[published on September 18 2005 in "The Flatland Oracles" blog, my previous blog]
Getting angry at the sight of another’s pain is the most natural response in the world. Why are we being forced to see it? What’s the good of our seeing it? What do they expect us to do about it? Isn't it obvious that there is nothing we can do about it?
Unabashed grief strikes us as embarrassing and unseemly---e.g., the widow or mother who abandons herself to emotion and howls with pain at the graveside. Our first response is to distance ourselves because what can you do or say or feel yourself in the face of it?
Even Christ got fed up and impatient being followed around by people who wanted him to fix their problems. If you can heal the sick, everyone is going to expect you to be at it all the hours there are and when are you going to have a minute to yourself, to think, to pray, to teach? Like the poor, the sick, maimed, and miserable are always with us.
I was so angry with my mother after my dad died. She just sat. I was there with her and she just sat in the chair staring ahead in the blank way people in pain do, as if they are looking at a wall a few inches away that is between you and them. I wanted to break through it, so I yelled at her. I wanted her to remember me and to care about me. I remember how listlessly she glanced up at me; it was with the expression of a mortally injured animal---uncomprehending grief, pain, and terror. Her misery was something she couldn’t articulate or share. I was sad, but she was shattered.
Later, when my own husband died, and nobody wanted to hear or see too much of <em>my</em> pain, I remembered this and tried not to feel too abandoned or judgmental. </p>
<p>I didn’t know how to give her anything that would help. Getting in there with her was too painful for me. I wanted her to stop. I wanted her to be okay again. And this is the problem faced by people who are in pain---that not only can no one else help, they don’t really want to. They just want to make the pain stop. </p>
<p>Seeing someone give in to grief is devastating, terrifying, searing. None of us wants to be reminded that things that are too bad to happen sometimes do, or that some types of loss are too painful to bear. </p>
<p>I’ve thought a lot lately about the notion of Christian love in the sense of ‘charity.’ And I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important component of that sort of love is empathy. </p>
<p>Empathy in some respects seems to be counterintuitive---when you see someone lying down in the ditch, the last thing you would think they need is for you to get down there in the ditch with them, because how is that helpful? I know based on empirical experience that it is not only helpful, but critical, but even now I don’t know why or exactly how it works. I had to be taught how to do it---it’s not like compassion or sympathy; it’s not something you can <em>show</em>, but something you have to <em>be. </em>You have to get down there with them. You have to be where they are and see the world in their way.</p>
<p>The best song I ever heard about empathy was by Everlast. It's on </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00000AFH2/qid=1127104582/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-1163021-0818336?v=glance&s=music&n=507846"><span style="color: #000000;">Whitey Ford Sings the Blues</span></a> and is called “What It’s Like.” It’s a song about learning to experience empathy for the problems of the people in the poorest classes of life---beggars, desperate young pregnant girls, the wives and families of drug dealers and gangstas. And (in a very understated fashion) it makes the important, crucial point that empathy is the one emotion that is totally inconsistent with judgment.</p>
<p>You can judge someone and still feel sympathy; you can also have compassion for those you judge. But empathy precludes it. If you’re standing in the person’s shoes, so that you are experiencing what the world is like from their point of view, you lose that capacity. You’re right down there in the ditch with them. And you're there for one purpose and one purpose only: to get across the message <em>You truly are not alone.</em></p>
<p>So I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important (and most often missing) component of true Christian charity is empathy. You don’t give money to the beggar because you feel sorry for him; you do it because you look into his shamed or angry face and see yourself; and because you see God. You do it for yourself because if you were abandoned by the community you would need money yourself; and so would God.</p>
<p>But it’s just so hard. It’s so hard to look into the eyes of people who have fallen through the net , people who are dying, or people who have <em>lost</em>. If they look angry, that’s easier, because you can get angry back, but if you see past through that to the grief, the loneliness, the suffering, and the bafflement…..who wants to participate in those feelings? Who wants to have to know what it's like till there is no other choice?</p>
<p>I have been trying to do empathy for years, but I’m not good at it. I fall back on the other, lesser things, such as pity, compassion, sympathy. </p>
<p>When I was training to be a volunteer, the technique they taught us was intended to convey to the person being counselled our empathy. Empathy, said the trainers, is what people in crisis need that you can give them. The last phrase is the key: Empathy is what people in crisis need <em>that we can give them</em>. </p>
<p>I can’t give the sobbing abandoned wife her husband back; I can’t give the man whose wife has Alzheimer’s his life or hers; I can’t take the traumatic memory away from the boy whose brother accidentally shot himself in front of him; I can’t give the woman dying of bone cancer her health; or take away the terrible fear of the man with Lou Gehrig’s muscle disease. </p>
<p>I can’t help any of them. Nor can I advise them---there’s no advice I am qualified to give that would serve. In the best cases, I can find resources for them in the community---support groups, therapists, and so forth. All I can do is be there.</p>
<p>In some respects, those cases are the easy ones. The pain of those people is pain that we can all understand. Most of the people don’t need much more than kindness and attention. They already know that their pain is something they have to undergo. </p>
<p>The harder ones are the people whose pain and sadness is chronic. Many of them are in dire straits, but in some cases, it just seems so clear to a third party that the pain is self-inflicted. Some of them abuse substances, some have mental or emotional illnesses that might be treatable if they could afford the treatment (or would take their medication), some are just angry, unhappy people with painful or abusive histories and a complete inability to trust others.</p>
<p>Those people want my advice. They may even think they want my judgment. They become angry when I continue to offer only empathy, acceptance, or understanding. </p>
<p>It’s very hard to keep from becoming angry. It’s hard to withhold judgment. I don’t think I’m very good at it, to be honest. The solutions are clear to me in many instances; sometimes I want to yell, “Just pull yourself together and start looking for a new place to live! Stop feeling sorry for yourself and realize that there are people around with much worse problems than your preoccupation with your neighbors’ opinions of you! <em>Stop</em> obsessing over the husband who left you 25 years ago and get a life <em>now</em>! Stop letting your husband make all the financial decisions---take some responsibility! Go to Al-Anon! AA!”</p>
<p>Most of the people I know who are in the helping professions end up---I’m sorry to say this, but it’s my opinion---losing whatever compassion or interest in other people initially drove them into the field. If you deal with people’s problems on a regular basis, you find out that they really are not that interesting. Furthermore, you learn two things: (1) That many people’s torments are of their own making; and (2) if they are not, there’s nothing much you can do to fix them anyway.</p>
<p>Empathy burns you right out. After awhile, it becomes something you do, not something you feel. It’s a technique, not a connection. And believe me, people at the receiving end of a technique know it. You can see the disappointment in their faces; you can hear it at the end of a phone line. You see the hopefulness---maybe someone will hear the story and take on some of the pain---die away. </p>
<p>The automatic and easy response is anger and irritation. What do these strangers expect from me? What do they think another person can do for them? Why do they expect anything at all? </p>
<p>It’s the last question that’s the saddest of all, when you think of it. Why <em>do</em> they expect anything? And it's because I think I know what the answer <em>ought</em> to be that I feel compelled to keep on trying.</p>
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