Idiot Compassion for Dummies

It has been some years since I first heard the term "idiot compassion" used by Zen Teacher Joan Halifax. Her example was that you don't help a friend commit suicide; that might seem like compassion, but it's idiot compassion. After much thought, I'd have to say, "That depends." What if someone you love were wasting away in a painful terminal illness, and too ill to hasten her own exit without help, and asked you to help?

I think idiot compassion interested me because I grew up in an alcoholic household, my father the alcoholic, my mother the explainer.

"He didn't mean it."
"He has a headache today."

The setup was that he chose me to be mean to, to delegate as the family scapegoat, as it is known in family systems theory. The scapegoat is the one cast as the only problem in the family: If it wasn't for Jeanne, this would be a happy family.  She ruins everything.

My mother's interpretation was that he was "strict" with me, which she said in a wondering way.  No, this was not true.  He was not at all strict with anyone, including himself, not setting clear rules and enforcing boundaries as a father should.  He lashed out at me and demeaned me whenever he noticed me.  My mother did this too; when she was ruminating on her simmering anger at him, she would insult me or kick at me.  Really.  That sweet Sunday school teacher. 

I think that however much he disappointed and angered her, she loved her role as "the martyr, always the virgin," as my father put it.  Her role was to be kind and protective of her Man. If he had treated her son that way, it would have been a different story, but I was just a girl.

If I complained to my mother about something brutal he said to me, she might say, "His back has been bothering him," her voice assuming a rounded, sacred tone.  She was speaking as a ministering angel.  She loved that role.  When I was sixteen, I did my best to commit suicide. 

Here's the thing:  it does not matter what motivates someone to harm others - the harm is done. We might need to help that person or lock them up.  But to excuse out-of-bounds behavior, to explain it away and let them do it again, that's idiot compassion.  You're not helping them, you're not helping the victim, whether that victim is your child or yourself. 

It's not uncommon for women to excuse away bad behavior, and not just with their partners.  I've watched with some disbelief how people accept and excuse rude behavior from a woman in my (former) social circle because, oh, she's worried about [fill in the blank].  My response to that is my favorite line from the movies:  I don't care what she's worried about - she's hurtful.  And I don't like to be hurt. 

In case you haven't seen "The Fugitive," Tommy Lee Jones is a federal marshal chasing an escaped murderer played by Harrison Ford.  In the confrontation above, Ford is trapped in a huge sewer pipe.  He turns and tells Jones he is innocent.  Jones' response is, I don't care!  Because it's not his job to judge innocence.  His job is to bring the guy in.  And all you men and women who are putting up with partners who are mean to you and your kids, that's not your job, either.  That's not what compassion does.

Does Connection Matter?

Grailville 2011, through a screen

from a Tricycle interview with Gil Fronsdal - 

..........the American Vipassana movement emphasizes interconnectedness when teaching anatta, or “not-self.” This is emphasized so much that a person might get the idea that realizing interconnectedness is the ultimate goal of Buddhism. It’s not; this is a very American emphasis. I think interconnectedness is inspiring to us as an antidote to American individualism and the pain of alienation it can cause. 

This interests me from a couple of points of view. One, I am a devoted member of a Unitarian Universalist church, which emphasizes interconnection as one of its seven core principles.  Two, I have seen this emphasis on aspiring to deeply realize our connectedness in American Zen, and a mystic's life is not for me.  I think it's important to emphasize the entire 8-Fold Path, which makes clear that our behavior is important.  If you set out to follow the precepts there, it will keep you busy.

On the other hand, as the scapegoat in an alcoholic family I grew up without a sense of having a family or connection, except insofar as I could connect with some poets through their poetry - sobering even to remember that intense loneliness.  So for me, personally, realizing my connectedness to what family I have, my friends, my church, has been healing; it's what kept me alive during my years of profound clinical depression. Therefore I stopped writing just now and called Nancy, a dear friend from years of meditating together.  And now, to connect with Tom over breakfast.
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Oh man, such a long long too-much-to-do list today.  This is the result of addressing it sporadically, and a lot of change going on in our lives.  And sporadic is my buddhanature.  Meanwhile in back of mind, what is more important?  going to Zen tonight, see special friends there, or doing collage assn. while perhaps listening to a dharma talk?  Hmmmm........What is the most important thing?  I used to think it was my private spiritual practice, as in meditating.  Now it expands out to it being important to be there, sitting with the group, making the group.  The collage group tomorrow morning is a sort of practice, too, and certainly connection with other women in my age group.  But they really don't care if I do the assn, do they?  They shouldn't.......But my health and well-being is surely the most important thing. 

Breathe in, exhale. Cool down.  Abandon idea of going out in the noonday sun for major grocery shopping.  Decide to go to Zen tonight.  A bunch of Zenners meditating is about as cool as you can get. And staying cool physically and mentally is becoming a priority as summer barrels at us here, going up to 95 degrees today.  Already, even the little cat is irritable.

