36. Pandabewwy

We’re not feeling so great this morning. Our sweet little 9-month-old cat, Panda Bear, is going to the SPCA to be spayed today. We were dreading not being able to feed her before the operation but for some strange reason she seems to accept this. Which is a little weird. She looks at us expectantly whenever we get up from our desk but doesn’t seem very concerned that we are not getting up to feed her. She still plays and scratches and sleeps as if everything were as normal as always. It’s as if she totally trusts us. Maybe she won’t feel that way this evening though. She’ll get over it though ... won’t she?

Hartly (8) calls her “Pandabewwy” even though she can say her “r’s”. Before we knew of Hartly’s existence and when we had just gotten Panda Bear, this kid’s voice would call out Pandabewwy. We thought it was just one of us but didn’t know which one. It was months before we began to suspect this was a new voice. Eventually, as always happens, we found out about Hartly and shortly after one other called “Shelta (8)” who was Hartly’s protector for all of these years. We had hoped there weren’t any more but .... that’s how it goes when you’re multiple.

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Yesterday we put Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication tools to work. And we’re so proud of ourself for it. We were at the support group and it was getting really late. Sometimes when there is such a large group we end up going overtime. Everyone needs their say. But we found ourself getting angry as time went on and felt like just getting up and leaving. But thank goodness we didn’t give into that urge. It would have made us and other people feel kinda lousy. Instead we put Rosenberg’s technique to the test. The first thing you do when you are feeling angry is to stop and breathe. I think we missed that one. But we did stop and think – what’s going on here? The next step is to identify your judgmental thoughts. Yes well that part is censored. On to step 3 – connect with your needs. Okay, we asked ourself, what is it that we are needing right now? Well, we really want to go home. We feel tired. Group has been going for 2½ hours. We usually feel spent after group. Some people go for coffee afterward and as much as we would love to do that we just don’t have the energy then. That’s when we need to go home and re-group.

Well, that was a definite ah-ha moment. We were tired. That was our need. Now the hardest part – express those feelings and unmet needs. Okay, how were we going to do that and who were we going to make the request of. (We know that wasn’t a good sentence grammatically speaking) Another ah-ha moment. We would ask the whole group. We didn’t want to ask the facilitator because he was doing the best job he could and wanting to let everyone have their say. It wasn’t his fault that so many people had come. So, before the group ended we asked everyone to cut short their feedback and questions when there is such a big group and especially when we are running out of time.

It worked. We weren’t screaming at anyone to shut up already and let’s go home. In fact, the moment we identified what our feelings were beneath that anger, well we weren’t angry anymore. We felt heard and others agreed. Some even thanked us afterwards for speaking up. Wow. That Rosenberg really knows what he’s talking about. We felt great. And even our energy level picked up and we stayed and chatted with a couple of people.

There are tools out there for us you know. Tools to deal with our emotions. Tools to deal with our anxiety and depression and mania. Two years into therapy, back in 1992, we attended a support and education group for multiples. It was called something like “making it manageable”. We thought – you can manage it? We had never thought of multiplexity as something you could manage. It seemed like it was something you had no control over.

In the past few years depression has been our demon and we thought it just reared its ugly head whenever it wanted to and we were helpless to stop it. But we have reading a little about dealing with depression and come to the realization that it doesn’t have to be this way. You can think your way out of it. Not easy of course but do-able.

Ever heard of Viktor Frankl? He wrote “Man’s Search for Meaning”. We read it many years ago but it has stayed with us. He spent time in a concentration camp and he observed that some prisoners managed to do more than just survive in that environment. He found that people with a certain attitude did much better than other prisoners. They found meaning in the midst of the most horrible suffering. Gordon Allport wrote the preface saying “to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying.” Frankl quotes Nietzsche “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.”

