Cut Off, Part II

Continued from Cut Off: The Role of Compassion in Social Death

Social death is a hidden blight, because we never see those who experience it.  We can’t imagine what they are going through.  I received a message from someone who recently severed his friendship with me.  He asked me to return a book and wished me a Merry Christmas with my family.

I wished that I could tell him I am spending this Christmas alone, as I did last year.  My children are with their father, savoring their time with him before he moves to Europe.  Visiting family is unfeasible for countless reasons.  Christmas is only a day on the calendar, I keep telling myself.  Nevertheless, sadness still wells up inside.

How Many?

I have this fantasy of going to an apartment complex on the south side on Christmas day and knocking on every door until I find someone who is alone.  When they open the door, I ask, “Are you all by yourself this Christmas?”  When they nod yes, I pull out a gift.  (Well, first I might ask if they even celebrate Christmas.)

“This is for you,” I say.  I don’t know what I would put in the package, but it would be something warm, something beautiful.  Perhaps a hand painted mug and a canister of fine tea.

If they started talking, I would listen.  If they kept talking, I would have a seat on their sofa and listen some more.  “You have five children?  Wow!  How old are they?”

If they felt too shy to talk, I would smile and depart.  “Hey, you’re not really alone,” I’d say, before slipping away.  “You have a place in the world, and the universe loves you.”

How many people, I wonder, will be sitting in their quiet apartments softly crying on Christmas while we embrace our kin amid warm lights and delicious aromas?

Cultivating Compassion

Being cut off and isolated evokes intense suffering.  How can we enable this suffering to stir our hearts and move us to act?  And what can we really do about it anyway?

In the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche writes, ”A powerful way to evoke compassion is to think of others as exactly the same as you.”  Imagine that others are “another you.”  He encourages us to put a close friend or loved one in the shoes of one who is suffering.

Generally, those we target during compassion meditation are loved ones, friends, enemies, and strangers.  Enemies are those who evoke anger or hatred.  Strangers are emotionally neutral.

In addition to these targets, include in your meditation those who evoke indifference or apathy, those who have fallen off your social radar, those whose suffering you believe is theirs to bear alone, those you consider outside your circle, or those you have outright rejected.  Those who evoke indifference are not necessarily neutral strangers.  Often, it is easier to conjure up compassion for a neutral stranger than for one we are inclined to see as explicitly outside of our circle.

Perhaps indifference is an antidote or shield to the demands on your heart implied by those in need.  Yet, when we offer indifference or disconnection to others, even only in our minds, they feel it acutely, and their pain is what presses on our hearts.  When we offer inclusion, even only in the apparent privacy of our own separate consciousness, they feel that too.  Compassion is a strong step towards healing social death in the world.

To learn more, see: Awakening Compassion
Also highly recommended: The Most Transformative Technique for Love and Compassion from UrbanMonk.net

Transforming Social Reality

After cultivating compassion, making a difference is not particularly hard.  Social death is primarily a conceptual experience.  External cues are merely markers for the social reality, which we create internally.  This means that healing social death involves offering external cues that say, “You are a part of the whole.  You and I are in the same circle.”  In the end, inclusion may be as simple as saying, “You have a friend in me.”

During periods of loss or loneliness, when my inner social reality was one of isolation and disconnection, those souls who most touched my heart and gave me strength were those who acknowledged my pain but refused to buy into my reality.  They offered their presence without pity, without placing themselves in the role of helper.

Confronted with the conceptual reality of social death, certain metaphorical concepts may arise.  These include:

• weight or heaviness,
• pressure,
• disgust or repulsion,
• distance,
• coldness, and
• robbing of energy

As these concepts evoke their corresponding feelings, compassion is obstructed.

The task during compassion meditation is to work through these concepts and feelings to develop compassion that transcends metaphor.  In the end, when you think of that person, you will feel no weight, no pressure, no repulsion, no distance, no coldness, and no loss of energy.  Nothing given, nothing taken.  Simply, you want their suffering to end.

Don’t try to fix me. Then I am broken.
Don’t try to help me. Then I have nothing to offer.
Don’t try to support me. Then I am a burden.
Don’t struggle to include me in your circle. Then I am an outsider.
Just want me in your world.
Then I am a part of the whole.

~ Lisa M. Lindeman

Paradoxes

When you transcend metaphor, you begin to notice paradoxes.  According to our conceptual reality for compassion, proximity and warmth are the primary means to nurture the well being of others, and if proximity and warmth are not feasible or beneficial in a given situation, compassion is impossible.

