Developing Empathy

When Phillip Seymour Hoffman died, of a heroin overdose, it made me extremely sad. I loved watching Hoffman long before Hollywood caught on to how amazing he was. I remember watching some forgettable Showtime sitcom as a pregnant newlywed in 1986, seeing Hoffman, and thinking, "That guy is amazing." I think that one of the reasons he was relatively overlooked for so long was that people forgot that he was acting. They assumed that he was being himself, reciting memorized words. News flash - that's what good acting looks like. You believe that the actor is truly like the character(s) that they portray. When Hollywood finally caught on, I was both thrilled for him and proud of myself for having known it first.

After his death, the first time I heard someone say, "Why should we care about the death of a junkie actor?" I thought that it was an anomaly, spoken by a judgmental individual. Then I heard it over and over, from many different people.

They said it as though two things were true: actors were somehow less valuable than non-actors, and junkies had relinquished any chance of being valued or loved. Both assumptions made me very angry.

A few people called for understanding or compassion on the basis that "it could have been any one of us. It could have been me." I thought that they were missing the point, too.

It could not have been me. Why? I have never been intoxicated. I have never been drunk, high, buzzed or whatever. I don't drink; I never have. I have never recreationally taken anything intoxicating, mind altering or mood altering. (Even though I've had to use prescription painkillers and the like many times, they have never made me loopy, euphoric, giggly, sad or anything except sleepy and nauseated. I cannot imagine taking them recreationally.)

Should it matter if it could have been me? Not in the slightest; not for a moment.

Why? Because if you want to be a caring, compassionate, empathetic person, you will care about the pain and problems of others, even if they are different from yours, and even if they brought their problems on themselves. You should want to be a caring, compassionate, empathetic person, even if those qualities feel unnatural to you and do not come easily. This seems so obvious and self evident. This should be Human Interaction 101. We should all learn, before we are even out of diapers, that this is our goal.

Second, someone that you love will one day need that kind of understanding. Understanding is not condoning or encouraging. Even if all of the people you now value in your life have the same beliefs, standards and behaviors that you do, that does not mean that they always will. Some day someone - a grandchild, a cousin, a childhood friend - will do something ill advised or damaging. That does not mean that you should cut them out of your life and your heart. (And if you are not close to anyone with whom you disagree, you are living an extremely ill advised and isolated existence, but that's another discussion.) How do you want others to treat your loved one?

I often see people who are willing to accept the behavior of loved ones who drink too much or use recreational drugs, as long as they seem to be reasonably functional, and as long as they believe that their loved one could stop using if they wanted or needed to, but they have zero sympathy for anyone who is truly addicted. I think that's backwards. Addicts have my utmost sympathy. They have a physical and psychological dependence. I cannot begin to imagine how difficult that must be. Both their body and mind are convinced that they will cease to function, or even die, without their substance intake.

Aerosmith's Steven Tyler has given interviews about how he felt when he was forced into rehab. He would call his bandmates and say, "I'll never be able to write anything again. They're killing my creativity. I'll never be able to play or sing again. Is that what you want? Do you want to kill the group and take away my livelihood - to take away your own livelihoods?" He meant it, too. He wasn't trying to manipulate them with false facts; he truly believed that if he was sober, he couldn't work and couldn't create.

He's not alone. I've personally known people who felt this way, and I've heard and seen the stories of many more.

"Then," Tyler says, "I found out that my writing was better, and easier, sober, but I never would have guessed that before."

Even good fiction tells truths. I resisted reading "Doctor Sleep," Stephen King's sequel to "The Shining," for years, because Danny Torrance is one of my favorite fictional people, and I didn't want anything to ruin how I felt about him. When I finally picked up the book, I was so annoyed with Danny. I try not to, but I tend to be disappointed and a bit judgmental when people behave in stereotypical ways. I know that cliches and stereotypes exist specifically because so many people will react in predictable ways. Still, I think that the harder and less conventional roads are wide open enough that any reasonable bright or functional person can find and walk them, so it annoys me when they don't or can't. It made me angry that Danny, after watching his father fight alcohol and lose, after watching Jack's life (and that of his family) unravel in good portion because of this Achilles heel, became an alcoholic. I just thought he was smart enough to avoid that first drink.

