Tag: sympathy

  • Empathise

    Empathise

    Empathy is expressed when we desire for others what we wish to have for ourselves.

    Sometimes, it’s something we have, and we hope that others will be able to enjoy the same value and benefit that we enjoy from it.

    Sometimes, it’s what we don’t have, yet we hope that we may be able to contribute towards others having it, despite having no reason to believe that we’ll be able to experience it ourselves.

    Empathy is founded in our desire to alleviate our struggles that we see in someone else’s life.

    That struggle could be something we currently experience, or something that we have experienced before.

    It is core to our humanness, and only gets tainted when we respond with bitterness, hoping to see others suffer or struggle in the same way as we may have. Either at their hands, or at the hands of those whom they represent in our life.

    Empathy is the difference between peaceful acceptance, and bitter vengeance.

    Like that old proverb says, a bitter heart eats its owner.

    Protect your heart from the bitterness of this world by practicing empathy instead.

  • To Breathe Again

    To Breathe Again

    There are few things more exhausting than the plague of insincerity from those that find a constant need to explain their drama and their dreams under the pretense of seeking sincere advice to overcome their hurdles. 

    Soliciting advice while professing not to have the answers ourselves, then discarding that advice in favour of taking the easy way out reflects the deficit of conviction in our soul. 

    A deficit of conviction leads to an empty existence, embellished with an outward show of struggles, while concealing an inward turmoil of loneliness as we go through life seeking associations with others that may define who we are. 

    Loneliness is more burdensome when we lack affection for who we are. 

    Lacking affection for who we are results from a lack of courage to live with conviction because we believe that our worth is defined by the acceptance of others before it is defined by our acceptance of ourselves. 

    Accepting ourselves demands that we take a brutally honest view of who we are and what we stand for, but our timid souls protect us from such realities and turn us into victims. 

    As victims, we require a support structure that recognises our weaknesses as battle scars, while ignoring our contribution towards growing so apparently weak. 

    Our contribution towards our weakness, or our impotent state, demands a sense of accountability for the decisions we took and the choices we made. 

    Accountability becomes unnecessary when we’re protected from the reality of it by those that seek to comfort us in moments of weakness while they seek such comfort as well. 

    Seeking commonality in weakness and then building a support structure to celebrate the triumph of existing in spite of such weakness is a fool’s profession of courage to the world. 

    Victims are emboldened in their need to hold others accountable for their (victim’s) choices when the support structure that they subscribe to is formed by equally celebrated victims. 

    Celebrating the weaknesses of others as a statement of courage denies them the motivation needed to emerge from the state of weakness. 

    When our state of weakness defines our significance to those around us, and in turn solicits the affection and care that we desire, we will fight with a blinding rage against anyone that threatens the reality that we’ve created for ourselves. 

    A sobering moment at an unexpected intersection in our lives is all that is needed to shatter the alternate reality that we clung to for so long. 

    A shattered reality forces us to reinvent ourselves in the face of adversity. 

    Forced reinvention in the face of adversity is considerably more challenging than reinvention from introspection. 

    In the absence of courage to reinvent ourselves, we will seek out new avenues to play the old script of pity that is needed for a battle weary soldier. 

    Pity begets pity, and the slide into self loathing will gain momentum. 

    Self loathing constricts our ability to prevail in the absence of a support structure that celebrates our weaknesses, leaving us with the tough decision to either prevail, or willingly fail. 

    The choice we make at this point will either see us emerge from that constricted space and embrace the reality of who we are capable of being, or see us resign ourselves to a scrap heap of souls that found it easier to blame the world for their misery than to live with conviction. 

    If we choose the former, we’ll suddenly breathe deeper and realise that we were simply gasping for air until the arrival of this new reality that we chose to embrace. 

    If we choose the latter, our chests will continue to constrict, until eventually we will suffocate on the bile of the self loathing that we nurtured for so long while waiting for sympathy to make us feel whole. 

    To breathe, rather than gasp, we must live with conviction, and have the courage to see ourselves for who we are and not how others perceive us to be. 

