empathy

Polarization

Polarization is a problem in the world. Us versus them is a mentality that has always existed.  The criteria for who is in and who is out are determined by those who have the power.  Historically, the criteria for acceptance has been tragic. Jewish people were rejected by the Third Reich in Germany, who determined that the entire race should be exterminated. African Americans were once considered only 3/5th human in America simply because of the color of their skin. Racism, sexism, patriarchy, ageism, etc exclude some and include others because of someone’s definition about who is acceptable and who is not.

When I was a kid I tried to hang out with only Cub fans. If you liked the St. Louis Cardinals, there was something wrong with you. My dad was a blue-collar worker and we were Democrats. We prayed for those who were Republicans and wondered why! We thought that the Pope was the antichrist. There were 3 areas of our town: Elm Ridge, where the rich people lived; Grant Park, where the poorest lived, and then the rest of us. We learned to categorize people by their address. We looked up to the folk in Elm Ridge as successful. They were the “haves.” We fought to keep our address out of Grant Park where the “have nots” lived.

Judgmentalism has separated people throughout my life. There was the Red Scare and McCarthyism in the 1950’s. Famous people like Paul Robeson, who was a great black athlete and actor, was ostracized and accused of being Communist because he refused to bend to popular opinion. There were Christians who thought the world was going to end in a ball of fire in the early 1960’s. They were scoffed at by scientists and ostracized as Holy Rollers. Now, scientists push the alarm of a catastrophic global warming, and many of those same Christians scoff and ostracize the scientists.

Polarization is a challenge to recovery. Healing requires integrating both the best and the beast within each person. In community, us versus them undermines the healing process. Judging others’ social status or recovery progress paralyzes the potential for transformation. It requires each person to recognize their own dark behavior in order to have compassion for other people’s struggle. It is by recognizing compassion and identification that transformation occurs. 

No one escapes childhood unscathed. I have learned that working through abuse requires the acceptance of a victim/victimizer dynamic that exists in those who have suffered abuse. When you have been victimized it is important to face ways that you have victimized others, perhaps not in like kind but in like principle. 

It is critical to confront behavior where you selfishly wanted what you wanted when you wanted it. It is important to face the impact of feelings and consequences that your behavior created for others and experience the gravity of their plight  because of your actions. Then, you focus on forgiving yourself which simply means to let go and not hold the behavior against yourself. It also means to stop the hurtful behavior. When you do this, you become less polarized from those who have victimized you. By accepting your own dark behavior you can create compassion for the dark behavior of others who hurt you with perpetrating abuse. Through common shared brokenness you can experience healing and forgiveness which can produce freedom from the abuse. 

Essentially, this controversial process can be framed as a way of getting out of an emotional prison that an abuser’s behavior created. Some have described it as a healthy selfish way of forgiving the son of a b**** who perpetrated pain and devastation in your life. You don’t have to be friends with someone who has hurt you. However, polarization is less likely because you have addressed in principle the victimizer dynamic in yourself that also exists in the perpetrator who has hurt you.

When this does not occur, communities remain fractured and polarized. Perpetrators, like sex offenders, are excluded from their communities. Some people think that if we segregate, isolate, or polarize people, then somehow we become a safer community. I don’t see evidence that this is true. 

Through my work at Psychological Counseling Services, we have witnessed transformation and healing by bringing victims and victimizers together. When sexual abuse is the issue, careful consideration of healing factors are assessed for both victim and victimizer before such integration takes place. Through 25+ years of engaging this process, I have observed and facilitated healing and transformation for both victim and victimizer. Regarding betrayed partners, we have integrated them with addict betrayers for many years. I have listened to partners who have shared that listening to the heart of an addict who is not their partner has been helpful to cultivate compassion and healing toward their own addict partner. On the other side of the coin, I have listened to addicts state that hearing the heartache of a different betrayed partner helped them to deepen empathy toward their own betrayed partner.  

When we face each other’s pain we promote healing and transformation and eliminate polarization. This makes far more sense to me. 

