SYMPATHY
"Never could maintain his part but in the force of his will."
_Much Ado about Nothing_.
A great French physician once combined in the same sentence two
expressions that to most people of the modern time would seem utter
paradoxes. "Rest," he said, "is the most dangerous of remedies, never
to be employed for the treatment of disease, except in careful doses,
under the direction of a physician and rarely for any but sufferers
from organic disease"; while "sympathy", he added, "is the most
insidiously harmful of anodynes, seldom doing any good except for the
passing moment, and often working a deal of harm to the patient."
With the first of these expressions, we have nothing to do here, but
the second is extremely important in any consideration of the place of
the will in human life. Nothing is so prone {58} to weaken the will,
to keep it from exerting its full influence in maintaining vital
resistance, and as a result, to relax not only the moral but the
physical fiber of men and women as misplaced sympathy. It has almost
exactly the same place in the moral life that narcotics have in the
physical, and it must be employed with quite as much nicety of
judgment and discrimination.
Sympathy of itself is a beautiful thing in so far as it implies that
_suffering with_ another which its Greek etymology signifies. In so
far as it is pity, however, it tends to lessen our power to stand up
firmly under the trials that are sure to come, and is just to that
extent harmful rather than helpful. There is a definite reaction
against it in all normal individuals. No one wants to be pitied. We
feel naturally a little degraded by it. In so far as it creates a
feeling of self-pity, it is particularly to be deprecated, and indeed
this is so important a subject in all that concerns the will to be
well and to get well that it has been reserved for a special chapter.
What we would emphasize here is the harm that is almost invariably
done by the well-meant but so often ill-directed sympathy of friends
and relatives which proves relaxing of moral {59} purpose and hampers
the will in its activities, physical as well as ethical.
Human nature has long recognized this and has organized certain
customs of life with due reference to it. We all know that when
children fall and even hurt themselves, the thing to do is not to
express our sympathy and sorrow for them, even though we feel it
deeply, but unless their injury is severe, to let them pick themselves
up and divert their minds from their hurts by suggesting that they
have broken the floor, or hurt it. For the less sympathy expressed,
the shorter will be the crying, and the sooner the child will learn to
take the hard knocks of life without feeling that it is especially
abused or suffering any more than comes to most people. Unfortunately,
it is not always the custom to do the same thing with the children of
a larger growth. This is particularly true when there is but a single
child in the family, or perhaps two, when a good deal of sympathy is
likely to be wasted on their ills which are often greatly increased by
their self-consciousness and their dwelling on them. Diversion of
mind, not pity, is needed. The advice to do the next thing and not cry
over spilt milk is ever so much better than sentimental recalling of
the past.
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Many a young man who went to war learned the precious lesson that
sympathy, though he might crave it, instead of doing him good would do
harm. Many a manly character was rounded out into firm self-control
and independence by military discipline and the lack of anything like
sentimentality in camp and military life. A good many mothers whose
boys had been the objects of their special solicitude felt very sorry
to think that they would have to submit to the hardships and trials
involved in military discipline. Most of them who were solicitous in
this way were rather inclined to feel that their boy might not be able
to stand up under the rigidities of military life and hoped at most
that he would not be seriously harmed. They could not think that early
rising, hard work, severe physical tasks, tiring almost to exhaustion,
with plain, hearty, yet rather coarse food, eaten in slapdash fashion,
would be quite the thing for their boy of whom they had taken so much
care. Not a few of them were surprised to find how the life under
these difficult circumstances proved practically always beneficial.
I remember distinctly that when the soldiers were sent to the Mexican
border the mother of {61} a soldier from a neighboring State remarked
rather anxiously to me that she did not know what would happen to Jack
under the severe discipline incident to military life. He had always
gone away for five or six weeks in the summer either to the mountains
or to the seashore, and the Mexican border, probably the most trying
summer climate in the United States, represented the very opposite of
this. Besides, there was the question of the army rations; Jack was an
only son with five sisters. Most of them were older than he, and so
Jack had been coddled as though by half a dozen mothers. He was
underweight, he had a rather finicky appetite, he was capricious in
his eating both as to quantity and quality, and was supposed to be a
sufferer from some form of nervous indigestion. Personally, I felt
that what Jack needed was weight, but I had found it very hard to
increase his weight. He was particularly prone to eat a very small
breakfast, and his mother once told me that whenever he was at home,
she always prepared his breakfast for him with her own hands. This did
not improve matters much, however, for Jack was likely to take a small
portion of the meat cooked for him, refuse to touch the potatoes, and
eat marmalade and toast with {62} his coffee and nothing more. No
wonder that he was twenty pounds underweight or that his mother should
be solicitous as to what might happen to her Jack in army life at the
Border.
I agreed with her in that but there were some things that I knew would
not happen to Jack. His breakfast, for instance, would not be
particularly cooked for him, and he might take or leave exactly what
was prepared for every one else. Neither would the Government cook
come out and sit beside Jack while he was at breakfast and tempt him
to eat, as his mother had always done. I knew, too, that at other
meals, while the food would be abundant, it would usually be rather
coarse, always plain, and there would be nothing very tempting about
it unless you had your appetite with you. If ever there is a place
where appetite is the best sauce, it is surely where one is served
with army food.
I need scarcely tell what actually happened to Jack, for it was
exactly what happened to a good many Jacks whose mothers were equally
afraid of the effects of camp life on them. Amid the temptations of
home food, Jack had remained persistently underweight. Eating an army
ration with the sauce of appetite due to prolonged physical efforts in
the outdoor {63} air every day, Jack gained more than twenty pounds in
weight, in spite of the supposedly insalubrious climate of the Border
and the difficult conditions under which he had to live. It was
literally the best summer vacation that Jack had ever spent, though if
the suggestion had ever been made that this was the sort of summer
vacation that would do him good, the idea would have been scoffed at
as impractical, if not absolutely impossible.
