Compassion and empathy both refer to a caring response to someone else’s distress. While empathy refers to an active sharing in the emotional experience of the other person, compassion adds to that emotional experience a desire for the alleviation of that person’s distress.
Webster’s Online Dictionary
When the FOUR is at his best, he has transformed his personal suffering into compassion for the suffering of others and developed a deep sense of internal equanimity. At his core is a steady river of calm that, in spite of the emotional waves on its surface, remains still at his depth. He feels and senses his significance and the significance of others and often can create a creative form that captures and heals the suffering of others.
Michael Naylor
Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
Pema Chodron
Recovery (from trauma and addiction) is a winding path of endless iterations. Since embarking on this path in 2003, I have come to greatly appreciate the global recovery community and, more and more, the key role of compassion in this communal process of healing.
Since the founding of the first Twelve Step movement (AA) in 1935, it has become increasingly evident that the healing relationship between equals far outperforms the classical hierarchal relationships such as doctor/patient, therapist/client, spiritual director/seeker, or judge/accused in terms of achieving long-lasting desired outcomes. A combination of inner work, peer support, and professional assistance, as needed, tends to produce the best possible results.
This power of mutual support among equals may come as a surprise to those who have not yet had first hand experience in such matters. Let’s have a look at the role of childhood adversity, judgement, shame, and blame in the emergence of addiction (becoming apart from) and how compassion is key to transcending these as we become the best possible version of ourselves (a part of).
Most of us have not had ideal childhood experiences. We have all had our hearts broken in one way or another. Over generations, people have found themselves challenged by the task of parenting without ever having had role models to show how parenting can be practiced at its best. I include myself in this category. Obviously, we cannot transmit what we haven’t got.
This is not a question of perfection. Perfect parents do not exist. It should be sufficient to have `good enough parents´.
While there was much love and good intention in our family home, there was, too, a plenitude of dysfunction, substance/process addiction, supressed grief, and an incapacity to express emotions and deal with conflict. When I left home at the age of eighteen, – insecure, angry, confused, bewildered, and estranged from myself, – I had not learned how to handle conflicts in a constructive manner, or to set healthy boundaries.
As a troupe of ten children, all born within 18 years, whenever personal needs were expressed, we were often told not to be `so selfish´. When expressing our needs leads to danger (in the form of rejection, abandonment, humiliation, etc.), we tend to convince ourselves that these needs don’t really exist or that we have no right to have them. So, we supress them.
Each of my beloved dear departed parents, both from even larger families, presumably came into adulthood with lots of untended inner wounds and supressed needs of their own.
The playbook to which they adhered was the catechism of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, which had been deeply rooted in Irish culture for centuries. A product of their time, my parents did their utmost to raise their children well while obeying what they considered to be the Law of God, a severe and punitive God. By the time we children were approaching adolescence, however, that societal foundation was already crumbling.
The Beatles were already splitting up when I began to tune into the world. David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Debbie Harry were now shaping the popular culture. Compatriots north of the inner-Irish border were shooting and blowing each other up in the name of their respective patriotic values. In the sixties and seventies, we children were more focussed on disobeying than obeying.
My adopted playbook was that of sex, and drugs, and rock’n’roll. Especially drugs. A sensitive, insecure, and socially awkward boy, being intoxicated relieved me of the longing, – of escaping the unbearability of being in my own skin, – and gave me an artificial sense of confidence and belonging. In the seventies, teenage drinking was as ubiquitous as it is today, and dope was already available to anybody who wished to get it.
In my teenage years, complications arose, and setbacks occurred. My father, whom I idolised (and at the same time somewhat feared) fell ill and died the slow death that lung cancer brings. In his final months, as the sound of the death whistle became more frequent, I became his loyal soldier, doing my best to alleviate his pain while promising to be his standard-bearer for the family, especially my five younger siblings, when he was gone. In this, I was destined to fail.
The Loyal Soldier, according to Richard Rohr in `Falling Upward´, wears the common disguise of loyalty, obedience, and old-time religion, which is all you have until you have experienced undeserved and unmerited love.