I do not think there is just one way to heal trauma from abuse. There are many alternatives. I do believe that polarization has splintered communities throughout our country. Judgmentalism through categorizing and labeling people has been detrimental to healing in our country. I suggest that we overcome judgmentalism and polarization toward others through identification of common-shared brokenness with shared accountability and consequences.  

Take time to be curious of someone who is unlike you or represents a position you vehemently disagree with.  Notice how judgment comes up and simply sit with gaining an understanding of another person’s plight and position about life. You don’t have to change your mind about how you think. But, you can find a way to connect with someone who sees things different than you do. A way to overcome polarization is to integrate common-shared brokenness through listening to a different perspective.  

Deep Listening

When Someone Deeply Listens to You

By John Fox

When someone deeply listens to you

it is like holding out a dented cup

you’ve had since childhood

and watching it fill up with

cold, fresh water.

When it balances on top of the brim,

you are understood.

When it overflows and touches your skin,

you are loved.

When someone deeply listens to you

the room where you stay

starts a new life,

and the place where you wrote

your first poem

begins to glow in your mind’s eye.

It is as if gold has been discovered!

When someone deeply listens to you

your bare feet are on the earth

and a beloved land that seemed distant

is now at home within you.

This beautiful poem expresses so much of what most people long and yearn for. It is a gift simply to feel heard by another. Feeling heard is more than hearing the sounds and syllables pronounced by another to you. It is engaging the presence of another and comprehending the meaning of the spoken word. Listening is so powerful, yet such an elusive skill. Some experts have said that 85% of all learning is acquired through listening, yet they suggest that 75% of the time we are distracted from what we hear. It is believed by some that only 20% of a lecture is remembered less than one hour afterward. Some believe that human beings attain only 25% efficiency of the capacity of our listening possibilities and that our current span of attention is but only 8 seconds. All this said there remains great potential in the resource of listening to self and another. 

Our society fosters a poor listening environment. We are blitzed every day with massive doses of technology to our brain. We are constantly triggered to shift our attention from one thing to another. Algorithms are designed to influence what you listen to determined by what triggered your interest in past sites visited on the internet. There is constant competition for your attention which lessens your capability to listen to yourself and others around you. Some studies suggest that spending more time in front of a computer screen lessens your ability to concentrate because of the influence of distractions to your brain. The challenge to listen is not new. Over 100 years ago William James wrote that there is “a ceaseless frenzy always thinking we should always be doing something else”. There is the urge to do, to declare, to sleep, or do anything other than the work of listening to another. The airwaves are full of talking heads. Seldom do warring countries sit down and listen to each other. It is always for peace talks. 

In today’s world, media often distorts what has been spoken. There’s the little boy who thought he was repeating a well-known prayer translated by what he heard grown-ups share numerous times. He began “Our Father who does art in heaven. Harold is his name.” I recall as a young boy listening to public prayers in church. My dad would verbally declare “Grant it Lord” indicating his support of another’s verbal request. As a young boy, I always thought that my dad was comparing God to a piece of granite rock. It is easy to carelessly distort what others say. 

Here are some points to remember:

Without developing listening skills you will lose sight of the sacred in life. Addicts must cultivate heart listening. This requires quieting the soul to uncover true yearnings of mind and spirit. There is a constant clamor of distractions that addicts must learn to sort and sift in order to listen to the heart and discover true aspirations. Addicts approach recovery not knowing how to listen to their heart. Rather than seek understanding, an addict is driven to numb pain and avoid discomfort. Yet, the sacred is uncovered when you listen to your truth. Some people like to think that written texts provide a way to know truth without listening to their heart. Through religion, they seek truth packed in sacred texts like the Bible, the Koran, or Bhagavad Gita. But truth is discovered in your heart with assistance from sacred texts like a Big Book in 12-step recovery, etc. There is no understanding without listening to your heart. Addicts must cultivate the capacity to recognize needs that must be met in healthy ways through the identification of their feelings. Breathwork helps to slow inner distraction and to notice feelings. Being able to recognize feelings provides a vehicle to meet legitimate needs in mature and healthy ways. Addicts transform the curse of feeling addictive craving into the blessing of intimacy through meeting needs in a healthy manner by listening to their heart. 

