Compassion, wisdom, resourcefulness: Ticket to Ride

I'm so, so excited to have listened just now to my favorite podcast, Hidden Brain, for the first time in months:
the topic is central to my life:
"Healing 2.0: What We Gain from Pain".

In this episode, psychologist Eranda Jayawickreme looks at how we are affected by traumatic events and suffering––using research to separatethe objective reality from our myths about it.
In the US, for instance, there's a strong SuperHero myth--telling the story that adversity makes us better, "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger".

Is there any sense in which suffering might "make us stronger"?
If so, in what ways might we be stronger?
In what ways does suffering continue to hurt us?

. . . And my big, ongoing question:
What helps?

Eranda J concludes that suffering is bad.
LOL, I love that he puts this bluntly. Being wounded (witnessing wounding, causing wounding) is terrible.
Yes.
It may seems obvious that suffering is bad, but in a culture that says suffering makes us strong ("no pain, no gain"), or suffering creates great art (Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo), it is far from obvious.
Further, those stories say that if you don't rise to the challenge, the problem is you.

On the other hand, while Eranda J doesn't address this in this episode, I see an unhelpful push-back to the idea that you should be improved by suffering:
a pushback that overemphasizes the permanency of trauma--an emphasis that can freeze suffering people into statues of powerless victims.

Eranda J (and one's own experience, perhaps) also says that suffering can increase wisdom, compassion, and resourcefulness.

BOTH can be true.
Suffering destroys some things, and suffering improves some things--both at once (or, over time).

Again, maybe this is obvious, but it's not what I hear. I feel like people choose sides:
 a certain political or therapy mindset, seeking to protect people who suffer, emphasizes how awful suffering is.
Yes, it is so awful.
Vs.
people who want everyone to man-up, take personal responsibility (again, with political ramifications--"I don't have to pay for you"), they emphasize how it makes you "stronger".
Sometimes, also yes.
Though it turns out--looking at soldiers after war, for instance, that John Waynism isn't strength, it is hardness.
It may help you survive, but it's not technically an improvement, it's more (again) like freezing in place.

(I want to add that sometimes we suffer because WE are the ones who caused the pain. That's a particularly awful kind of suffering--not the suffering of innocence but the suffering of guilt.)

Eranda J. talks about the importance of our reaction to trauma.
When we do not have "primary control"--when we cannot control our environment/what happens to us or people around us--what matters is our "secondary control", that is, how we react to what is happening to us.

II. ReCasting Trauma

The first person I thought of was bink.
A few summers ago she drew a series of comics (graphic memoirs), re-framing the traumas of her childhood. As a child, she had no primary control. But in her art, she gained power through her own resourcefulness and magical friends.

I've shared one of them--"The Owl". (I hope she will put them all online one day.)
Below, Roy Rogers leaps out of the TV set and rescues little bink (and her blue dog!) from her father:

Sort of amazingly, retelling her story—but differently—some fifty-years later WORKED.
Events that had made her sleepless her whole life lost their power to haunt her nights.
She says she thinks it worked partly because it took a long time--months--to draw all the comics--so she went (painfully!) all the way into each memory and re-lived and re-image'd [reimagined] each thoroughly.
_______________________

III. What Survives the Fire

Then, I also thought about the faith crisis of Donna Showalter, who I'd just heard on the Mormon Stories podcast. (I recommend all five hours of her story.)
Donna S. experienced total betrayal of her belief system--and her life fell completely apart when she when she found out the leaders she trusted were lying and were not doing "what's right".

(Discovering that her life was based on lies was so devastating, she didn't even know if she was real or not. She went outside and looked at mountains in the distance, and in knowing they were real--she had walked in them--she got a foothold in believing she, too, was real.)

When Donna talked on Mormon Stories in 2019, this was a recent event in her life, and she didn't have a lot of overview.
I see, however, that while she was devastated in a way that almost killed her, literally---NOT A GOOD THING--and  while she will perhaps remain wounded in some ways, she also did turn her own suffering into SERVICE to other people who suffered--
in her case, to LGBTQ teenagers in the Mormon church.

So there's that both/and. It's terrible, and you may be better IN SOME WAYS for it.

She said she used to judge people who left the church or didn't believe correctly.
No more.
So, yes, while weakened in some critical ways, she grew in compassion, wisdom, and resourcefulness.
BOTH are true.