I understand what he was thinking. He'd seen horrible things - unlike the rest of us, who have to in some way be present to witness horrors, Danny didn't. They let themselves straight into his brain. It was scary and uncontrollable, and he was a child. He tried to cope, and to silence the horrors, any way he could. For a moment, the alcohol shut the door; but it didn't stay shut. Then, Danny would drink more, sure that he needed more alcohol, not less, in order to stay sane.

What Danny was surprised to find out was that being drunk kept out any of the positive effects of his "shining," and only let the horrors in. He eventually discovers that being sober lets in the good stuff, and makes it easier to keep out the bad stuff. He was amazed; I was not. It's a universal truth that life works that way.

It's hard to trust that, though, especially if you've spent time teaching yourself that the opposite is true. I think that every one of us has been in physical pain and mental pain, sometimes at the same time, so acute that we would do almost anything to shut it off. It makes us frantic and panicky and unreliable. We can't hear anything but the noise inside our own heads. I've certainly been there. At one point or another, many people learned that they could momentarily silence the pain with a drink or a pill or a shot or a smoke. They didn't intend to become addicted - nobody does - but it happened, and now they cannot imagine that there's another way to quiet the pain. Their body tells them that this is the only way. Their brain tells them that this is the only way. All they know for sure is that they want the pain stopped, or at least blunted, and they'll do anything to get there. The motivation is understandable.

Sometimes, people start using for reasons other than pain. They might be lonely, easily influenced, bored, hoping to fit in, or afraid. There's nothing wrong with feeling that way, and nothing wrong with trying to fix it. The problem with trying to fix it with a substance is that the substance has zero effect on the actual problem, and you need more and more of it to feel any effect on your mood. It's a recipe for failure. Still, that momentary relief is enough to keep people coming back until they're physically and psychologically dependent.

When Hoffman died, he wasn't with friends. He wasn't at a party or a club - he wasn't "partying." He was alone, in his bathroom. His family was out of town. Maybe he was lonely; maybe he was in pain. We'll never know. We know that he'd fought this demon for years, and was currently winning most of the time, but on this night, he lost. It, unfortunately, happens. You can win them all, and then lose one, and that one will take you down.

He wasn't having fun. He wasn't being sociable. He wasn't following a crowd. That makes it all the sadder - that a man alone in his own home could be his own downfall. It hurts. It hurts me to think about, and I never met the man.

Don't tell me that I shouldn't care. Don't tell me that you don't care unless you're prepared for an angry reaction.

Also earning my ire is the belief that intoxication is unavoidable and even beneficial. People lose credibility with me when they start telling me how "impossible" it is to be sober - Hello! Standing right in front of you! Closing in on a half century old! - or insisting that I'm "ruining" my kids by expecting them to be sober. I have little patience with that kind of nonsense. I also have little patience with the idea that the sober are uncultured, unsociable, immature or somehow suspect.

For instance, even years later, I'm still pretty ticked off at a particular bartender.

When you're working on a theater production, it's very common to go somewhere afterwards to get drinks or a meal with the others working on the show. Quite often, that happens at a bar, because they're open and convenient. (Also, because quite a few people follow the "need alcohol at the end of a long, hard day" mindset, but that's another story.) I spent years working at one theater that shared its parking lot with a bar, so it received a lot of our business. We'd walk over after a rehearsal or show.

The usual bartender knew some of our names and most of our faces; a show typically rehearses for six weeks, and we'd often be the only faces in the bar at 10 o'clock on a weeknight. Depending on whether I'm more concerned about sugar or caffeine at the moment, in a bar I'll order a 7-Up or a Diet Coke. (You get a bigger tip if you give me marachino cherries in either one.)