Less talk and more listening cultivates understanding that relieves frustration and suffering in others who feel injustice and misunderstanding. Compassionate listening helps to calm reactivity in others. Fear is born from a wrong perception. Trying to correct misperceptions before carefully listening and understanding only fuels debate. As you listen, think about what is behind the words. What does the person want you to know and what meaning is behind the words? It takes courage to listen to someone who is espousing a belief that you do not believe in. Lean into the possibility that you might be changed by what you hear. 

Become aware of your “wanting” agenda. Be conscious of your wanting the person’s approval, wanting the conversation to go a certain direction, your desire to fix the person, etc. All of these impact your listening skills. Can you recognize your agenda and let it go? Can you simply seek to understand? Can you stop planning your response while listening to another? Can you wait to express your thoughts and feelings and focus on another? Maybe not even address the misperception until later. It is difficult to listen without speaking when you feel threatened or offended. It is difficult to attend to the spirit of another when aversion arises. We want to control the conversation. 

Practice becoming a receptive open presence. Conditioning your mind to listen began with inner listening to yourself without judgment. This requires ongoing training. You then extend your receptive open presence to another. It takes meditation and practice to listen to another without judgment and to attune to their spirit. You will need to anchor with your breath and give yourself care while attempting to do the work of listening to another. Telling another that you have not understood their suffering and that it is not your intention to make them suffer more relieves suffering and struggle. Telling them you are eager to hear more about their suffering heals the greatest divides the world knows. It impacts your significant relationships and offers healing to those who hate you and despise what you stand for. 

In a world of divergent interests, pejorative perceptions, and unfriendly resistance toward others who are unlike you, practice becoming a receptive open presence. As you sit with your family and friends during the next holiday, courageously listen to another’s passion and frustration. Practice extreme listening. Find common ground. Always know that when the other person feels heard it is the beginning of trust which heals hate and hurt perpetrated throughout the world by those who choose not to deeply listen.

Limits

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” 

― Steve Jobs

Limits are difficult for type A, entrepreneurial people who like to insist on getting things the way they want it. And when they don’t, that’s when the color comes out in their behavior. Some people become green with envy, red with rage or a host of other colors demonstrating frustration, anger and exasperation. Some show ugly intolerance, making deleterious demands with iterations that reflect sophomoric immaturity. There is a mentality in the social milieu of our country that disdains limitations. There is an emphasis upon becoming a limitless person. Yet I have discovered great benefit to living within the context of personal limits. 

Boundaries are synonymous with limitations. Living within the framework of boundaries has saved more than one addict from deepening the hole of destructive behavior. 

Metaphors for the value of limits are all around us. I grew up in east central Illinois. To go home, I often fly from Phoenix to St. Louis. From the airport, I take Interstate 270 around the city of St. Louis leading to the I-70 bridge over the Mississippi River that parallels the old Chain of Rocks Bridge that has been shut down and abandoned for decades. After crossing the Mississippi there is another bridge that goes over a canal built for commercial barges to navigate safely through the Chain of Rocks. 

This canal is designed to be wide enough to accommodate the barge traffic with a steep shoreline. It is plenty deep so that commercial traffic can navigate with no problem. For me, this canal channel is a metaphor to recovery. There is no danger of the barge becoming impeded or stuck in shallow waters. The canal is designed and properly sized for typical commercial barge traffic. Within its confines, each barge is safe from the hazard of shallow waters. 

As long as addicts stay within the confines of healthy boundaries and respect limitation, they are safe from the hazards that lead to addictive acting out. It’s only when an addict ignores limitations that he or she gets into trouble with addictive acting out. Work addicts frequently lose themselves in the conquest of pursuing more to keep from being less. At some point, one more acquisition only adds meaningless content to an overstuffed portfolio. Ego grows while awareness of personal brilliance dims. 

