A Recovery Blog

This blog is about my continuing recovery from severe mental illness and addiction. I celebrate this recovery by continuing to write, by sharing my music and artwork and by exploring Buddhist and 12 Step ideas and concepts. I claim that the yin/yang symbol is representative of all of us because I have found that even in the midst of acute psychosis there is still sense, method and even a kind of balance. We are more resilient than we think. We can cross beyond the edge of the sane world and return to tell the tale. A deeper kind of balance takes hold when we get honest, when we reach out for help, when we tell our stories.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Did I Make A Mistake?

Karen left a comment on my last blog entry informing me that Brendan was probably a sociopath and not a psychopath.  The research I did before I posted my last three blogs indicated that the line between being a psychopath and being a sociopath is blurred.  They both are classified as Anti-Social Personalities.  There are some differences, but then sometimes psychopaths have sociopathic tendencies and visa versa.  Brendan may have been either.  In any case, psychopath or sociopath, both are mentally ill.  That's the most important point I can make.

How do you treat the mentally ill that are prone to violence and deception?  With compassion and organized support.  You don't label them as hopeless.  You make room for them in the society.  Maybe you even set up communal environments for holistic treatment.  You identify the problem as early as possible, in childhood preferably, and get those children the help they so desperately need.  It's very possible that sociopaths as well as psychopaths have abnormalities in their brains.  Perhaps they are born with it or they develop the abnormalities through environmental factors, particularly abuse of one sort or another.  I say don't rule out treatments such as medication and therapy.  Don't give up on people because you feel threatened and repulsed by them, especially when they are handicapped.

Pema Chodron has said many times that we are all in the same boat, which is one way of saying that we are one people.  How a tribe treats one of their own who has mental illness says many things about the tribe itself.  For some tribes, their mentally ill become shamans, for others perhaps great warriors, so sometimes they find their place within the group.  But in other tribes the mentally ill are abused, even made scape goats, often locked up.  It's easy to justify that behavior when you label someone as violent and disruptive to the tribe.  And so there came into being the crime and punishment philosophy and approach.  This philosophy and approach has been around for a long, long time.  Adam and Eve committed a crime against God and so were cast out of Eden.  And then came Cain who murdered his brother Abel.  Generation after generation, all the way up to Jesus.

What's extraordinary about Jesus is that he not only challenged this eye for an eye mentality, he infused compassion into his message.  People turn a blind idea to it so often, but there's no way around it -- Jesus said "Love your enemies."  What's not to understand here?  And who did Jesus hang out with?  Probably a few psycho/sociopaths amongst other people who were judged by society and who were suffering because of it.  Some people were moved by his message and followed him, others were deeply threatened.  Jesus was tested to the limit.  He was one person who had to walk the walk and not just rely on empty words.  He was killed for preaching mercy.  On the cross he said at least two things:  "God forgive them for they know not what they do." and "God, why have you forsaken me?" Even on the cross he still had mercy in  his soul and yet he was suffering so much.  He was still human and not a god, which is why his story is so poignant.  There's no doubt in my mind that he was a very good man. In a lot of ways he was a very ambitious man.  He wasn't looking for material wealth or status.  What he wanted was to move people's souls to get them to be the very best they could be.  That's real power, that's spiritual power.

And before Jesus, there was Buddha who expelled himself out of a man made Eden to seek the truth and to find a way to end suffering for all beings.  Again, he didn't say that he was seeking to end suffering for the "good" people and not the "bad" people, but for all people.  He did this through compassion and this compassion flowered alongside wisdom and he became enlightened.  He taught people to love themselves and all others, regardless of what they did or didn't do.  I wonder what Buddha thought about the very sick and violent people he met.  I imagine that his compassion was so great as to include them in his heart.  Compassion started out as the practice of his life, but I believe after he woke up he no longer had to practice, he just was always compassionate, it had become his way of being.

Am I wrong to try and follow the Buddha and Jesus?  Was I wrong to try and love a person that they would have tried to love, too?  Shouldn't their examples mean something to us in our everyday lives?  I know deeply and personally that it is very difficult to love someone who, in a sense, works to block intimacy, which includes love and compassion.  More than that, who might be hardwired to be a difficult person to co-exist with.  I know what extreme fear feels like.  I also know how fear distorts the truth too many times.  And it's the truth that I care about.  My fear and my resentment were the natural result of having been abused repeatedly, but to remain in that state, that would have been a mistake.

1 comment:

Karen May Sorensen said...

Hi Kate,

What does Buddhism and Pema have to say about the concept of idiot compassion? I just ran across the term and didn't get a good definition in her book.

Our former neighbor is a sociopath and mentally ill. I know he takes anti-psychotic medication. We used to let him sleep over as an arrangement between his over burdened adoptive parents and the state who paid for his care while he was a teen. We stopped this service when he repeatedly stole a cell phone from us to make calls to his girlfriend. He had no remorse (after he was caught once he did it again) and got angry when we pointed out that stealing was wrong and criminal. I know that when I lectured him I was close to being hit. You should have seen the way his jaw worked. I knew he hit his mother.

Eventually he tried to strangle his adoptive mother while she was driving a car. This got him taken out of the home. We still see him around town and we are very friendly with him. However, we do expect that he might try to steal from us, since he knows the layout of our apartment and where things of value are kept. We believe that he stole money before from us. And we don't let him get too friendly with our dog. Our former dog was used to letting him in the house, we don't want to train our current dog in this way.

Because of this young man we always lock our doors, which we should have been doing anyway. But we consciously changed our behavior because he was a threat.

Do we like him and wish him well? Yes. Do we think he would steal from us if we didn't lock our doors and have a German Shepherd? Yes, absolutely. The friendliness and care we showed him created in him no obligation to treat us as special or respectfully. It is the locked door and the barking dog he respects. Its unfortunate, but since his morality won't stop him, we have to make other arrangements as barriers to criminal behavior.

Knowing him is like having a rattlesnake for a pet. The rattlesnake likes you, is familiar with you, but you have to handle it carefully so it doesn't get mad and bite you. I know how nice this young man can be and I hope, when we see him around town, he gets some satisfaction from our friendly hellos. I know all the work his adoptive parents put into his childhood, tons of therapy, supportive schooling, and home emotional support. He was a mess when they got him as a child. But because of the young man's moral compass, he doesn't show any loyalty or respect or even wish to have contact with them. I think the mother particularly is hurt, she poured love into him, although they seem to have moved on well with their lives.

If compassion means wishing a person well, wishing that they know happiness, and being kind to them, then this is easy to do with this young man. However, we feel we are wise not to trust him and to know what he is capable of and take care to protect ourselves from him.

All my love,
Karen