To get to the point of questioning the Loyal Soldier (or False Self), however, many of us must first crash, hit bottom, and burn. This loosens the grasp of the False Self we had created to get us through childhood, – with his array of fear-driven Saboteurs. What we had come to identify as our core, reveals itself to be only the protective cladding hiding the genuine article.
As this False Self falls away, the divine essence, our core being, – which had for so long been hidden behind layers of protective beliefs, emotions, impulses, and compulsive habits, – is revealed. Then we become open to receiving – and transmitting – the grace of undeserved and unmerited love.
After stating the obvious, that a loving God does not work with such tools as guilt or shame, Rohr goes on to point out that: `When you discharge your Loyal Soldier, it will feel like a loss of faith or loss of self. But it is only the death of the False Self.´
This Loyal Soldier became my protector in the first half of my life. It did its work until this no longer worked, a realisation that nudged me into recovery in 2003, by which time I had run out of alternative options. Now, in long-term recovery, a new, loving protector, the Great Spirit, protects me with grace and freedom as I do my best to deal, one day at a time, with the mundane vagaries of life’s ups and downs.
Granting my Loyal Soldier an honourable (loving) discharge has been a gradual, ongoing affair. It is an indispensable step on the journey towards compassion, without which emotional sobriety remains beyond our reach.
A prerequisite for this shift is the act of forgiveness. Forgiving myself for being imperfect, falling, failing, for drinking alcoholically for over two decades and all the associated harm that caused. Forgiving myself for transforming so little of my pain by the age of thirty and transmitting so much of life’s burdens to my family, friends, and my own children.
Forgiving my father for leaning on me so excessively in his time of need. Forgiving my mother and other family members for not protecting me from that overwhelming experience and being unavailable to comfort me in my desolation when Dad finally departed.
The recovery community is the ideal setting for learning forgiveness. True healing cannot be achieved in isolation, but rather requires the compassionate support of others. That support can often be found in the Twelve Step recovery community.
When we have forgiven ourselves, we can then do it for just about everybody else. If we have not done it for ourselves, we are likely to pass on our untreated wounds, judgment, sadness, and grief to others, especially those closest to us, those nearest at hand.
One further point is important in this respect. This is the danger of premature or simply rational forgiveness. This is `pseudo forgiveness´, a form of spiritual bypassing.
It occurs when we return to the past, to attend inner wounds, this time not shielded by intoxication but by our still intact invulnerability. We thus protect ourselves from truly remembering and re-feeling the original pain. Instead of healing the old wounds, this approach simply masks them, thereby exacting a high price.
While then cultivating our self image of superiority (since we now belong to the Forgivers´ Club), we continue to harbour blame and resentment deep down inside, in our shadow. As with any demon, the success of this one depends on our blind spot, our denial, our belief that it is not there. Fellow travelers in healthy recovery will help us discover our blind spots, another boon of having a good recovery community.
My recent reading has included Michael Naylor’s insightful book, `The Alchemy of the Enneagram in Transforming Addiction´. Michael is a psychotherapist who has been in recovery for over four decades and has become an adept practitioner and teacher of the Enneagram (an ancient system encompassing nine `Types´), which he uses in his work, helping clients establish, cultivate, and maintain emotional sobriety.
In his description of Type Four, he states that, in the highly evolved state, this person has transformed his personal suffering into compassion for the suffering of others. This goes beyond mere identification or sympathy or even walking a mile in another’s moccasins.
Because the Type Four values the gifts he has received through his own painful experience and his processing of the human experience, he has no greater wish than to see others reap a similarly rich harvest. He or she becomes the Wounded Healer.
This is true of the people I have met in recovery who have not been content to simply stop drinking or using but have gone on to do the inner work which helps us rediscover the True Self and develop emotional sobriety. Compassion is a key trait in doing such work. Compassion for self, for others, and circumstances.
If our compassion does not include ourselves, it is incomplete.
