Listening without ego

I have a couple blog posts in the works, but the topics are tricky and what I wish to say about them is elusive. So I thought I would turn to something more direct, such as responding to one of the topic suggestions I received via comment in this earlier post. And the question/suggestion is one posed by Ricercar who asked: “Why are some people so sensitive to feedback (good or bad), almost to the point of being dysfunctional?”

At the heart of this question is a desire to understand others. What remains hidden within this desire, however, is the motivation for wanting to gain this understanding. In other words, why do we need to understand others? And often the actual reason we have for understanding another person’s behavior is the wrong reason; if we’re honest, most of the time the reason is selfish – we think we ought to know despite the fact there is no good reason for us needing to know.

This brings to mind an experience I went through many years ago while I was working at a residential treatment facility for children diagnosed with emotional and behavioral disorders. The boys in the unit where I worked were there for a variety of reasons, but most had been abused.

Right there, all of you reading this have brought forward in your mind a concept of what that means – being abused. Maybe It’s a general understanding, or perhaps it’s a personal understanding either because you are a victim of abuse or you know someone personally who experienced abuse. And based on these different levels of “understanding,” it is very likely that you also have a continuum within your mind regarding the validity of each level of understanding. In other words, if you’ve personally experienced abuse, you will likely consider your understanding of what “abuse” means to be superior to someone whose understanding of abuse is based solely on reading the book, “Sybil.”

This is a bit of a digression, but nonetheless worth bearing in mind. Because if you’re a victim of abuse, your understanding of this violence is not superior to someone who has not been abused – it’s just different. But back to my story.

There was a boy in the unit who was very neurotic. He handled praise very poorly. He would lap up the praise, but afterward frequently do something negative that would result in some form of restriction. It was almost like he didn’t believe he was worthy of any praise and to prove that, he would intentionally do something negative.

Following a therapy session, this boy returned to the unit and went to his room; nothing odd there because it was quiet time and all the boys in the unit were in their rooms. But this boy had a plan. My co-worker on the shift, a woman, was conducting the room checks when she found the boy had attempted to hang himself with his belt. There was no physical injury, no need to rush him to a doctor. My co-worker tried to find out what prompted this, but the boy wouldn’t talk. In this line of work, we often did a lot of tag-teaming; if one staff member was unsuccessful dealing with a kid, we let someone else try.

It was the most surreal conversation I’ve had with someone. The boy did open up to me, but he would only talk to me from beneath his bed. Turned out that during his therapy session, he learned that his mother was coming later in the week to visit him. No wonder he wouldn’t talk to my co-worker, a woman. The boy didn’t want to see his mother – he hated her – but believed he wasn’t being given a choice. So rather than meet his mother, he’d rather die.

Why would you rather die than see her? I asked. Asking a question that begins with “why” is a dangerous one because more often than not, such a question is an invitation to receive a shrug of the shoulders as the response. Any parent can tell you that when a child is caught misbehaving and the child is asked why he or she did the deed, the most common response is “I don’t know.” But this boy told me why.

He hated his mother, a mean-spirited alcoholic bitch of a woman who whored herself during repeated excursions. During these periods of drunken promiscuity, particularly when he was very young, she would lock him up in his room for days without access to food or a bathroom. She would leave newspaper on the floor as if he were a puppy that hadn’t been housebroken. And when she would return to find the mess in his room, she would fly into a rage and shove his face into the excrement.

Listening to this, many of the maladaptive behaviors this boy engaged in, particularly his intentional sabotage of any praiseworthy actions, made sense: I understood the why. But I couldn’t lose sight of the fact that his maladaptive behaviors remained maladaptive, his anti-social behavior was still anti-social; no matter how horrible his mother had been, it didn’t excuse him. It did, however, allow me to be compassionate and empathetic.

Thich Nhat Hanh often speaks of being able to listen deeply and use loving speech. When we speak with someone, especially if it is someone we care about, and the other person is aloof or sharp with us, or even seems to be unable to accept what we are saying, our initial response can be one of confusion, even of feeling hurt. But if we can stop this selfish thinking and bring to mind the thought, “this person is suffering,” rather than dwelling on “this person is a prick,” we are opening up an opportunity for us to be compassionate and beneficial. When we are in that frame of mind, we can listen deeply and with loving kindness.