    We always show our best side to society, and hide the worst for the quiet moments of torment that is rarely shared with others. In those quiet moments, we either learn to love ourselves, or loathe ourselves, and the choices of others has no bearing on those moments whatsoever. 

  • Dramatic Trauma

    I’ve always been curious about the impact of our perceptions on the reality we seem to contend with. This became even more prominent in a recent discussion regarding the way in which we perceive or interpret various experiences and how it subsequently affects us.  One thing I realised is that I don’t recall ever looking at any of the many colourful experiences in my life and feeling distinctly overwhelmed or traumatised by it. The thought of it being traumatic never entered my mind.

    Sure, there would be times when I would describe the experiences of others as traumatic events in their lives, but I think there is a very important difference between how we describe something for effect, versus how we experience or internalise it. This rings true to my views about labels and how that also drives conditioned responses within us. Without intending to rob others of the gravity of their life experiences, I would suggest that the moment our internal conversations suggest to us that we’re experiencing a traumatic event rather than just a challenging event, it reinforces the sensations associated with feeling attacked, as opposed to raising our awareness of our response options instead.

    It reminds me of moments when the responses of others towards an event in my life seemed to have heightened my awareness to the impact of it compared to how I felt a moment before they said anything. This has happened to me often regarding death or near death experiences. I would cope with the reality quite well, but would be jolted into a deeper sense of loss or betrayal when I saw the emotion in the faces of others that were witnessing the events unfold.

    It’s like the contagion of a yawn. We tend to feel a need for rest after watching someone else going through a really hearty yawn, even though there was absolutely nothing wrong with our energy levels before that. I think this is the same response we have towards people that express raw emotion around us. We’re drawn to it like a moth to the flame. Sometimes it grounds us in compassion, but often it sucks us into the victim state that makes it that much more difficult for us to emerge from it. More destructive than this is when we find a sense of comfort in the sympathy from others that dwarfs any level of comfort we experienced in the normal course of our lives. That’s when the weak and neglected among us play to the sympathies of others and remain bogged down in a phase of their lives that ultimately defines their existence, not because the event itself is too traumatic to let go of, but the attention and significance it afforded them is too rare for them to want to give up. Rare in the context of their lives.

    It’s that dramatic emotional response that leaves a lasting impression. It makes a mediocre life noteworthy,  and when that fleeing moment threatens to pass, a cycle is spawned where we seek opportunities to create triggers for yet more sympathy because as long as others sympathise, the true frailty of our lives would escape us as long as we enjoy the sympathetic embrace of others. That embrace tells us that it’s ok to be broken. It tells us that simply surviving is a triumph in itself, and that any lack of conviction or courage to move beyond that point is completely understandable.

    That’s when we fail ourselves, and we fail others. When we gauge the intensity of the struggle of our lives relative to the weaknesses of others. It’s for this reason that we need to look towards those that rose above it rather than those that coped. Unfortunately, our celebration of mediocrity makes it increasingly difficult to tell the difference. Couple that with our innate fear of exposing ourselves to the same opportunity that earned us betrayal and you have a perfect recipe for a victim’s regret that is despised on the inside and dressed as strength on the outside. If only we put as much energy into moving on, life would be so much more endearing.

  • Reverse Engineering Life

    It seems that I’ve wasted most of my life experiences during the years when I quietly contended with the upheavals in my life and moved silently forward without making a fuss of what I wanted, nor questioning why it always seemed to happen to me. Through no deliberate effort on my part it strengthened me, even though I, and many around me, often perceived that strength as numbness. There were times when I chastised myself for not having a more emotionally grounded response to the suffering or trials of those around me, but I was also often reminded that it was that very same numbness that allowed others to draw strength from my apparent composure at times when they felt overwhelmed.

    I think there’s a value in having such an emotionally disconnected person around at times. It’s a reminder that not all is lost when all seems lost. But that’s not how most people viewed me, and fortunately my default demeanour of being oblivious to the perceptions that others held of me meant that it didn’t affect me much either. Despite this awkward sense of comfort I had about being able to deal with my reality in ways that caused many to question my sanity (quite literally at times) I felt a growing dis-ease regarding the fact that my experiences were being wasted because it only seemed to benefit me, and no one else. In doing so, it further distanced me from those around me because not many could relate to me just being me.