And, interestingly, she continued to draw on the core values (love & service) of the religion that was based on lies---they are the things that survived the fire.

IV. Birds Do It, Buddhists Do It

Religions, Eranda J said, are mostly about the question of suffering--what do we do with it? What’s it “for” (if anything)?

He grew up in Sri Lanka, so he grew up in the middle of a cruel civil war--he became hardened to seeing bodies of people tortured to death, dumped in the streets. Violence was normal.

Westerners who think Buddhists are not violent (I hear this a lot) are not paying attention. Sri Lanka is largely Buddhist, and this was Buddhist violence.  (See also, Myanmar.)
A fascinating article on this from Waging Nonviolence, a nonprofit media organization:
"Lessons on Buddhist extremism, nationalism and violence from Sri Lanka: Despite a general image of being nonviolent, adherents to Buddhism in Sri Lanka and other Buddhist-majority countries have both justified and engaged in out-group violence", Kumar Ramakrishna, Fellowship Magazine, August 16, 2023.

This is important to delve into because while religion may be a fertile soil for violence, it's not the root cause--it's a tool, a carrier.
Remove religion, and you still have the same human problems rooted in struggles for power and control (of resources, including emotional and economic ones).

I'm not saying religion is innocent!
I'm saying humans are equal-opportunity exploiters of philosophies.
Religions teach "do not kill"; Nationalism adapts that--"Well, but you can kill the outsiders; they are not worthy of the protection of our law".
HOW do we politically and personally deal with this???

V. Getting to Know You

I was talking with Big Boss yesterday about how we do or do not stay centered in Spirit (whatever name you want to give to the Source of compassion, wisdom, resourcefulness).
And how faith in human goodness is continually strained by seeing the human cruelty and stupidity on the streets around us, or in ourselves.

I've been working at the store for coming on six years.
Big Boss looked at me yesterday as we were talking about this--which as usual, I brought up, and he said as if he just realized this,
"I don't really know your faith story. When someone stays at the store a long time, they usually have some kind of calling here."

LOL.
Damn straight, you don't know my story, buddy--YOU NEVER ASKED.
I know his story--I have heard it in depth. It's on youtube!
He didn't directly ask, but murmured something about maybe we could talk sometime.

I am hardly going to open wide up to someone who never asked me any personal questions in six years.
But it did get me wondering... What would I say? What is [to use his term] my "faith story"?

I had told him before and I repeated again my experience of seeing a therapist who wanted to talk about my intimacy issues when I wanted to talk about my walk to work, stepping over people lying on the sidewalk. (This is not a metaphor.)
And how out of that, I'd found the priest who said,
You are not the savior.

Big Boss didn't quite get where I was coming from. He said, "We are not the Savior, but we still have a duty to try to help."

"I want to make it clear," I said, "that 'you are not the savior' is not a pass.
It is a ticket to ride."

It's one of the things that help in the face of trauma --seeing or experiencing cruelty, deprivation, and so forth.
In terms of the Hidden Brain episode, it's a
secondary control---it's an awareness that I may not have primary power to change conditions (say, that led a person to be lying in my path), that is, I Am Not the Savior.

But I do have a secondary control, the power to react, and to interpret, to find meaning, to find a story that keeps me from freezing in despair.

I told Big Boss, as an example of being freed up by realizing I am not the Savior, about how I had tried to help Ray, , as he knows, who is now dying of alcoholism.
He nodded.
I said, "I have no power to help him in ways that could save him. And I've seen other people trying, and they couldn't save him either. But here, at what seems to be his end, I know his name. It doesn't save him, but it's not nothing. And I have to settle for that. I accept that."

Acceptance is a resource. It allows me to keep trying.

Big Boss went on to tell me he'd been reading that morning about Jesus talking to the Woman at the Well. As a Samaritan, she was a total outcast to his people---in Nationalistic terms, she was an outsider who should be scorned and shunned.
Instead, he spoke to her with love and acceptance.
BB said, when Jesus' disciples saw him talking to her, “they were awed”.

He said, We want to live so we are awed by who we talk to.

I like that way of putting it.
What keeps us flexible enough, strong enough to do that???
Even after we fail, even after we're wounded, even after we cause pain.
This is the question I am always asking.