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Steven Stosny, PhD, is Director of CompassionPower. His interest in emotional regulation in general and in the healing power of compassion in particular grew from his childhood in a violent home.
Dr. Stosny is a consultant in family violence for the Prince George’s County Circuit and District courts, as well as for several mental health agencies.
He has treated more than 3,000 clients with various forms of anger, abuse, and violence.
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Editorial... |
The Age of Anger and Resentment - Part two
by
Steven Stosny, PhD © 2004
Click here to read part one
Increasing Victimization through the National Victim-Identity
As all who study human behavior know, individual and collective identity exert far-reaching influence on thoughts, feelings, and behavior, as well as public policies and laws. The profound ripple effect of identity owes to its function as an organizer of experience and a filter for what sort of information the brain (or legislature) selects to process. The brain (or legislature) looks for information consonant with identity and overlooks disconfirming or contradictory data. People who identify with defects or weaknesses tend to see only negative aspects of themselves and their experience. A national identity organized around the sanctity of individual freedoms produces a different legislative agenda from one that considers itself tough on criminals.
 A natural consequence of self-empowerment through anger and resentment marshals reason, creativity, and public policy for one primary purpose. Victim-identity seeks to confirm the various ways in which we seem victims of other people’s carelessness, manipulation, selfishness, incompetence, or insensitivity. The result is loss of power over internal experience, as responsibility for self-regulation is abdicated through chronic blame. The "damaged" self becomes a monument to the transgressions of others. Self-worth is measured by the never quite adequate apologies of others, by the amount of damages awarded by a court, or the degree of "validation" garnered on the Oprah show. One teenage client admitted that he did not want to relieve his depression because that would let his abusive father "off the hook." This boy needed his suffering to serve as punishment for his father. So long as identity revolves around injury or damage, as it must in this Age of Anger and Resentment, wounds cannot heal.
A still darker side of victim-identity explains how most violent criminals, having been brutally victimized themselves, so often construe abuse of others as righteous retribution for the wrongs done to them. Even far less extreme subscribers to victim-identity are likely to feel justified in demeaning others. Some therapists refer to this phenomenon as "the abuser within." But it may be nothing more than a primitive impulse for revenge that is far more general, automatic, and habitual than deliberate and discriminating. Like the Bite of the Vampire, victim-identity carries the compulsion to make other creatures like ourselves.
Many victim advocates have begun to realize that identification with victimhood can make intractable problems out of what might otherwise be transient, albeit painful, symptoms. Most support groups now refer to themselves as "survivors" of various abusive and dysfunctional conditions. But for this to be more than a mere semantic shift, motivation for individual and social development cannot come from anger and resentment, which will organize identity around monumentalized injury or damage. Rather, empowerment must come from passion, conviction, competence, healing, nurturing, growth, creativity, and compassion for self and others. In this solution-oriented construction of reality, there is no time for blame.
Compassionate Power
Focus on injury, damage, defects, and submission, i.e., blame, distorts self-image. For consistent, pro-social self-empowerment, we must turn to that which widens and deepens the scope of self-knowledge. Accurate self-knowledge, a prerequisite of genuine power, is possible only with clear focus on our enormous capacity for healing, nurturing, growth, creativity, building, and competence. We fully know ourselves only when we develop what Abraham Lincoln called, "the better angels of our nature." We can sustain a sense of genuine power only when we experience the unparalleled reward of human compassion: To understand deeply the hurt of another is to heal one’s own.
 We are hard-wired to discover ourselves by caring about others. Infants are programmed to learn their personal value and self-worth from the degree of compassion received from their caretakers. Children fall into depression, fail to thrive, even die, when deprived of compassion. Adults become morbid, physically sick, suicidal or eccentric, crazy, and dangerous, when the compassionate part of their nature atrophies. A family low on compassion tends to be high on dominance/submission. It becomes trapped in a pendulum of pain. The inexorable pendulum swing begins when the arousal of anger/resentment, stimulated by failures of compassion, resolves into still more shame, guilt, and abandonment-anxiety, shifting the pendulum once again toward anxious renewal of attachment bonds. Unless a genuine rekindling of compassion occurs, the attempts at reattachment will again founder. The pendulum swings back yet again through shame-guilt-abandonment-anxiety, to the anger side of the arc. This hellish ride back and forth continues until, exhausted, the parties simply detach and either flee new attachments or face a period of depression, despair, bitterness, and numbness.
The pendulum of pain is a family’s punishment for failure of compassion. When an entire culture suppresses compassion, we live in an Age of Anger and Resentment.
The Power of Compassion vs. The Powerlessness of Pity
Compassion may be the most misunderstood of all emotions. For example, the current political debate concerning the failure of so many social programs invariably confuses pity with compassion. Pity requires an assumption of superiority, e.g., God pities us; we pity the poor and downtrodden. Though it may flow from a kind heart, the nature of pity sustains inequality and breeds dependency, which easily leads to contempt on both sides. Those we pity make us feel guilty for having more, angry at them for not getting better, and frustrated over our inability to make them better, while they resent us for the same reasons. The German playwright, Bertolt Brecht, wrote that the first time we see beggars on the street we’ll give them our coats. The second time we’ll call the police to have them removed. The pity-dependency-resentment-guilt-anger association helps explain why the frailest, most dependent, most powerless among us absorb the greatest abuse, despite the many laws designed to protect them.
