A few years back, a student sent me an email asking, “Could you say a little more about Martyrdom and how that differs from Compassion? And would you expound bit on the power of saying ‘No?’ And thinking about those things made me start pondering the concepts of neutrality, and respect versus tolerance. How do you define those?”
That’s too much for one blog. I’m going to start with the first two and follow up with the others in successive posts.
Martyrdom vs. Compassion
This one made me blink. The energy of those two states of being is so disparate in my reality that I don’t think I’d ever considered positioning them as opposite ends of a dichotomy. The only thing they have in common, as far as I can tell, is that, as states of being go, they are both perfectly valid choices for a person to make in their experience of relationship with others.
But they are choices. Which one you choose is entirely up to you.
When defining concepts, I’m a big fan of referring to the dictionary. Not only do I love finding the origins and derivations of the words we bandy around in our daily use of language, it’s where I discovered, much to my delight, that the word “heretic” was derived from the Greek hairetikos, which simply means, “to be able to choose.” (So if you had the temerity to flex the Free Will God gave you and make your own spiritual decisions based on your own authentic experience of the Divine, the Church would string you up. Yup! Gotta love that old-time religion!)
But the dictionary also lets you find shared definitions. Concepts that most folks would agree upon. So, it’s often a good footing for beginning a discourse.
Now as a noun, martyr is defined as, “1. One who chooses to suffer death rather than renounce religious principles. 2. One who makes great sacrifices or suffers much in order to further a belief, cause, or principle. 3. One who endures great suffering.”
As a transient verb (a verb with an object) it’s defined as: “1. To make a martyr of, especially to put to death for devotion to religious beliefs, or 2. To inflict great pain on; torment.”
The funny part of course, is that a lot of folks who endeavor to embody the second two definitions of the noun often, consciously or unconsciously, inflict the verb’s second definition on the folks around them.
And the obvious difficulty of this mindset is that usually, nobody asked them to.
Really think about that definition. One who makes great sacrifices or suffers much in order to further a belief, cause, or principle.
So—these folks have an agenda. It may not be a conscious agenda, but it’s there. And yes, there are some causes that are more noble than others, and there are two very different kinds of martyrdom; the decent, selfless kind—such as the parent who goes without food so that their children might eat—and the more self-serving kind; the kind that seeks out suffering as a way to manipulate the feelings and behavior of others.
The first type of martyrdom is a lesson in nobility. It’s a dynamic that allows a person to explore the dynamics of what matters to them, this incarnation. It allows them to define things like love and devotion; it often allows people to find the true depth and breadth of their own strength.
The funny thing is, these folks seldom think of themselves as ‘martyrs’—because they’re not seeking pain. Even though they may be making true sacrifices for another, they’re not seeking suffering. They’re seeking well-being. If you asked them they’d probably tell you that they’re merely dealing with a rough patch of circumstances with as much grace as possible until their situation improves. To be honest, I wouldn’t really even call these folks martyrs; I’d just think of them as ‘strong’ and ‘focused’ and admire them—and help them if I could.
No; what I think of as a classic ‘martyr’ is someone who deliberately embraces suffering—when there are other, less painful options available—in order to exert an unhealthy influence over the people in their sphere. This type of martyrdom is nothing more than a control game that says, “Look at me! Pay attention to me. I’m suffering so much and it’s all for you! Now you owe me—so do what I want you to do!” It attempts to impact or manipulate the behavior of others by putting one’s self forward as an object of selfless self-sacrifice.
The first type of person generally moves you to a feeling-state of sincere compassion, igniting a desire to help, if you can. The second type doesn’t want to be helped—that would ruin their game entirely. They just want to dominate the interpersonal dynamics with their allegedly ‘selfless’ acts.
I’m thinking of a woman whose children were constantly telling her to slow down, relax, and let them manage their own affairs. But because she had this martyr game running as her baseline reality, she was forever stopping by her children’s homes and dropping off prepared foods for the freezer, rearranging their furniture and household items as she ‘just tidied up a little bit,” wrestling with her daughter to take possession of the grandkids’ soiled clothes—which she then took back to her own place to wash, dry and iron, requiring that the daughter ‘stop by for just a sec’ to pick them up again—a trip that usually required at least two full hours of her daughter’s time. She had an entire repertoire of these kinds of ‘selfless’ acts.
She irritated the hell out of her children, yet when they expressed any sense of displeasure with her behavior, telling her that they were perfectly capable of running their own homes, she’d burst into tears and run into her bedroom, throwing herself down on the bed and howling because “nobody appreciates the sacrifices I make for them.”
Her son finally accepted a job in another state and moved without telling her. Her daughter changed her locks.
This type of game is obviously not true altruism or self-sacrifice, but an unhealthy type of competition, or control game, that is a cloying parody of those states. True altruism is a rare trait to find in a human being in any case; true altruism is determined by a genuine selflessness that neither asks for nor expects compensation or even consideration for one’s behavior. Neither are they acts of barter, where every “kind” act is extended with the clear expectation of receiving a similar expenditure of time and energy in return. The acts that are committed from true altruism are undertaken for the inherent value derived from the act itself. Affection or compassion is often apparent in the conduct of such people, but it would never occur to them to attach a sense of moral obligation or reciprocal debt to the gifts they give—they do what they do for its own sake. This may even be seen as an act of self-interest; it makes them feel good—although even if the motivation is self-serving in that way, it doesn’t necessarily take away from the value of the gift. It’s just a person’s uncommonly clear awareness of their own true motivations.