I often hear complaints from work addicts who resent the need for limitation and boundary. Yet, true to the metaphor,  individuals who honor and respect limitation discover that they can go as deep within the boundary as they want. Rather than think horizontally, I want this, that and the other, consider the unexplored depths of going deep within.  It’s by respecting our limits and going deep within the heart that we have the opportunity to know ourselves best. Canadian poet Shane Koyczan declared that,“To discover the thing you’re brilliant at you first must explore meaningfulness in average experiences of life.” Limitations are the common stuff of every day living. Everyone has limits. The common frame of mind of “having your cake and eating it too” is often unrealistic. Limitation is the average awareness that all must embrace. Rather than stretching yourself to conquer more and more, consider plunging deep within the heart of average everyday experience and mine your own personal brilliance from within.   

Reflection:

  1. What personal limits have you tried to ignore?
  2. If you were to honor your limits and go deep within, what does your personal brilliance tell you about who you are? 
  3. Does the word “average” only connote assessment and judgment of performance to you?
  4. If average meant commonplace experience, what every day happenings do you minimize in your chase for achievement and success? 
  5. In what ways do your personal limits offer benefit rather than a burden toward developing personal brilliance?

Understanding Crazy Living

“I’m on a drug. It’s called Charlie Sheen.
It’s not available. If you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.”
By Charlie Sheen

Addiction is all-consuming. Brilliance is lost to the twisted, distorted perspective that says, “I am the essence of brilliance.” Audacious self-importance keeps a person stuck. Now in reported recovery, Sheen may well speak from a different place than he once was.

I remember watching Charlie Sheen on 20/20 television show when he said, “I just didn’t believe I was like everybody else. I thought I was unique.” The public self-destruction of Charlie Sheen was painful to follow in the news. The descent from being the highest-paid American television actor on primetime ($1.8 million per episode on Two and a Half Men) to being HIV positive and suspected of threatening to kill a former fiancée all was very sad to his most loyal fan base.

Addicts are an odd lot. Rapacious, loner, renegade, charismatic, luminary, chic, and disgusting are among the many adjectives that describe those who suffer from addiction. During my professional experience, I have treated individuals who have squandered hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to escaping what they don’t want to feel. I have listened to a medical professional describe having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive partner numerous times and confessing that they cannot get enough of what they really don’t want. Some have spent millions of dollars on a cocktail of experience with sugar daddy prostitutes, alcohol, and opiates and then blew their brains out! I have spent time with workaholics who literally experienced tremors, excessive sweating, nausea, and diarrhea from simply withdrawing from the rush of adrenaline that comes with the art of the deal. The merry-go-round lifestyle of most addicts is dumbfounding and would make anyone dizzy just listening to the staggering story of out-of-control behavior.

Why? Gabor Maté has been so helpful with this question. He suggests rather than why the addiction, why the pain? A simple question that requires the courage to go deep under the surface and examine family-of-origin, social mores, economic conditions, etc that promote escape through addiction. This post will focus on family of origin.

As a kid, I always wondered if I was crazy. I created a make-believe friend who would walk alongside me and I could talk and feel safe as I walked up and down the railroad tracks of the Illinois Central. I once printed fliers warning of the end of the world and tried to give them to people I cared for and loved, fearing they would perish in hell. When my Little league coach was killed in a train/car crash I literally put my ear to the ground and thought I heard his screams in hell because when he died he was a Catholic! I was taught that Catholics weren’t Christian. I ran out of a minor league baseball stadium believing that it was going to blow up. And once I cut a 12-inch gash on the top of my right arm from my wrist to my elbow. I learned to soothe myself each night with masturbation. It was my only constant soothing source.

Later in life, I learned to hide and minimize these earlier childhood experiences by focusing on pleasing others, by being zealous in my Christian faith and by working harder than anyone else I knew. My work addiction and sex addiction flourished to a point of being out of control. Once I worked 120 hours in one week and averaged 80-90 hours per week as a minister “serving” God. Sex addiction became a way for me to medicate the crazy work schedule for which I was complimented for sacrificing for the sake of God’s kingdom.