Homer suggested that a mollycoddle character whom he introduces into
the "Iliad" owed something of his lack of manly stamina to the fact
that he had six sisters at home, and an Irish friend once translated
the passage by saying that the young man in question was "one of seven
sisters." This had been something of Jack's trouble. He had been asked
always whether he changed his underwear at the different seasons,
whether he wore the wristlets that sisterly care provided for him,
whether he put on his rubbers when he went out in damp weather and
carried his umbrella when it was threatening rain, and all the rest.
He got away from all this sympathetic solicitude in army life and was
ever so much better for it.
It is extremely difficult to draw the line {64} where the sympathy
that is helpful because it is encouraging ends, and sentimental pity
which discourages begins. There is always danger of overdoing and it
is extremely important that growing young folks particularly should be
allowed to bear their ills without help and learn to find resources
within themselves that will support them. The will can thus be
buttressed to withstand the difficulties of life, make them much
easier to bear, and actually lessen their effect. Ten growing young
folks have been seriously hurt by ill-judged sympathy for every one
that has been discouraged by the absence of sympathy or by being made
to feel that he must take the things of life as they come and stand
them without grouchy complaint or without looking for sympathy.
This is particularly true as regards those with any nervous or
hysterical tendencies, for they readily learn to look for sympathy.
The most precious lesson of the war for physicians has been that which
is emphasized in the chapter on "The Will and the War Psychoneuroses."
There was an immense amount of so-called "shell-shock" which really
represented functional neurotic conditions such as in women used to be
called hysteria. At the {65} beginning of the war there was a good
deal of hearty sympathy with it, and patients were encouraged by the
physicians and then by the nurses and other patients in the hospital
to tell over and over again how their condition developed. It was
found after a time that the sympathy thus manifested always did harm.
The frequent repetition of their stories added more and more
suggestive elements to the patients' condition, and they grew worse
instead of better. It was found that the proper curative treatment was
to make just as little as possible of their condition, to treat them
firmly but with assurance--once it had been definitely determined that
no organic nervous trouble was present--and to bring about a cure of
whatever symptoms they had at a single sitting by changing their
attitude of mind towards themselves.
Some of the patients proved refractory and for these isolation and
rather severe discipline were occasionally necessary. The isolation
was so complete as to deprive them not only of companionship but also
of reading and writing materials and the solace of their tobacco.
Severe cases were sometimes treated by strong faradic currents of
electricity which were extremely painful. Patients who insisted that
{66} they could not move their muscles were simply made to jump by an
electric shock, thus proving to them that they could use the muscles,
and then they were required to continue their use.
Those suffering from shell-shock deafness and muteness were told that
an electrode would be applied to their larynx or the neighborhood of
their ear and when they felt pain from it, that was a sign that they
were able to talk and to hear if they wished, and that they must do
so. Relapses had to be guarded against by suggestion, and where
relapses became refractory and stronger currents of electricity to ear
and larynx were deemed inadvisable, the strict isolation treatment
usually proved effective.
In a word, discipline and not sympathy was the valuable mode of
treating them. Sympathy did them harm as it invariably does. The world
has recognized this truism always, but we need to learn the lesson
afresh, or the will power is undermined. Character is built up by
standing the difficult things of life without looking for the narcotic
of sympathy or any other anaesthetizing material. These are "hard
sayings," to use a Scriptural expression, but they represent the
accumulation of wisdom of human experience. Sympathy can be {67}
almost as destructive of individual morale as the dreads, and it is
extremely important that it should not be allowed to sap will energy.
In our time above all, when the training of the will has been
neglected, though it is by far the most important factor in education,
this lesson with regard to the harmful effect of sympathy needs to be
emphasized.
For nervous people, that is, for those who have, either from
inheritance or so much oftener from environment, yielded to
circumstances rather than properly opposed them, sympathy is quite as
dangerous as opium. George Eliot once replied to a friend who asked
her what was duty, that duty consisted in facing the hard things in
life without taking opium.
Healthy living to a great extent depends on standing what has to be
borne from the bodies that we carry around with us without looking for
sympathy. It has often been emphasized that human beings are eminently
lonely. The great experiences of life and above all, death and
suffering, we have to face by ourselves and no one can help us. We may
not be, as Emerson suggested, "infinitely repellent particles", but at
all the profoundest moments of life we feel our alone-ness. The more
{68} that we learn to depend bravely on ourselves and the less we seek
outside support for our characters, the better for us and our power to
stand whatever comes to us in life.
Physical ills are always lessened by courageously facing them and are
always increased by cringing before them. The one who dreads suffers
both before and during the time of the pain and thus doubles his
discomfort. We must stand alone in the matter and sympathy is prone to
unman us. Looking for sympathy is a tendency to that self-pity which
is treated in a subsequent chapter and which does more to increase
discomfort in illness, exaggerate symptoms, and lower resistive
vitality than anything else, in the psychic order at least.
Suffering is always either constructive or destructive of character.
It is constructive when the personal reaction suffices to lessen and
make it bearable. It is destructive whenever there is a looking for
sympathy or a leaning on some one else. Character counts in
withstanding disease, and even in the midst of epidemics, according to
many well-grounded traditions, those who are afraid contract the
disease sooner than others and usually suffer more severely. Sympathy
must not be allowed to produce any such effect as this.
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