Thus, situations which require that we emotionally disengage are perceived as being in conflict with compassion.  There are times when it is necessary to emotionally disengage.  However, the weakening of social networks makes it easy to interpret emotional disengagement as impending social death.  Disengaging as social death is something we perceive at a gut level.  Even for one who is responsible for disengaging, such a step is difficult to take without feeling as though one is sentencing the other person to a sort of social death, even if only in one’s imagination.

Emotionally disengaging can be an act of compassion rather than a death sentence.  Distance can be an act of love.

Projections

In the depths of social death, desperation for communion makes me willing, even eager, to adopt and thereby enter the reality of anyone around me.  If I can join them in their perspective, I’m not alone.  If someone wants to diagnose my suffering, “Yes, yes, whatever you say.”  A sort of Stockholm Syndrome sets in.

Yet, the reality of others may include a projection of me with characteristics we tend to see in those experiencing social death: heaviness, need, sorrow.  Things we dare not take on.  When I adopt their reality, I adopt their impression of me.  In their eyes, I am beyond help or perhaps simply… beyond.  In which case, I feel even more cut off.

Then, not only must I heal from social loss, I must heal from a perspective on myself that traps me in that loss.  Such healing requires I hold firm my own reality.  In my perspective, I am a part of a system, a part of the whole.  I am a reflection of everyone who comes into contact with me, and they are a reflection of me.  We are interdependent, whether conscious of it or not.

Embracing Social Loss

Even as I write about cultivating compassion and process through my own experience of social loss, I begin to embrace it.  Slowly at first.  Reluctantly.  Grief resumes its hard course.  Resentments dissolve, as I know they must.  Trauma completes its descent into my mind.  I look at the photos of the winter solstice party where my former friends danced and communed, a party to which I was not invited, and try not to imagine myself disintegrating into a million little pieces of dust.  My longing for some surrogate tribe has worn on me for too long.

Instead of clamoring for social contact, which has become exhausting and endlessly heart breaking, I sink into solitude, relinquish my sense of entitlement to the presence of others in my life, rest, and surrender.  Despite the pain, I believe this is the lesson for me.

In her book, When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron describes how loneliness can be transformative:

Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy.  Heartache is not something we choose to invite in.  It’s restless, pregnant, and hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep it company.  When we can rest in the middle, we begin to have a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness, a relaxing and cooling loneliness that completely turns our usual fearful patterns upside down.

There are six ways of describing this kind of cool loneliness. They are: less desire, contentment, avoiding unnecessary activity, complete discipline, not wandering in the world of desire, and not seeking security from one’s discursive thoughts…

When you wake up in the morning and out of nowhere comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, could you use that as a golden opportunity?  Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart?

As I surrender, I begin to sense the presence of kindness in my life, which grief occludes.  My eyes are opened to the caring of old friends and new friends, and gratitude begins to fill the space occupied by resentment and regret.

One thing I have gained from this experience is the realization of just how easily it happens, how hard it is to climb out of, and just how deeply and relentlessly excruciating it is.  Social death is a quicksand that smothers the heart.  Knowing this, I feel compassion for everyone who feels it too.  Okay, universe, mission accomplished.

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UPDATE:  In Part I of this post, Cut Off: The Role of Compassion in Social Death, I spoke of a woman I met in the hospital who was clearly suffering:

[She felt] a sense that she did not matter to anyone in her world.  Even her close family constantly degraded her, and her emotional suffering caused them to degrade her even further.  A familiar downward spiral.  Her pain was palpable.  Her suffering was addressed with numerous medications, multiple rounds of electroshock therapy, and countless stays in the unit, during which she spent most of her time alone in her room attempting not to injure herself.  Perhaps most damaging was the diagnosis itself, whatever it was, and the grand message conveyed by every nuance of her surroundings: the notion that the root of her suffering lie in some personal psychological defect.

When I first met her, she explained that she’d been in and out of the hospital every few weeks.  She had visited that particular psychiatric ward at least twenty times, and the staff knew her well.  Caught in this whirl of anguish and stigma, she was drawn to self-injury the way an animal gnaws on its leg to free itself from the deathly clutches of a trap.  My heart went out to her.

I gave her the poem by Hafiz, “Holy Fallout,” which seemed to comfort her.  On my last day in the ward, when I said good-bye, I gave her a hug, and she was kind enough to thank me for our conversations.  I only got her first name, and I was too shy to ask for contact information, but I’d been thinking about her.

A few days ago, I walked into a local gym and there she was, standing at the counter!  I was so excited to see her.  I ran over and put my arms around her.

She said she had not returned to the hospital since that week.  “I haven’t gone back, not since you were there,” she said emphatically.  “And no cutting.”  She had strength in her voice.  Hope.  The first stages of healing.  She looked good.  Glowing.

For those whose heart went out to this woman and held her dearly in your thoughts, you undoubtedly touched her life and nourished her soul.