I'm struck by some words the Reverend Joseph Lowery uttered in his inauguration address today. "Turn to each other," he said, "not on each other." How this point of politics resonates in the world of love!
If you've ever been involved in an affair with a narcissist--and I mean a real narcissist, not merely a self-centered person--you know what it feels like to be turned on, not turned to. You know what it means to be treated without empathy--that sympathetic understanding so vital to friendship and love. Your actions, your feelings, your every move is thrown at you as though you had the worst intentions; as though your feelings were nothing more than an assault to this person; as if, in fact, nothing you feel or do can be comprehended in a spirit of love. That's, in fact, the core definition of a narcissist: A person with no empathy. A person who feels only his own feelings--never yours. Which is why being "loved" by one is such a lonely, alienating experience. The narcissist reads you as his enemy; and your actions as enemy fire.
As you magnificent Americans pull together today in a way this ancient goddess hasn't seen in a thousand years, remember that you do so because your new President, Barack Obama, has consistently made clear that he has empathy--for those who govern differently, for those who don't agree with him, for those who don't agree with or even like each other, for those who even bitterly oppose and have attempted to hurt him. His empathy towards all those people is what has made Americans feel freed to turn to each other, not on each other.
It's his appeal to our "better angels" and it can last. But only if we learn how to bring those angels into our own homes. My grandmother (a goddess who knew even more than I about love!) used to say about my grandfather whenever we were mad at him, "You don't understand. He didn't mean to be hurtful. He's just, well, an angry god at the moment." Her empathy for him, her often infuriating insistence that he meant well even if we didn't see it that way (and even if he perhaps didn't mean so well!), was a generosity born of her desire to understand him. She really felt for him; felt what he was feeling when he did what he did and said what he said. Once you have that kind of empathy for a lover, you never again feel the desperate loneliness of being willfully misunderstood. What therapists call "conflict resolution" becomes easy because you're on each other's team. You can be mad as hell, but empathy makes you inclined to turn to one another.
I'm not stretching this connection between love and politics. Uniting as a nation means a consistent, difficult sympathy and generosity--an empathy that's a mere momentary fantasy if we can't show the empathy toward one person.
TLG
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