Compassion is Power

I believe that compassion is the most powerful human emotion. My late mother, a victim of severe emotional abuse and domestic violence, blessed me with this belief about human nature. Before I was 11 years-old, my mother left my father 13 times. She tried to go back yet again, but this time he had found another girlfriend. So still in her twenties, she became a single mother, working in a factory to support her child. In the 1950s there was little sympathy for mothers who “failed their marriages” for whatever reason; I was always the only kid in Catholic school from a “broken home.” The pressures on her were enormous and she began to drink heavily to deal with her extreme resentment at the unfairness of her life. But even in those darkest days, whenever anyone in the neighborhood or in our extended family needed help, she was there to offer it. Though we barely had enough food for ourselves, she took in many relatives and near-strangers who had less than we did. In my cynical adolescence, I thought she just wanted someone to complain to about how unfair the world was to her. But much later I saw the truth: In sympathizing with the pain of other people, she was healing her own hurt. As she grew more compassionate, her resentment vanished. She stopped drinking and smoking, and helped hundreds of people over the course of her life.

We never talked about our violent past -- my mother preferred to focus on the present and future. But when I went back to graduate school to study family abuse, I had to ask her opinion, as someone who had lived through it all. I told her what I had learned: Abusive men use anger and violence to control and oppress women. But she didn't buy it.

“Everybody wants to control their spouses when you come right down to it,” she said. “What stops most people is compassion – you couldn't stand to see someone you love feeling bad. Abusers are angry and controlling because they're not compassionate. Because they're not compassionate, they can't heal themselves.”

“But wasn't it compassion that made you go back all those times?” I asked.

“No,” she said emphatically. “It was ego – I wouldn't rest until I made him a better husband. If I were compassionate , I would have seen that he felt so bad because he couldn't be a better husband. My love only reminded him of how much of a failure he was. If I were compassionate, I wouldn't have gone back; I would have let him heal on his own.”

My mother taught me the meaning of personal power, which I have tried to teach to resentful, angry, and abusive people ever since: You reach down deep, beneath ego, resentment, and hurt, to touch the part of your spirit that wants to grow, improve, appreciate, and connect with the good in other people. She taught me that compassion is power.