After all, even Mother Teresa is said to have noted that she began founding orphanages to get kids off of the streets because she couldn’t stand seeing them suffer. It made her feel good to give them shelter and food. True, she might have had an ethic in place that informed her that such an act was also noble; she may have even been of the opinion that God would approve of such consideration for others. But she claimed that she did it because it made her feel good, which I have to say, is a delightfully refreshing stance of honesty.
Although certainly not confined to it, this game is rife in family dynamics. It’s where one family member, being unable to force their children, spouse or siblings to act in a way that is pleasing to them by outright demands, goes out of their way to inconvenience themselves so that the object of their strategy feels guilty and caves—doing what the martyr wants so that they don’t have to watch someone they love suffer.
Rather than take charge of their own happiness and move forward consciously towards meeting their own needs and manifesting their own desires in a mature and thoughtful manner, folks who run this game will often attempt to make other people responsible for their happiness through guilt, shame, and coercion.
And sometimes it works—kinda; for awhile. Sometimes it’s much easier—and faster—to simply capitulate and do what the flippin’ martyr wants—then they’ll stop whining and leave you alone. But when spurred by guilt or shame like that, an action is never undertaken for the right reason; it can’t be—the level of resentment that’s been engendered in the martyr’s victim is just too great. It’s a disrespectful, manipulative and immature game—and yet it’s so common that there are myriad variations on the joke about “How many children does it take to change their mother’s lightbulb?” The punch-line being a long-suffering, “Oh, don’t bother about me, dear. I’ll just sit here in the dark…”
Which would be funny if it wasn’t so painfully familiar.
The silly thing is that the martyr game, like any other game of active manipulation or coercion, never really gives the martyr what they want. Unless they’re truly masochists who get a quiet thrill out of being misused, most martyrs are actually looking for attention and deferential respect. They’re looking for companionship and love. These are perfectly agreeable things to desire in one’s life—but gaining them through the ‘guilt’ game martyrs play is usually unsatisfying—because it’s not the genuine article, only a pale shadow of it. So they ask for more—and more—and more; never satisfied by what they receive because the wine they’re being poured is soured by the toxic level of resentment or obligation their own behavior engenders.
Tell me, how easy is it to love someone who constantly attempts to make you feel guilty or ashamed? How easy is it to harbor resentful feelings towards that person? Martyrdom is an obvious, overt control game, and if you catch yourself playing it, you may want to ask yourself who you’re trying to control and why—and work to find a more effective, ‘cleaner’ way to negotiate the result you’re looking for. Or you could just take action on your own behalf, and leave other people out of it.
My childhood home was a martyr’s dream. Having been raised with the concept that a “good” Christian was defined by the amount of overt suffering they’d managed to create in their lives, enduring pain in this worldly plane in order to ‘earn’ a seat in heaven, my fundamentalist Christian aunts and grandmother would compete to see who could be the biggest martyr. Asked or unasked, they’d go out of their way to inconvenience and exhaust themselves on behalf of family members. They’d also compete to see who was in the most physical pain.
This part of the game was so bad that at Sunday dinner, all of the top martyrs would start trotting out their medication stats. The person who had performed the most allegedly ‘selfless’ acts while taking the highest number of aspirin per day, won. Even as they were attempting to indoctrinate me into accepting this disempowering mindset as ‘reality,’ this game they played absolutely baffled me.
‘Nuff said?
Compassion, as others define it, is something along the lines of, “A feeling of distress and pity for the suffering or misfortune of another, often including the desire to alleviate it.” My personal definition of compassion is a little more neutral, and I like to think a little more empowering, than that.
As I see it, compassion has a deep, and yet respectful understanding of a person’s condition in life, but it sees and validates the sometimes latent power immanent within each of us. It assumes that we are each strong and capable, and holds to that belief so that the object of their attention can see their own value and strength reflected in their regard.
(It looks to me that this is how Jesus healed, by the way; he saw the person he was asked to heal as sound and whole and healthy—and held up such a powerful, implacable awareness of their intrinsic health for them to see that they could simply step into it. J.C. didn’t say, “There, there you poor thing; let me fix you up.” He said, “Get up and walk. Your faith has healed you.”)
This type of compassion doesn’t necessarily need to move to change another’s circumstances, also understanding that these same circumstances are a part of a person’s ‘lesson plan.’ They aren’t problems—merely variables—as a person makes their journey through life.
Please don’t misunderstand me; the feeling of being moved to help another can be one of the most beautiful, lovingly human things on earth—if offered for the right reasons and in a way that is empowering. As opposed to action taken from martyrdom, neutral compassion is quite altruistic. But although one can feel deep compassion for another’s struggle—maybe even have been in their shoes at one time— sometimes one can also comprehend that the correct course of action is to do nothing, but rather allow the individual caught up in the struggle the courtesy of resolving their own conflicts, realizing both their strength and the value of the growth inherent in the process.
Often simply being a spiritual witness to the process of struggle can be a gift in itself. I have a dear friend who’s a trained Spiritual Companion, and who has an uncanny ability to simply understand me, and to reflect back the solutions she’s gleaned from my own musing—handing me back my own solutions to my challenges in a clean, respectful way. It’s such a gift! In my times of crisis sometimes that’s all that I need—to feel another’s sincere appreciation of my situation. Human beings are remarkably resilient. They can handle a tremendous amount of upheaval if they know they’re not adrift and alone.
So—as opposed to true sacrifice—martyrdom is disempowering and sticky, moving in a direction of manipulation and control. Compassion is stimulated from a ‘big picture’ place of certainty that all people are strong and capable, and that all is well, and yet, it acknowledges with true understanding that sometimes the lesson can be pretty darn challenging.