An abundance of pity and dearth of genuine compassion has doomed scores of social programs as surely as it ushered in the Age of Anger and Resentment. Having relegated the needy to subclass status, we now resent and berate them when they show any of the contempt that relegated status breeds or when they assert their dignity with a sense of entitlement. I recently saw a bumper sticker that read, "Swallow your pride, not handouts: Take a menial job."
The more shame we heap on complex conditions of need, the more likely are the needy to empower themselves with contempt for the system that stimulates their shame. When the dignity, value, and importance of persons is denigrated by their society, individuals blame the system for their misery and set about to oppose, subvert, or cheat it in any way they can. Rather, we must recognize that persons with menial jobs have the same inherent dignity, value, and importance as the president or the Chief Justice. Then working minimum wage jobs can represent a rise in status (showing determination, diligence, industriousness), rather than an even more humiliating descent into the "menial." Reinforcing the dignity, value, and importance of all persons frees the enormous amounts of emotional energy necessary to defend against loss of core value. That store of energy can then go into achievement and autonomy. Compassionate behavior always empowers the self and others to realize the core value and self-sufficiency of our common birthright.
A more insidious problem comes with pity. It carries a propensity toward a kind of blind trust of those who are less than trustworthy. The false presumption of dominance/superiority inherent in pity demands that an offender engage in a convincing display of shame, remorse, and powerlessness. In exchange for his apparent emotional suffering (that indulges our pity), we offer renewed trust. The trouble is, self-effacing remorse organizes identity around the anti-social: "I’m essentially a bad boy." Under stress, "bad boys" do bad things. Shame reinforces self-obsession, in which other people continue to be merely sources of emotion for the self-obsessed. What’s more, shame drastically impedes learning, making it difficult to acquire vital new skills in pro-social self-empowerment. The remorseful tend to "talk the talk," never quite learning to "walk the walk."
A compassionate response to the offender restores the sense of self to levels sufficient to learn new skills in empowerment. In terms of renewed trust, the utterly crucial question becomes: Has the offender learned pro-social forms of self-empowerment that can hold under the most stressful conditions? To answer this question, we must first answer: Are we better off seeing the offender wracked with self-obsessed shame, remorse, and deprecation, or feeling good as a result of his sustained compassion for others?
Compassion for self and others includes awareness that even the most obnoxious of behavior represents attempts at self-empowerment, motivated by a sense of powerlessness and vulnerability. The more compassionate we are, the better we see the deeper hurt and continual struggles for self-empowerment that people encounter. The more compassionate we are, the more efficiently we distinguish those who cannot consistently choose forms of pro-social self-empowerment from those who can. The more compassionate we are, the more wisely we trust, and the less we suffer.
When compassionate people are victimized, they never succumb to victim-identity. The self-pity of victim-identity reinforces a false sense of inferiority and damage. Self-compassion includes recognition that the bad things that happen to us can in no way diminish our core value as persons. As one client put it after brief empowerment treatment, "The fact that I was sexually abused as a child is the least important thing about me."
The Ultimate Power of Compassion
The sense of powerlessness endemic to the Age of Anger and Resentment comes from our national addiction. Blame externalizes vulnerable feelings, forges identity with the anti-social, creates endless power struggles that produce only resentment and dependency, and makes veritable enemies, abusers, and victims of us all. The ultimate power of compassion heals vulnerable feelings, forges identity with the pro-social, and creates mutual empowerment that, in turn, creates self-sufficiency and cooperation.
Anger is an instinctive and vital response when one is--or expect to be--attacked by a predator. No amount of compassion can or should diminish this function of anger. But without development of the compassionate part of our nature, it is impossible to tell the vicious predator from the hungry lamb. It is impossible to keep concern for our children from intruding on their psychological and spiritual development. It is impossible to extract justice from revenge or attempts at community from inadvertent hegemony. It is impossible to distinguish benign public policy from special interest manipulation or populous retribution. It is impossible to separate passionate conviction from vindictiveness, no matter how noble the cause. It is impossible to trust or even sustain interest in one another. It is impossible to know consistent internal peace and well-being. It is impossible to love without hurt.
We cannot begin to know ourselves unless we know ourselves compassionately, not as victims or survivors, but as powerful agents of growth and creativity. We cannot begin to know ourselves, as individuals, as families, or as a nation, without knowing one another compassionately. For only through compassion can we see our similarities, understand our differences, and appreciate our essential equality. Only through compassion can we build an individual, familial, and national identity that remains consistent, inclusive, accurate, and satisfying.
We have long thought of compassion as a means to therapy. It is time we recognized that it is also and end. Eventually, exhaustion will loosen the hold of anger and resentment on our collective nervous system. Then compassion for self and others, the god within waiting to be born, may finally emerge as the predominant form of self-empowerment. Then we will enter the dawn of unprecedented therapeutic efficacy in helping to build bold new levels of personal, familial, and national empowerment, in the Age of Compassionate Power.
Click here to read part one
Copyright 2004 Steven Stosny, PhD., all rights reserved
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