourselves that we ignore the messages we are communicating to ourselves. The times I have truly allowed myself to sit in pain, it has actually felt good – like a unexpected positive aftertaste.

There is a large part of addiction that begins with “pain management.” Listening to the stories of substance abusers offers many reasons why one would utilize pain management. The abuse, the neglect, the abandonment, the grief – the injuries and chronic health problems  - it is all horrific, sad, and unfortunate. In following, one who has experienced these things must then grow up in a society that does not know how to deal with pain. We want to medicate it, diagnose it, or avoid it all together. The most logical explanation in that type of world? Anything, and I mean anything, that will dull the pain that everyone is so afraid of. Welcome Addiction, to our society. Granted, addiction is somewhat more complex than just an overall avoidance of pain, both physical, emotional, and spiritual, but it is a very, very large part.

So, it is my hope that we as a society, and the work that goes on in the treatment center where I work, begin to see pain and difficulty differently. We need a paradigm shift. We need to embrace all of human experience and emotional responses. We need to have parents and teachers feel more comfortable with a child’s pain so that children can grow up and not fear pain. I’m not saying that pain would then no longer hurt. We cannot escape hurt and pain, but we can certainly embrace them more authentically.

I, like Peck, have done my fair share of moaning and groaning. I probably do it everyday. I love moaning and groaning as though it were a past time of mine, but I’ll tell you what – it gets me absolutely no where! I end up powerless to whatever I am moaning about. I give away my power. I give away my responsibility. The desire to avoid pain and difficulty also moves us to blame others. I will visit the existential concept of responsibility next.