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