My recollection of the boy who didn’t want to see his mother is an extreme example. I’m not trying to say that all people who can’t handle praise are victims of abuse. What I am saying is that suffering is at the heart of any maladaptive or antisocial behavior we encounter. We don’t need to know why someone is unable to handle praise or criticism; we just need to open our ears and eyes and avoid viewing this behavior as a personal affront. In fact, directly questioning someone about their puzzling response only draws increased attention to it, likely leading to increased anxiety and more inappropriate behavior.

By practicing the Four Brahmaviharas – loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity – we become less obsessed with our egos and simultaneously become more beneficial to others. This is not an easy practice, but it is a critical one.

In the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta (MN 72), the Buddha tells the wandering ascetic Vacchagotta that the Dhamma is deep and very difficult to understand – that it cannot be understood through reasoning alone. I could have read about that boy’s background in his clinical file; everything he told me was in it. But listening to him tell me all this, his voice coming from beneath his bed (it was like he was returning to the darkness of the womb), I was able to experience this information in a way that no reading of a clinical file could reproduce.

All I had to do was be there.

Things have changed

I want to thank the Rev. Danny Fisher for turning me on to this video. I have always loved Bob Dylan.

A real HOMO-CON

After reading an item at Huffington Post about the alleged Republican gay group called GOProud getting smarmy conservative pundit Ann Coulter to headline its Homocon event, I started to think about how this is related to the four fears of water. It was difficult enough for me to comprehend the Log Cabin Republicans, but at least they embrace being gay. GOProud seems bent on neutering the gay politic entirely by ridiculing gay activists by portraying them as taking all the fun out of politics.

I didn’t know that politics was supposed to be fun, you know, like karaoke or your first circle jerk or kissing a boy for the first time (or the second, or third, or fiftieth, or …).

This group asserts that it stands for “individual liberty” and that “every individual should be equal under the law.” But selecting Ann Coulter as your headliner for your inaugural event? This woman (and I use that term in the general sense), whom GOProud has dubbed “the right wing Judy Garland,” famously called former presidential candidate John Edwards a faggot and labeled a Mississippi high school girl an “irritating lesbian” because she dared to challenge the “sanctimony” of a heterosexual-only prom. She’s called Al Gore a “total fag,” and let’s not forget this salacious slag’s knock on Jews, saying in 2007 that they “need to be perfected,” as if she were queen of the Borg. Ann Coulter is no Judy Garland; rather she is the antithesis of the class and grace Judy Garland exhibited, particularly when it came to Garland’s gay fan base.

As I said, all this reminds me of the four fears of those who go down by the water: The fear of waves, fear of crocodiles, fear of whirlpools, and the fear of sharks.

In the Catuma Sutta, the Buddha uses this simile to explain how some who enter the holy life leave it because they are unwilling to accept the demands of monasticism (while the link goes to Wikipitika, I am referring to the translation by Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi).

With the fear of waves, the novice decides he doesn’t like being told how to act, how to dress, and how to move his body. With the fear of crocodiles, the novice decides he doesn’t like being told what he can eat and drink and when he can eat or drink it. With the fear of whirlpools, the novice quickly decides that he misses the sensual pleasures of the lay life, of being able to dress as he pleases and accumulate wealth and possessions. And with the fear of sharks, the novice gets turned on by women (or men) and decides he would rather indulge his woody than live celibate.

This self-loathing and denial most noticeably exhibited by the gay “conservative” is really quite perplexing, and undoubtedly a primary factor in why the most sensational political sex scandals almost always involve conservative Republicans. These pseudo-gays consistently lambast the more colorful and, yes, stereotypical members of our community as being inappropriate representatives of the gay community, all the while wearing fishnet stockings and black lace panties beneath their three-piece pinstriped suits.

Instead of fearing the waves of homosexual sensibility, instead of fearing the crocodiles of taking dramatic stands on important issues, instead of fearing the whirlpools of mingling openly with the dancing circuit boys or the drag queens in the pride parades, instead of fearing the sharks of openly accepting same-sex sex without a shred of guilt and all that entails, these moes need to cut loose and join the chorus singing, “Don’t dream it, be it.”

Yes, it is important to have fun. But there’s a time for seriousness as well. And there’s not a single minority issue in American history that was ever successfully changed by being nice about it. It takes dramatic and sometimes shocking acts of civil disobedience. That’s why we celebrate Stonewall, and not the founding of the Mattachine Society.