So much can be solved with common sense and compassion

Does anyone else agree?

I find people asking me for personal advice about other situations in life - and i often find myself saying "just try to have compassion and imagine if you were them" or "just use common sense - dont do things that are going to land you in the hotseat"

Does anyone else agree?

Makes perfect sense to me. Many people are pretty selfish though and that messes up the whole compassion and common sense thing.

Imagining you were in the place of someone (empathy) is very powerful. My family lacks empathy- my mother knows how trying my life has been with bipolar and she says with disgust in her voice- YOU HAVE HAD A HORRIFIC LIFE!!!! With disgust in her voice, removing herself from caring or empathizing. She could add, but I love you anyway, but she does not, just looks away with disgust in her eyes also. She says a part of her died when she learned I was bipolar, she calls anything out of the ordinary that I do "WEIRD!!" She even admitted she wanted a daughter more like my friend I grew up, who read a whole lot.

Empathy would be great, I think that's the major thing I lack from my family (they're all 6 figure snobby uppity people) (I got planted in this family SOMEHOW it skipped a generation...) and THAT is what I look for at PC, I enjoy providing it and feeling from others also..

...to be understood at the place we are at.....priceless...((((PC))))))

Mothers take it very personally when one of their children are not "perfect". They cannot, for some reason, get beyond themselves and encourage and love and support because they get so caught up in their own pain from having an imperfect child, often also experiencing guilt as if it was somehow their fault that their child ended up with such difficulty. You are right when you say they cannot show empathy and it's because they can never reach that point because of all the other emotions, motherly emotions, they torture themselves with daily. It also ends up just like you described, looking to you as if she despises you. Frankly, it is very cruel of her to say those things about wanting another daughter, like your friend. That was just over the top. Very abusive. Totally uncalled for.

((((((((((( Junerain ))))))))))))

Sorry, Rainbowzz.....I totally got off your subject. It does make sense to tell someone to act with common sense and compassion however, too few of the people who ask for advice have that resource to fall back on. But in theory, I totally agree with you.

Thanks guys. What I am thinking is perhaps all of us could do with a refresher course on these things now and again. What exactly IS common sense - for me, its thinking a situation out, and thinking of consequences.

At what age do we acquire "common sense"? Two years? Five years? Twelve years?

I could easily be wrong about this but I think common sense is acquired by learning. Learning things from a teacher, a parent, a friend or learning things from our mistakes; we try a behavior and don't like the result so we learn to use a different behavior that gives us results we do like. If parents, teachers,... do not teach us or we continue to make mistakes again and again without learning we do not acquire common sense. Or something like that...

I am probably babbling off topic now so if this makes no sense... well sometimes I don't.

I agree, we try different attitudes, personalities, actions- and we come upon mistakes, some terrible, others smaller...we learn and adjust, until we become someone with common sense and compassion, at least a good portion of the time.

For example some people still abuse drugs or are promiscuous or violent much longer into their lives, say into their thirties, often because nothing has happened to stop them, to make them think about consequences or other people's feelings/value....others may get a DWI and be court ordered to attend rehab, meet another sober person in rehab, then spend the rest of their lives healthy together.....some are sensitive to the people they become when they are violent and stop their actions immediately..

Then there are people who hold a diagnosis such as bipolar INWARD and suffer a lack of action, a lack of social learning and do not grow..

I have done both- I have inward anger that makes me furious there is such a stigma against my illness I spend much time on PC to me that is 'my world' where my inner thoughts of feelings and illness come to play and get expressed

I have also had promiscuous behavior in which I was trying to FEEL something in a world that is lonely to me, to my heart. I was so hurt when my last sexual relationship ended I swore I would not go down that path again.

I have tried on the personality of someone who wears their heart on their sleeve and it did not go over well- I was trampled on emotionally..

Chalk that up to a learning and 'common sense' experience, I went to a new church tonight and presented my new personality that was open and fun but more guarded, more about small talk at first, more dignified- it went over great, I am so pleased with myself..

Others may start out guarded and eventually learn to open up, we are all on different paths with our personalities..

What do others think, when did common sense develop in regards to who you were going to be?

Where I run into difficulty is if the other person seems to be in something other than their right mind. For instance, over the years I've had three or four neighbors with obvious drinking problems. I could imagine being them and wanting to be allowed to drink, drive, make noise, smoke in bed, or whatever felt most comfortable to me at the moment. I could equally well imagine wanting to be rescued in some way, even though rescuing never seems to work very well. I settled for taking a step back, trying to imagine myself as that person if they were in their right mind, and dealing with them that way.