    I slowly experimented with using my experiences as a point of reference to try to relate to the emotional burden that so many people seem to drag around with them, and each time I tested my observations for accuracy and relevance, I found that it was quite effective in providing others with an alternate perspective as to why their situation was not as grave as it seemed. All this clutter continued to swim around in the back of my mind for many years until I considered it slightly differently recently when someone once again asked me why it is that I am so calm and composed during moments when others are literally overwhelmed or panicked.

    My usual response was to dismiss it and smile while telling myself that I’m incapable of feeling such emotion, but that uncomfortable feeling in my gut kept nagging at me because I knew it wasn’t true. I am probably more emotionally sensitised than most people I’ll ever meet. (Note I said sensitised, not sensitive!). However, my innate focus on wanting to emerge from trials rather than how to cope causes me to look behind the emotion and focus on the steps needed to overcome it instead. In doing so, it’s inevitable that I got accused of being insensitive because most people look for sympathy rather than guidance when they’re down and out. I think it validates our weakness when we receive sympathy, while tough love reminds us that we’re being pitiful instead of bold. Victims versus masters. Scarcity mentality versus abundance mentality. They all talk about the same thing. You either want to prevail, or you want to be admired for having persevered when others would understand if you failed.

    It’s that unhealthy need to be recognised for our strength in our struggles that often leaves us rooted in our struggles rather than motivating us to overcome it. We find comfort in knowing that others know how much we’re hurting because there’s a natural embrace of compassion or sympathy that often accompanies such visibility. That embrace is often from those that are equally or more weak than we are because they draw comfort from being able to comfort others that are similarly afflicted. This must all sound so cold and dismissive, but it’s not intended that way. I’ll say it again. Sympathy has only ever made someone feel better about being in the state they’re in, while tough love is what pushes them to move forward. Soliciting sympathy in times of weakness is the poison we don’t need.

    That’s when I realised the value of being sensitised rather than sensitive. The value of reflection rather than expression. Reflection allowed me to observe what lessons I had learned from past experiences, and what markers were associated with them, while my outbursts, my anger, and my need to make others understand how bad my state was so that they could empathise with me only ever served as a distraction from moving forward and letting go of the past. That’s when I started looking for the tell-tale signs in others relative to what I witnessed in myself when I went through similar experiences, and the more I identified it, the more I was able to accurately interpret what they were experiencing, why they were experiencing it, and what they were contemplating in dealing with it. Not because I knew them well, but because I knew myself well. And that’s how I started consciously reverse engineering my own life experiences with the aim of understanding the trials and struggles of the people around me.

    So when we’re told we see our faults in others, we need to go beyond just understanding that it implies that every finger pointed at someone else means there are several more fingers pointing at ourselves. This is more valuable and important than that. If we go beyond the rhetoric and the vilification, we’ll see that every struggle of ours is in fact a resource to alleviate the struggles of others. It’s not the sympathy that matters most, but the compassion coupled with the resolve to raise them out of the depths of despair that we once experienced that will add more value than any amount of sympathy ever could.

    However, the irony of helping others out of the dark spaces in their lives is that when they emerge, they’re often inclined to avoid you because you remind them of a time when they were weak. Most people think such weakness is deplorable, they are the ones that remain weak. It is only the grateful that see their moments of weakness as being the source of their strength. They are the ones you should surround yourself with because they will offer the hand of compassion concealed in a glove of tough love when the ingrates will revel in your weakness because it makes them feel better about their own pathetic selves. On that note, don’t expect to be surrounded by too many people at all, because a cursory look around you will reveal that this world is overcome with ingrates who are obsessed with what is in it for them, rather than considering what they need to contribute instead. Incidentally this brings to mind another thought that occurred to me this week. That is, sincerity is rarely reflected at the moment of giving, but most often reflected in the behaviour that follows. And so we should be careful of seeing those that sympathise with us as being sincere, because very often they are the ones that accuse us of thinking that we’re better than them when we let go of what held us back, just because they’re still holding on to it in their own lives.

    (This was a particularly challenging post to write, for reasons that I have yet to figure out!)