I am up to a very interesting part in the novel Shell that I am reading this week where after meeting up with her estranged brothers living and working in the Snowy Mountains and finding they are soon to enlist in the Vietnam War, their sister Pearl struggles with her culpability having left them behind many years ago after the death of her mother. In the novel her friend Suze tries to appease her guilt telling Pearl she was not God and not ultimately responsible, instead Pearl had chosen for her own life, to pursue a career in journalism. Never the less Pearl being empathic acknowledged the part she played in things (albiet unconsciously in the following paragraph) :
I fucking abandoned them Suze, and they knew it. And they were kids. How do they deal with that? They turn themselves into different people, that’s how. Who cant be hurt anymore. Her voice broke on the words and she stopped….Tears that might be anger, or might be grief pricked at her eyes.
Suze tries to show Pearl it wasn’t her fault but Pearl still struggles knowing her actions may have had an impact.
The reverse situation is shown in the BBC drama series Howard’s End where the lead character through a chain of circumstances involving the two Schlegal sisters gives advice that the company that a young friend of theirs is working for is soon to become bankrupt. Based on this evidence he resigns his job to take a lower paying one else where and ends up being badly disadvantaged when the supplied information proves to be incorrect. When the younger sister confronts the character played by Mathew McFadyn he denies all culpability where as the younger sister who passed on the information takes full responsibility then goes through desperate measures to rectify the situation but is unable to call out a shred of sympathy from the instigator of the incorrect information who shows not a shred of remorse at all.
I could not help but be reminded of key incidents between my brother and me when I watched this episode again last week. I trying to convince him to feel some empathy for and help members of our family who are struggling, he denying that he has any need to and that I would be better off not to care.
I guess it is for each of us to define the degree to which we suffer for others. How much we take on board of our own impact, conscious or unconscious. I most certainly know I have hurt people at times doing something I needed to do or being ignorant or blind to their level of hurt and the same has been done to me. I think the important thing was that at times I had to chose for myself even though that hurt others and doing that (putting myself first) does not come naturally.
Perhaps there are no hard and fast rules for how much of other people’s suffering we take on. Perhaps in the end it is all down to temperamental bias. Empaths being deep feeling and having a capacity to extend themselves into the situations and suffering of others may end up taking on far more than we can cope with and our guilt or sense of culpability may not always be warranted. We may have to acknowledge that what we did had an impact that we must live with while keeping a sense of perspective and balance and not adding as much to our suffering by always beating ourselves up about unrealistic ways we fell short.
But it also shows sense of character and a deeper level of consciousness when we can own that things we did or actions we took could have adversely affected others. We are human and far from perfect and there a are many things we don’t have ultimate power or control over, learning to differentiate what these are and are not is probably an ongoing challenge in our life and all our relationships.
Emerging From The Dark Night 