One night, I ordered a 7-Up. The bartender said, "Awww. Would you like a milk? Do you want me to put a nipple on that?"

I am cutting him more slack than I think he deserves by assuming that he was trying to be funny. It was not funny.

You know The Mom Look, the one that means you've stepped over the line, and the boom is about to be lowered? Most small children figure out that look very quickly; it's a self preservation thing. I had That Look on my face. The bartender saw it, and momentarily froze.

The thing is, I was working very hard at making sure that the next thing that came out of my mouth was not outright offensive.

In that theater company, there were, at the time, at least two recovering alcoholics. One had spent years getting sober, and more years sober before he could face walking into a bar again. Now, he could walk into the bar with the rest of us, order a soft drink, have a good time and leave, but it hadn't always been that way. It was deeply offensive and inappropriate for the bartender to say this to anybody, but I was trying not to imagine the horror of saying it to a recovering addict, or someone teetering on the edge between social drinker and addict, or to a young person trying to decide if they'd become a consumer of alcohol. For all this bartender knew, I was a recovering alcoholic, and the hardest thing I'd ever done in my life was order this soda. Then there's that insidious and ridiculous idea that I was somehow not adult if I didn't want something intoxicating. All of this was running through my mind as I tried to choose my next words.

I was leaning toward, "Just shut up and serve me the soda" or another sentiment of the kind, but the bartender suddenly saw a Pandora's Box open up in front of him. He knew that 1. he'd blown his tip, and I'm a generous tipper, 2. I might never come back, 3. My friends might decide not to come back as well, and we'd find a new hangout, 4. I might be writing a letter of complaint to his boss the moment I got home (and I write a great complaint letter, let me assure you), and most importantly, 5. he'd blown it big time and needed to remove his foot from his mouth. As I opened my mouth, he opened his. "I'm sorry! I'll get you that drink!" He scurried away. I fumed, and he tried hard to be endearing. for the rest of the night.

I'm still angry about it.

Don't be a jerk and express any kind of similar sentiment to me. Addicts deserve my patience; jerks do not.

Also, just for a moment, let's look at the idea that Hoffman didn't count because he was an actor. That, too, makes me angry.

First, I can't stand job snobs. It's obnoxiousness. My ideas about jobs are very Sesame Street; when they named jobs that began with the letter D, they put "doctor" right next to "ditch digger," with no value judgement attached. Any job that is not inherently immoral (say, child pornographer or crack dealer) is valuable. Society needs every job to be done, and done well. Plus, I grew up during the Cold War, trying to gauge how we'd all function After the Nukes Fell, so people with "menial" skills might end up being far more important to survival and wellbeing than, say, securities analysts.

Second, artists are valuable. We tend to judge past civilizations in large part based on their arts. A robust, flourishing culture would have thriving, well paid artists. Even people barely scratching out enough to eat, centuries before large cities, municipal governments and the like existed, took the time to paint and carve and tell stories.

I don't understand deciding that artists are unintelligent or of little value. I really don't understand disliking actors if you watch TV or go to the movies.

I don't like the frequent complaint that, since popular actors make more than the average Joe, they shouldn't have any problems. I expect anyone past childhood to have enough life experience to know that life is hard, no matter how much money you have. Complaining because someone rich has problems or disappointments is a childish manifestation of Sour Grapes Syndrome.

(Don't understand the reference? It's from Aesop's Fables, from the story of The Fox and the Grapes. Go Google it and read it.)

In short, I'm back to the idea that developing sympathy, compassion and empathy should be Human Interaction 101. You should want to be a caring, compassionate, empathetic person, even if those qualities feel unnatural to you and do not come easily. We should all learn, before we are even out of diapers, that this is our goal.

None of us are perfect at this, but please, for the sake of us all, start down the road towards it.