One of my favorite artists

Thoughts on Empathy

The picture of above is a print by Lundy Longhurst, one of my favorite artists. I love how she, the world, is wrapping her own love around that which she is…it feels she is dreaming her True Self into beyond beyond all that can make us despair. I love Monet enough that I tried to touch one of his works when I was twelve. It was my second time trying to be more intimate with famous art than was considered acceptable. The first holds one of my strongest memories. I was 18 months old - that I was told, I don’t remember my age…but there was a statue. It happened to be the Venus D’Milo. Of course I didn’t know that either. All I knew was I saw a beautiful statue that had only one arm and my compassion went out to it and I made my way to dart under a rope, thinking I would give it a hug, to help it feel better from the loss of its other arm. Security swept in, but that is vague, I only remember my parents removing me from the situation, apologizing profusely to the guards, picking me up and away crying. Then screaming with all my little might, the best tantrum I could muster. How could they not know I meant only to show compassion, to hug the statue? How could they drag me away when my intent was pure? They were well intentioned. They took me to a rectangle made out of concrete and told me “You can hug this statue.” I was infuriated. I didn’t learn to say the F bomb until age five, but if I could have, my emotion, which I remember exactly was, “Are you fucking kidding? You want me to hug a RECTANGLE? Don’t you know it wasn’t my need to hug concrete, but that I wanted to show love to the one who had no arm? What the BLOODY FUCK!”

I was never one to fawn until much older. In my family of origin, not until I became a Christian as an old teen, when my family used my faith against me to silence me calling out the painful dynamics that were so hurtful to me, to all of us. They told me I wasn’t following my faith if I was criticizing them, so I learned to suppress my feelings. What a journey to allow a full range of feelings, yet to realize no one is to blame!

I learned to fawn a little earlier in other contexts, but I put up a fight. First, when I was 8 or so I had the chance to be in my first show when we lived in Western Mass. When I first started really getting into skating in a more concerted but not yet competitive way, my mother was really hesitant to let me wear a skating dress and I remember feeling upset with her because to me it was just the outfit the more advanced skaters wore. Like spreading my legs when I felt relaxed, it had no sexual connotation whatsoever to me. My mother, herself a survivor of sexual abuse, was always telling me to close my legs, cross them, not wear anything revealing etcetera and it never resonated with me! But my mother knew aspects of the world I did not. The number I was chosen for was designed for two females being chased by a male, It was the more advanced of the opportunities available for a fairly new skater. I said I was uncomfortable with the choreography. They gave me a hard time and said if I didn’t want to be part of that routine I could do the lower level one. The choreography was dumber than dumb - the theme was a cuckoo clock. I couldn’t believe those were my only options! By 10-11 I had gotten serious about my training and was told by my new figure skating coaches at first just said to show a positive attitude, by smiling at the judges when I curtsied at the end of the routine. Then it turned into, “Play to the judges a little.” I felt great anger and resistance. I remember being told to do choreography that was not at all appropriate for a ten year old to be doing in front of a row of almost all old white male judges…shimmying, hip juts…I said no. My dance teacher who I loved, otherwise, couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to do these movements in my routine. It caused me to reject sexuality and tell everyone around me I would never like boys - implicit in that, was that I would never become sexual. I also did not like what I saw happening to my peers as they hit puberty. I cried for many hours when I got my period. Then I made it go away, as many female athletes do. I wasn’t consciously trying to stop my menstruation - I didn’t know I could do that - I had seen a girl I thought was healthy and normal get told she couldn’t compete until she lost twenty pounds. I didn’t ever want that to get said to me. I was pre-emptive. I lost weight ahead of time. I stopped getting my period. My coach (a Ukranian one) complimented me. I looked, “Like a princess.”

I was just trying to avoid getting criticized. My father’s criticism was so devastating, constant and came over the tiniest, most innocent things, and it wasn’t just the harshness. It was the character assassination. He assumed motives to things I either had none for, or misunderstood and attributed harmful motives where my motives where really benevolent and kind. His father fought at Normandy and had PTSD, which he undoubtedly handed down to my dad. My grandfather also was expert at fixing everyday things, as were many of his generation, but he never taught my dad, I think because he tried once and my dad didn’t catch on right away and it tripped up his nervous system. So my dad felt deeply insecure on top of angry, anxious, traumatized and hypercritical of himself - and therefore me, as I resembled him more physically and in intellect and basic personality than my mother who lives from both her innocent and wounded emotional body in ways that devastated me from even earlier than I lost trust in my dad, mostly for his incapacity to forgive those he felt wronged by…I thought to myself when he described how he couldn’t forgive a friend who he felt had let him down, “Well if that’s how you deal with when someone doesn’t live up to your expectations, I will surely end up outside your circle of trust/love and you won’t forgive me either, I know I can’t trust you!.” His circle the wagons mentality came from his Jewish family. That also wasn’t their fault. But it was a resonance I never connected to either…when my Jewish grandparents told me not to trust anyone outside the family or imprinted their cynicism on me, I felt very upset. I wanted to say, “I am sorry you have had such a painful time of it, but I don’t want that to be experience. Here you go, I’m handing this back to you.” But of course, I couldn’t. I was too young. The imprint went into my cells, even as I cognitively remember choosing it not to be “for me.”

My parents did their best. I have done my best. Still, however unintentionally, some of the energy of fear, of not being good enough or worthy seeped through to my children, in spite of lots of inner work and doing my absolute best to dissolve those patterns, as well as behave differently.

When my oldest daughter was the same age as I was when I wanted to hug the Venus D, she dropped a spoon while visiting my father. I was a single mother, dating my current husband. We were visiting in part to see a holistic MD in Vermont, because I had unexplainable health issues, like just collapsing out of now where, gaining and losing weight. My bloodwork was relatively normal, but as anyone with mystifying symptoms can attest, being told you’re within the normal range doesn’t help when your clinical picture is far from normal. Like when the bees were collapsing and coming to me on my doorstep when they used to inject the tree in the public area in front of our house on the other side of the sidewalk, which I just learned is called an Apron. Tell me all you want that stuff is safe but the bees only die when you inject it, and it’s always within 24 hours. I got them to stop injecting it and the bees stopped dying.

But back to my dad. He watched how I handled my toddler’s dropping of her spoon, (she thought this was a game for some time,) and he commented with great effort that felt like hostility and edginess that he was impressed with how I handled it and that he knew wouldn’t have been able to handle it as well. It was such a weird form of acknowledgment, because within minutes on a different topic, he all out shut me down. He just couldn’t handle it. I guess that’s PTSD.

Usually, things are not somebody’s fault, but that doesn’t mean they don’t cause pain.

How can we learn to acknowledge the pain that has come to others through how we are or what we do when we did our best?

One of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn is the things I most need empathy for in order to heal are the things where others are least able to give it, for whatever reason or reasons. I understand this is part of my soul contract to learn to give it to myself without reserve. I still don’t like it. I don’t have to….I get to love myself when I don’t like it!