I’ve probably written about this before, but I have been thinking about it recently, in part because of the challenges our weather in the Boston area has been bringing.
The difficulties are real, from finding parking at the supermarket because of the snow piles to water damage in the house from ice dams to delays in transportation and communication and to just being able to get stuff done.
So I try to see these difficulties objectively, and when I find part of my mind wanting to see them as more existentially threatening than they are, I start wondering what lies behind that.
For me, it’s the legacy of the Holocaust as my family of origin seemed to process (or not process) it. “There is always something terribly wrong, threatening, and dangerous, perhaps it is obvious, perhaps it is lurking in the shadows,” was the message. I think that fundamental attitude results in that part of me trying to tie any new challenge to existential issues.
I didn’t see things this way until I heard of a similar issue in another context. It was about families struggling with a member’s alcoholism who are pressured to subscribe to the idea that no one can be happy until the alcoholic is happy. Something like that. Anyway, it got me thinking about family habits of mind about how to handle the very real suffering of some members. Putting everyone in an emotional prison does not seem to be a helpful answer to the suffering or to the needs of the others.
The Holocaust issue in my family included the more obvious factors, but it also included a sense of betrayal, and not just by gentiles. My dad never got over his sense that the rabbis, at the very least, let down their communities, by not adequately reading the writing on the wall and guiding their congregants to plan and take steps while there was still time. So I grew up with a sense that it could be around the next corner again, something that we are not prepared for and is an existential threat.
I’ve had many personal losses that came quickly and as a shock to me, that were surprising and devastating on that account as well as in their own right. Some of them also involved people who in the structure of the situation would be thought to know better but dismissed my concerns. Ultimately what I took from this is that the universe will guide me through these experiences, I may get dinged up, or worse, but if I open myself to the universe, I get through (and I learn, as a consequence, how to mesh with the universe in a way I probably wouldn’t otherwise). A lot of it for me is learning compassionate detachment and a lot of it is learning to reframe.
On the reframing front, since I wrote my fairly recent post about lava, it occurred to me that my struggle with feeling slimed by others dumping their stuff on me and my having to process it (kind of like cleaning up somebody else’s mess) could be reframed so that I take such episodes as indications that I am doing my job and things are going well — if water ends up in my “sump hole,” so to speak and my pump is working, maybe this is evidence that things are in order, not that something is amiss. If I take it that way, that I am just doing my part, and being given opportunities to do so, my resistance diminishes; it has seemed to me that resistance usually is a large part of the problem, even if the underlying situation is painful and unpleasant and I don’t like it in some way.
I don’t see who it serves, even the innocent who have been slaughtered, if the living are paralyzed and miserable, or angry and belligerent, or bitter and ego-centric, or anything else that cuts us off from the universe and each other — I don’t think that can be the response to which we are called.
Connections and disconnections
December 15, 2012I was interested to read an explanation of sort for why a person might shoot small children at a school:
That’s quoted from
Nation’s Pain Is Renewed, and Difficult Questions Are Asked Once More
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
Published: December 14, 2012
in the NYTimes.
I had written a comment (to Gail Collins’ op-ed column; I wrote it before I read what Cornell said in the article, but after I had heard him on the PBS NewsHour), about how I have been taken aback by the crossing of a line in the shooting of small children. I compared it to a similar reaction I had to the slamming of planes into sky scrapers. I want to say, “We [humans] don’t do that.” The apparent coldness, the disconnectedness from fellow feelings for others are what strike me.
So, being the person I am, I have the urge to harmonize in some way Cornell’s explanation with my own reaction.
When I myself have felt what I want to describe as unbearable pain, the kind when you can’t stand being in your own skin, in your own body, my response has been to try to escape up into the spiritual realm until I have enough distance to process the event. (Watching my child being beaten is an example.) It’s hard to do in the moment, at least for me it is, because the pain seems to close the heart and my heart needs to be open to receive the help. I suspect that this is why prudent people pursue training, usually through religious practice, to keep the heart sufficiently open even in these situations.
I wonder if people who cross bright lines in their pain lack even more on-going connection to what I call the spiritual realm, but which can also be thought of in other terms, like Plato’s forms or forces in the universe or the collective unconscious or Source. I wonder if they are, first, cut off from themselves, and then, cut off from others and from a sense of community probably most of us have without being fully aware of it. And if a person is cut off from themselves, I think their awareness of the universe at large and of other people is not mediated through a conduit that includes compassion — I suspect they are using a mental process that includes information but lacks other components for understanding the world. So when pain is overwhelming for them, I’m thinking that they don’t have a safe harbor to escape to and that they don’t have in place the internal equivalent of Jersey barriers on a highway — a strong (internalized) connection to identifying with others and with community — to keep them from crossing bright lines.
For me, then, the issue turns into how to foster people’s feeling connected and how to coach them or encourage them to locate in themselves that part of our mental apparatus through which we connect.
Posted in community, compassion, consideration, mental processes, news comment, open heart, Plato, religious life, self-awareness, spiritual life, subconscious, trauma | Leave a Comment »