Finding the Person Under the Suffering

My dad loved to passionately debate politics with me, and I hated every minute of it. He’d get loud. He’d get aggressive. He’d ask questions only to interrupt before I had two words out in response. I left every one of those debates with something ugly vibrating in the middle of my stomach. How could a guy I knew to be so great and smart and loving turn into such a bully? It’s only years later that I can see that I never debated my dad—not even once. I debated his suffering. 

I know that principles aren’t innate, that what may appear to me like an objective moral imperative is really just the output from a lifetime’s worth of conditioning, and when others’ words or actions threaten my most deeply ingrained convictions (or support something I’ve learned to despise), they don’t just threaten my values, they threaten my very identity. With this in mind: 

Can I see the person underneath all of that conditioning and suffering? 

Can I see that underneath even their most sacred values is someone who looks not just “kinda” like me, but exactly like me? 

Can I see a human being who wants exactly what I want: to be safe, to live in peace, to know and experience love? 

Can I connect with the deep aspects that are shared between us, instead of clashing with the surface details that can be so vastly different? 

Can I feel compassion for the parts within them that suffer, even though those parts might drive actions that I find objectionable or harmful? 

Toward the end of my dad’s life, I used to experiment with this. Regardless of what he said, I chose to remember the incredible guy I loved under his inflammatory words, understanding that he was only using me as a safe target to express threats he felt towards a comfortable way of life that seemed to be falling away from him. I can’t say that I ever “won” an argument with this approach, but by then it was no longer about winning, anyway. Without my fuel to add to his spark, his otherwise heated words cooled to shared questions about life, and then eventually to a sort of quiet calm. 

While this may not resolve our society’s many differences (not directly, at least), it does put us all together in the same boat. In some circumstances, this just might be enough (as it was with my dad). When it isn’t, though, then maybe it’s at least a good place from which to start. 

♦

Excerpted from Refuge in Small Things, copyright Mike Travisano, 2024.