Over two decades of experience as a psychiatrist, and nearly six decades of being a human being on Planet Earth, have yielded this insight:
Reason, compassion, and relationship are essential building blocks of mental health and social well-being—and the greatest of these is relationship. Therefore, the corollary: The greatest destroyer of mental health and social well-being is self- and factional-centeredness. Nothing leaves a greater wake of damaged relationships and trauma than the self-centered, narcissistic, even sociopathic people in our lives, who aim to exploit and destroy others for their own advantage.
Reason
Reason is fact-based and reality-tested. Philosophers from Plato, Socrates, and Seneca to Descartes have considered Spock-like unemotional and scientific reasoning the pinnacle of human possibility. But we are often egotistical thinkers, blind to our own biases and prone to magnifying our own perspectives at the expense of others. It’s a nightmare to deal with someone who is “headstrong and dead wrong” and who relies on status or bullhorns to enforce their beliefs, which often depart from verifiable facts. Science isn’t science unless it’s falsifiable—or has the possibility of being proven wrong with new evidence.
Also, no one is an independently existing thinker. We all depend on others. Many of us specialize, and we rely on the expertise of specialists we can trust. When experts disagree, as they often do, it’s time to amplify humility, check biases, compare reasoned perspectives, and hunker down with our values. Self-reflection, inner dialogue, and conversation are critical for individual and collective reasoning. So is the emotional valence we place on our reasoning capacity. Captain Ahab said, in Moby Dick, “All my means are sane, only my motive and my object mad.” That’s why compassion is my next building block.
Compassion
Compassion brings sanity to the motives and objects of reason. As human beings, we have to deal with a wide range of emotions, and we all have to work with our distresses to find happiness. Adding compassion to our inner lives allows us to work with our own distress and, beyond that, be connected and helpful to others. As the Dalai Lama said, “If you want to be happy, practice compassion. If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.” Compassion has four stages, outlined by Buddhist scholar Thupten Jinpa:
- Notice suffering.
- Develop concern and caring about the suffering (an emotional inclination).
- Generate the desire to help alleviate suffering.
- Do something to alleviate suffering. This can be practical and concrete, or it can be a mental action (such as self-compassion, centering prayer, or practices such as Tibetan Tonglen or active compassion meditation, see this video) that transforms the external or internal distress as it lands in you.
It is a great spiritual and moral challenge to generate compassion for selfish, unreasonable, and uncompassionate people. We all have our limits. But at the very least, having self-compassion for the distresses of dealing with those challenging relationships is key. Self-compassion consists of the following:
- Mindfulness: noting and labeling the difficult emotion without having it springboard into a narrative, judgment, or criticism. You can also dig below the emotion to see the unmet need it springs from. “This is a moment of suffering.”
- Shared humanity: recognizing that this emotion and suffering itself is part of our shared humanity. “I am not alone in suffering. Suffering is a part of life. Others feel this too.”
- Self-kindness: finally, offering kindness to your difficult emotion. Treating yourself as you would a dear friend feeling this. “In this moment of suffering, may I at least be kind to myself.”
Relationship
The rubber meets the road when compassion and reason meet relationship. Relationships help us build a sense of self and are key factors in mental health and mental illness. No matter what feelings, ideas, beliefs, convictions, ideologies, and narratives you may have in your mind, heart, or social group, it all comes down to how we view and treat each other, particularly those who are different from us, at least superficially. The Golden Rule (do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you) is elemental to wisdom traditions and secular ethics. But it’s not a shibboleth. It takes work. Egalitarianism takes work. Freedom from tyrannical relationships takes work—emotional labor, shared understandings, and collective, collaborative effort. “The opposite of suffering is belonging.”
How do we treat those we disagree with? (See this post on “loving your enemies”) Relationships, particularly those across the current partisan divide, can be the cause of exquisite pain. It is especially hard to relate to people who are so caught up in their belief system, power structure, or screen-driven rabbit hole that they seem to have forgotten that we’re all human and have the same basic needs for food, water, shelter, health care, safety, love, and understanding. These are nonpartisan issues.
The Golden Rule implies we should not exploit and abuse others, and we should work to prevent exploitation and abuse. We should help those who have been exploited and abused. We should be allies to their vulnerability and suffering. This would be using our reason, compassion, and relatedness to improve mental health and social well-being. As Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson says, “It’s nice to be important—but it’s more important to be nice.”
How we relate to ourselves is critical as well. Do we treat ourselves as we would treat a friend? Do we treat our physical bodies well? After all, my brain is a mere 3 pounds of my 200-pound frame. Shouldn’t I spend a good bit of my time and mental energy tending to my whole body with sleep, food, and nurture? Nutritious food, sleep, and exercise are more critical to mental and emotional health than anything I might offer to my patients as a psychiatrist and are part and parcel of their autonomy, agency, and sense of self. We have to put the oxygen mask on ourselves before we can tend to others. Part of that is considering the advice of health professionals to decide whether a medication or medical treatments would help the biological components of your mental health.
On a philosophical but very real level to me and many others, how we relate to and view the Earth is critical to mental health and social well-being as well. Who isn’t awestruck when looking at photos of the Earth from space? If we could collectively raise our sights from more personal issues to the fragility of life on Earth and the necessary costs and benefits of saving it, I think we might all be better off in the short and long runs. We need to cultivate a collective Geocortex.
The Great Destroyer
The greatest threat to all of these building blocks is the rapid devaluation that emanates from those who grandiosely place themselves on a pedestal, gain inordinate attention, control others through manipulation and deceptive narrative, and then use their perch to rain down overt or covert contempt on those deemed “enemies” or “others.” This brings a wrecking ball to the building blocks I’ve described and challenges all of us to amplify reason, compassion, and relationship in a more collective and inclusive fashion, if only to survive the wrecking balls or “disrupters” in our midst.
How will you cultivate reason, compassion, and relationship?
What a wonderful world it would be if we could cultivate these forces for mental health and social well-being instead of giving a pass to their opposites—the drives to bull-headed and self-righteous delusion, cruelty, selfishness, and factionalism.
© 2024 Ravi Chandra, M.D., D.F.A.P.A.
