GETTING TO EMPATHY
April 22, 2016
Survivors of intergenerational
ritual abuse and mind control programming that had split them into a bundle called
multiple personality disorder (MPD) or dissociative identity disorder (DID),
including those whose “parts” have blended into a single sense of self, raised
my awareness of the different sides of myself and others I knew in everyday
life, what Erving Goffman called different “presentations of self.” As victims they had survived systematic
torture, as their torturers discovered that they had the “gift” of being able
to go to “a different place” to endure what their siblings could not, and come back
to their core selves keeping secrets about what had been done to them, with
memories that could only be unlocked by a torturer who had instructed a part of
the victim to “come out” when given a “trigger” by someone who knew the code. Among survivors I got to know well were those
discovered and trained under CIA, later NSA auspices, to perform
assassinations, to seduce and collect intelligence as from high political
figures, to carry secret information and as drug mules, and in some cases whose
fathers had prostituted them as children, as in the military. And among those survivors healed enough to
share what they had suffered, including survivors who met students whom I saw
growing stronger in my classes over as many as 17 years until my retirement, I found,
as I put it at the time, “some of the most together people I have
known”—extraordinarily self-aware, unusually caring and empathic, remarkably
capable of giving and receiving trust and open dialogue. In psychoanalytic terms, their capacity to
develop a coherent sense of social identity and belonging had been interrupted
by building defenses to wall themselves off from helpless pain and terror,
splitting themselves into parts. Their
gift was one of developed intellectual awareness that enabled them to meld the
pieces into one self with a consciousness and self-awareness that encouraged me
for one to become aware of the many parts of myself and others we recognize, if
at all, as internal inconsistencies in how we ourselves get “triggered” to
become different “personalities” as circumstances and conversations change in
our own daily lives. All in all, many
survivors have a gift of insight into and acceptance of their integrated
selves.
In turn what survivors have taught me is awareness and integration of personas
I assume (in Erving Goffman’s terms “presentations of self”) with close
friends, with my students, and with what are known in the social science trade
as “research subjects”—in a community where the imperative for “value
neutrality” and “objectivity,” and reticence to contaminate one’s data, runs
strong. Practically speaking, survivors
also raised my awareness of how support helps us all to build safer and more
trustworthy relations, serves as social medicine for all manner of trauma,
including for instance what makes victim-offender mediation work for
participants.
I was reminded of what ra/mc
survivors have to teach by the April 23 broadcast of the WHYY/NPR program
“Fresh Air,” on “Electrical Currents and an ‘Emotional Awakening’ for One Man
with Autism,” John Elder Robison, interviewed with the neurologist, Alberto
Pascual-Leone, who unblocked the neural passages that Robison from awareness of
the feelings of others toward himself by non-invasive transcranial magnetic
stimulation (TMS; story at http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/21/475112703/electric-currents-and-an-emotional-awakening-for-one-man-with-autism). Robison’s awareness of the feelings that lay
behind others’ actions had been blocked.
After TMS to his frontal lobes (Pascual-Leone had used EMS on other
parts of the brain to relieve depression in other patients), Robison suddenly
became acutely empathic, suddenly noticing “friends’” derision for his autistic
behavior, recovering the feeling for music which he had gained temporarily as a
sound engineer, being so overwhelmed by emotional drama at the movies and on
television that he stopped watching, and summarized:
I was always possessed of strong emotions, what I wasn't
possessed of was reaction to situations with other people, and indeed after
another stimulation, when I could look in your eyes and feel like I was just
reading your thoughts, which was really weird and powerful for me, because that
had never ever happened in my life.
Robison now works with
other autistic people, particularly youth, and concludes:
…I know that [the EMS treatment has given me] my ability
to serve on these autism committees, I think that's the greatest thing I've
ever done in my life, and I'm really proud [that] I can do that, and I think
this made it possible. So there's pain that I felt from having these emotions
come on, but I'm just so proud that I can do this thing that's important to
young people and other people with autism and differences. ...
After all this seeing of
emotion, though, one thing that I've come away with is the knowledge that I
wanted all my life to be able to read these emotions, but of course reading
emotions just makes me like everyone else. I think a debt that I could never
repay Alvaro and those scientists is that they showed me that my geeky ability
to see into machines and see into things, that's my true gift in life too, that
nobody else can do that.
Finally, the April 29 episode of the Ted Radio Hour
begins with a finding by Magill University Professor of Pain Studies and Canada
Research Chair in the Genetics of Pain, Jeffrey Mogil, that the empathy one
extends to friends extends to empathy for strangers after playing the video
game Rock Band—that is, by playing instruments to accompany video band music. I notice a similar phenomenon among people
who become acquainted as we play music together, as in weekly jams at the local
farmers market.
Ritual abuse/mind control (ra/mc) survivors I have
known who have recovered memories of violence done to them by others attribute
their recovery to having found safe company and places in which let their
defenses down on one hand, and regard having “split” into “multiple
personalities” or “dissociative identities” as a life- and sanity-preserving
gift, a defense system. It remains
indeterminate whether Robison was born with autism or was traumatized into it
by environmental circumstances, it is clear that his sudden gain in empathy brings
pain at the awareness of others’ suffering and of their negativity toward
himself and others; his courage in counting his newfound capacity for empathy,
like ra/mc survivors integration is dissociated experiences of trauma, is a
tribute to the value we humans place on awareness of interaction between our
own and others’ feelings as we become able to let down our defenses against it. As with ra/mc survivors, I attribute Robison’s
recovery of his capacity to empathize not only to a resonance in the brain
created by EMS, but to the faith and trust he has had in the neurologist who
administered the treatment and stood by to support Robison in the aftermath. For ra/mc survivors and for Robison particularly,
the connecting one’s own feelings to the feelings of others rests on making it
safe to lower one’s defenses against it.
And Mogil’s experimental results indicate that musical harmony can
awaken empathy too. Social and physical
harmonic resonance can break down defenses against empathy—connecting with the
feelings of others--even in those whose defenses against it are remarkably
strong.
The awakening of empathy is the fundamental mechanism
that produces what I call peacemaking
in response to human division and conflict in all our relations. It amounts to creating resonance and harmony
in the face of social dissonance. The
integration of split personalities or identities by social support, the effects
of EMS on autism, and the power of engagement in musical harmony to make people
kinder to strangers all suggest that empathy emerges spontaneously once
barriers to it are lowered. It explains
how, as a friend taught me, to learn to “trust the process” through which
tension was released and agreement was reached spontaneously in mediation I
conducted, once offenders felt safe enough to acknowledge what they had done
and why, and victims to express their fear, anger, pain and loss they had
suffered. It explains how police-citizen
relations improve in places like Richmond, California, and Cincinnati, Ohio,
once police chiefs establish ways for police and those they police to get to
know each other in many ways in community activities outside the context of law
enforcement. It explains the process of
resolving international conflict which Roger Fisher and others describe as Getting to Yes! Empathy emerges in our relations once we make
it safe to emerge, in many ways we are only beginning to discover. The trick to making peace is to lower our
defenses against it. And as with Elder
Robison, once the defenses are down, peacemaking happens. Love and peace, hal
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