Are You Too Sensitive?

Sometimes art is all that saves us

Not feeling so good yesterday, I browsed around some scientific studies, as if to assure myself that I have an excuse for being depressed. I found, or rediscovered, that bipolar brains have thirty percent more monoamines, which produce "dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. . . the altered brain chemistry due to the excess monoamine cells may directly impact the patients' cognitive and social function." These monoamines send signals between brain cells, or neurons and are involved in mood regulation, stress responses, pleasure, reward, and cognitive functions like concentration, attention, and executive functions. (link here)  Okay, so it's been really hard to get organized.

Then there was this:  "Bipolar disorder . . . is characterized by pathophysiological changes to the visceromotor network, disrupting the regulation of endocrine and autonomic responses to stress, and hence emotion and behavior." (link here)  Yes. So, a while back I got so irritated by a friend that I practically yelled at her. I'm sorry, and I apologized.  Even if I couldn't help it, I'm sorry when I'm rude and impatient.

But - here's something you already know - some people are never sorry for being rude.  I was raised by a couple of them, and I was trained to excuse anything the head alcoholic did or said to me, and he was constantly abusive.  He didn't mean it.  His back hurts.  He has a headache.  He had a hard day at work.  And my favorite, You're too sensitive.  You don't get to do things over, but if I could, I'd tell my mother, "No, I'm not.  He's too insensitive."  But when I was a kid, I didn't have the voice.

Sometimes I catch myself putting up with crap, to be frank, from the kind of friends who sometimes look like frenemies. I was trained, it was my habit, to find excuses for rude, thoughtless people. I was surrounded by them as the scapegoat in a very sick family.  And I want to say, when I had to work with people like that, I got along.  But in my social life, I don't have to. Putting up with their crap may in fact qualify as "idiot compassion," a term that refers, roughly, to enabling people in their stupid or dangerous behavior.

Thoughtless people often build a persona that helps other people excuse them.  (And many people like to have "an alcoholic" around, someone worse than them.)  I have known people who got away with murder because they had a stammer or chronic depression or a visible handicap. My dear, wise neighbor, Marge Endter, now deceased, once told me about such a person, "He trades on that."  Bingo.

I notice that I don't go through these things with people who are on a path, who have a spiritual practice.  Practice makes us more sensitive to the effect we may have on others, and the world.  And the religions I'm familiar with make a point of compassion, or giving, or love.  The Buddhists I know may have their issues, don't we all? but they believe in being kind.  They aspire or vow to be kind.  They write whole books about it. I have one.  And since I do, I will try to be kind in gently letting some people out of my life.  Because, actually, I'm too sensitive to be around them. 

Who's to blame for this mess?

Blaming doesn't even make sense.

I'm inspired to think this by a long article that hit my inbox this morning about who's responsible for the Euromess.  Googled "who's to blame" and got almost 6 million hits.  Six million.  Let's see, what failures are being examined?  The euro, the supercommittee, the great Gulf Oil spill, Nickelodeon's loss of ratings . . . everything but Who put jam on the cat?

The idea that some Wun Giant is to blame for giant things like this doesn't make sense in the light of our interdependence.  A great many actions culminated in that oil spill, including, I am afraid, my own reckless use of fossil fuel flying places in airplanes just for fun, drying clothes in a dryer, flicking on light switches.  I was a smaller contributor perhaps than a manager who decided some problem on the oil platform could be ignored, but I added to it.  Then there is the large diffuse problem of human nature and behavior.

The denotation of blame is to assign responsibility.  But it nests with words that assign judgement, like culpability, guilt, reproach, fault.   And what happens when you point a finger?  You have a war.  You have sides, someone saying "I didn't do it, Sammy did!  He did it!  You always blame me.  It isn't fair."  This is a pretty good translation of American political talk today.

I am sensitive to this issue because it takes place on the small scale of our lives.  I was the scapegoat in my family, courtesy of my father. There is an odd mechanism there, in which all the pain and distrust of an alcoholic family is laid at the doorstep of The Wun.  This is similar to sacrificing a goat to God to wash away our sins, a tradition found in some societies. 

What is the problem? The karma created by our actions is not washed away.  To restate: You don't get away with nothing.  It's easy to see how harmful the blame game is in a family - if the whole problem is Billy, nobody looks at their own behavior.  And if nations or politicians put their energy into blaming the other, we have gridlock.  The only way to move ahead is to ask, What are the causes? * To assume a nonblaming attitude.

This tempts me to go to the many finite causes of unemployment, such as doctors buying expensive software to answer and make phone calls, so they can fire the people who used to do that.  Or to climate change - public places cooling the air in summer down to 68 (the guys in suits are comfortable that way).  These things are matters of individual choice.  It gets subtle.  Fixing it is not about blame or exculpation, but about looking at reality.  Reality.  And that means looking fairly at our own part in this mess.
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* Though you can never really untangle the causes.  Maybe the way to move forward is to ask, What needs to be done here?  or What can I do?