Depression was never felt because I was too busy and tired to feel it. I used work and sex to be a way of holding back depression. However, like trying to hold a beach ball underwater, inevitably depression sprang forth and debilitated the existence of my life. Paralyzed with depression and unable to function, I had lost 48 pounds in six weeks and was suicidal. Hospitalized I found myself in the proverbial padded cell contemplating how I got there.

I thought about all the crap that my family and I had gone through in the church, and a wave of rage came over me. There were memories of a lot of sexual abuse. I felt the shame that manacled me and all of my siblings. I thought of the complexity of everything I knew about the church and its abuse. I wanted to throw up, but I did not. Rather, I began hitting my Bible with my bare fists. I struck my Bible again and again until my knuckles were bleeding. When I finished, I was exhausted. Not from the physical act of hitting but from tapping into all the rage, hate, and shame that had enveloped my life like a wet blanket for so many years.

Soren Kierkegaard once said, “life is meant to be lived forward but it can only be understood backwards”. Since being hospitalized for major depression, I have launched a lifelong exploration to understand why I suffered such debilitating depression. Somehow I had to make sense of the physical, sexual, emotional, and religious abuse I experienced. I wanted to know why I was an addict. I never signed up to be one! Learning about my family’s dysfunction helped me to convert and integrate unbelievably painful and abusive behaviors, perpetrated to me and from me, to a healing experience that made sense to me. This pursuit imparted wisdom which promoted self-compassion and empathy toward others.

It made sense that I would have a make-believe friend as a young boy. Being the youngest of five boys in a family of nine, I never experienced fitting in or acceptance by my older brothers. Every attempt to impress was thwarted or sabotaged. Any win I ever achieved in sports over an older brother was derided and shamed. If I didn’t want to play I was criticized for being a big baby. I once pitched a perfect game in baseball and was criticized for that! So fantasy became my refuge. Having a make-believe friend who was nice to me made all the sense in the world. Figuring out that I grew up in an evangelical cult helped me understand my over-the-top evangelistic fervor and fear. Think about it. If you were a young kid and sat week after week listening to a preacher tell you horror stories about people who died and went to hell, and that the world would end any day, you would probably do some type of crazy behavior.

Paradoxically, cutting myself felt soothing. It relieved tremendous emotional pain inside. It was a way of telling someone I was in distress, and cleaning myself up was a manageable problem, but the craziness in my life was not. Masturbation became a constant predictable source of relief in a world of chaos when I was a kid.

Listed are a few considerations to unravel your own craziness:

  1. Listen to your feelings — they are the voice of the universe talking to you about your life imbalance. Shame, hate, anger, depression, and resentment are powerful feelings you tend to want to avoid. Rather than run from them, embrace them. They will tell you what you need and your wise mind will suggest how to meet that need if you will but listen!
  2. Look backward for understanding your addiction behavior. You might find the meaning that could save your life. Nothing changes until it is real. Careful examination of your family of origin can help you make sense of your current destructive behavior. Actions and behaviors that seem crazy from one perspective will make sense from another. Understanding will help cultivate adult insight and compassion which creates acceptance and meaningfulness.
  3. Trying to fill the empty hole inside with a cocktail of experience (performance, work, alcohol, drugs, etc) from the outside is like a little kid who can’t get enough sugar. There is never enough! Unmet developmental needs from childhood are wounds that must be scrubbed. When ignored they create a pool of pain that triggers destructive behavior to sedate the emotional pain that exists. Grieving unmet needs from an early age is a way of discharging the suffering that gets locked in childhood. If the wound is not scrubbed and cleaned then the infection of arrogance, wanting what I want when I want it, contaminates and spreads through selfish myopic behavior. Adults give their power to the immature child within to make decisions and run the show. You will need to grow yourself up, take the reins from the small child, and enable your wise-mind adult self to make the decisions and empower you to sit with painful discomfort and resource your healing.

When you look underneath the addictive behavior, it’s never crazy and always makes sense. It is not healthy sense but nonetheless, there is rhyme and reason to what seems crazy-making. Only when you unravel what’s behind your own crazy-making behavior will you be able to answer the question “Why the pain?”