What we have always remembered about this book is this “In the concentration camp every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All the familiar goals in life are snatched away. What alone remains is ‘the last of human freedoms’ – the ability to ‘choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.’” Some of the prisoners “proved man’s capacity to rise above his outward fate.” (Allport)

In the support group we talked about people who have the odds stacked against them and yet they rise above them and find a way to stay positive about life. We also have that positivity. We think we got it from our mother. She is 97 this week and still going strong. She is clear-headed, memory still pretty much intact, a sense of humour, belongs to a church, and has people in her life who help her. Her life is almost over but you wouldn’t know it. She accepts where she is at.

Of course, the abuse we went through was horrible and wounded us so much. Yet our years of recovery taught us so much about pain and managing it, rising above it. Back in 1995, we came to the conclusion that our life’s work was meant to be in the area of helping others through emotional pain in their lives. Our goal for years has been to learn about compassion and how to develop it. We have an alter named Empath (1) and compassion is what she is all about. Through empathy is the way to compassion.

But our life is now centered on understanding compassion. The Dalai Lama says that’s the way to connect with others. He says “I would regard a compassionate, warm, kind-hearted person as healthy. If you maintain a feeling of compassion, loving-kindness, then something automatically opens your inner door. Through that, you can communicate much more easily with other people and that feeling of warmth creates a kind of openness.” (“The Essence of Happiness” by His Holiness The Dalai lama and Howard C Cutler, M.D.)

We have asked over and over how we can have compassion for someone who harms other people, or for someone who is arrogant or seems to have a big ego. How do we stop our negative judgment of others, stand back and feel compassion for this person. Years ago when we were chairing a committee in an organization, a woman was very upset with the way we had been with her. Later on she phoned us at home and she was so angry with us. Of course, we ended up feeling very angry towards her too. We had been upset with her behaviour during our meeting and thought she was very arrogant and selfish. But the next day we talked with our dear friend Lance and he pointed out that this woman might have been suffering. When we thought about it, we realized that yes she was most assuredly suffering and was lashing out and defending herself out of a place of hurt. Suddenly our anger was gone and we felt sorry for the place she was in. There was no need for us to be angry. We didn’t need to feel hurt. What a freedom that was.

Our psychiatrist, Lyn, taught us how to stand back and let go. She taught us through her own behaviour that we didn’t have to take things personally. She allowed us to be angry at her and she would validate our feelings. “Of course you are angry at me. ....” she would say. Say what? She wasn’t defensive. She heard what we said and she acknowledged the legitimacy of our feelings. Wow.

When we were in the most painful times of recovery our son was going through his own hell – adolescence. We had many a crisis and we turned to Lyn for help and advice. Both she and her husband said the thing we needed to do most of all was to take care of ourself. See it comes back to Rosenberg. It’s all about getting your own needs met. That sounds selfish but it’s not. It doesn’t mean to get them met at the expense of someone else but rather knowing what you are feeling and what it is you are looking for. Getting the support from Lyn and from other people in our life enabled us to stand back from Graham’s behaviour and see that he needed something too.  Then we had the energy to support him as well.

We Webers have become very skilled at getting our needs met and it helps us so much in our pursuit of compassion. Compassion is “a mental attitude based on the wish for others to be free of their suffering and is associated with a sense of commitment, responsibility, and respect toward the other”. And “in developing compassion, ... one could begin with the wish that one be free of suffering, and then take that natural feeling toward oneself and cultivate it, enhance it, and extend it out to include and embrace others.” (Dalai Lama) Exactly!!

For us, compassion can almost be like a drug. It makes us high. We feel connected to others and so happy that we are able to give someone the empathy and understanding they need. It fills us up completely.

Today we have compassion for our sweet little cat. We hate her to suffer anything. And yet she is being so good, so trusting. She is not meowing at us for food but sleeps peacefully on a chair. It’s as if she knows we are not withholding food out of cruelty. Our compassion for her is life-giving. Her very existence brings us such joy. We feel so blessed to live with this little animal our sweet little Pandabewwy.