One such neighbor decided to go for a drive while obviously very drunk. Fortunately the route from the garage to the street was a little tricky, with a couple of tight turns. I watched from my window as she managed to get her car hung up between the house and the fence, struggled for 5 or 10 minutes, and eventually gave up. Meanwhile I'd phoned the police to be on the lookout for her in case she did make it out of the driveway.

I can think of quite a few other cases where imagining myself as the other person in their right mind has led me to assert my boundaries and not let them get away with stuff that wasn't likely to benefit either of us.

Hi Rainbowzz... I do agree to a point. It depends on the audience and the degree of diversity. Differences in nationality, culture, race, religion, gendar, social-economic status will present challenges to 'walking in the other person's shoes.' Same can be said in my opinion with applying common sense. What may be common sense to one person may not be the same for another of a different background and life experience.

I understand what you mean in a general sense and think it is an admireable guide but I think they are subjective and dependant on commonalities to be present.

there are people who never attain common sense. some have great intellegence but no common sence. my brother is one of those. I have less intellegence but more common sense.

yes, I think I do agree with you here. However, i veiw that as a challenge just as you said - rather than a total roadblock to understanding.

Now, there are MANY things which I experience in life where I lack understanding, some I dont even feel like TRYING to understand - like the drinking and driving, like someone mentioned. But, for me, I so highly value compassion that I try anyways.

HOWEVER. Here is a big thing too: There is a huge difference between :

Idiot Compassion
and
Real Compassion.

a spiritual teacher I beleive a great deal in wrote the following on her website:

This is what I think you need to apply to situations like that. You don't need to accept a behavior or allow a bad behavior in order to be compassionate IMO.

Thanks for sharing a bit of Pema. I too gain much from her teachings.

The kind of compassion she speaks of can be very challenging for me. I do get trapped feeling pained by another's suffering. I have no strength in the face of someone in pain. I need to work on this more.

My mother had a history of abusing her medications. Emergency visits to the hospital to pump out her stomach were more regular than I care to remember. There came a point when I was in my early 20's that the doctor asigned me the task of administering her meds. It was a painful ordeal everyday as she would beg and scream for more. She would lie about having just thrown them up or cry in agony for the pain she claimed to be unbearable. It would break my heart to see her suffering. I would often give in and when the meds ran out I would be the one to talk the doc into giving her more. I hated those meds and I hated him for putting her on this path and I hated that I was stuck in the middle but once there I saw no way out because to see her suffer was too much to bare. He would play hard ball now and then and hospitalize her to get her off the high doses of meds only to send her home again with lower dose scripts to start the cycle again.

My dad and my brother and sister who were all long gone living their lives away from us would take turns telling me I was doing more harm than good when I would give in to her pleading for more and more and more everyday. They would lecture me about enabling her addiction. I hated them for that because they were not in my shoes nor were they in hers. They had turned their backs on her and all she had was me and her meds. Eventually she stashed enough of the doses I doled out and ended it all before I had a chance to save her again. When it happened I felt the release she must have felt. Shameful not just her release but mine as well.

Perhaps the more compassionate thing would have been to not enable her addictions. Perhaps I was as my 'family' said just enabling her but at the time I felt the compassionate one and judged them to be heartless and cruel.

I get what Pema is saying in terms of idol compassion being about the observer wanted to ease their own discomfort and I think I have repeated that level of compassionate care throughout my life. I never let my baby cry for example to get him to learn to sleep on his own. Ten minutes listening to him was all I could bear before I ran in to scoop him up and take him to bed with me. He was almost 10 before he left my bed. I would stay late with students to help them finish assignments they had put off completing so that they would graduate with their classmates. None of those students were successful in holding down a job after graduation. The list goes on of my enabling under the cover of kindness and compassion.

Sorry for the ramble.... but suddenly this question of compassion has revealed its many layers. I am not sure I have it in me to have real compassion. I don't do tough love very well. I feel their pain too iintensely and selfishly I guess I want my pain to go more than I really care as much as I thought about theirs.

It is interesting because much of my reason for isolation is getting overloaded by the needs of people around me. I can't see a need without feeling responsible for filling it somehow. The only way I have learned to cope is to avoid people so that I don't feel the pressure to take care of their problems for them. I burn out until I get so sick I have to retreat again. I often think I am not really enabling them, I am teaching them the way they should follow. Truth be told they don't usually learn how to do it themselves, they just learn how to get me to do it for them.

Quite the pickle.