How My Father, Robert, Listened ...

(found on Facebook)

One of the things my father was great at was "really hearing" me (and most others). Not only was he great at listening and understanding, but his understanding went beyond how most people understand: he "got" the meaning, the emotion behind the words, the yearnings and personal philosophy behind those words, the words as they were meant, and even sometimes the past experiences that made me say those words. I have never met anyone in my entire life who came close to him in this way.

I attribute this remarkable and unusual ability to his childhood: he often talked to grown-ups who cared about how he thought, what he thought about, his ruminations and his interests, and they asked a lot of questions. And then when he went to Farm and Wilderness Camps in the summer (a camp run by "lovey-dovey" Quakers), he learned to be non-judgmental, or at the very least, to keep asking questions and looking behind the scenes to get answers that would reveal a pretty good approximation of the truth, i.e. "as close as it gets". 

Who does that these days, an age of "a hurry to judgment", quick fixes, band aids, putting people in roles and hierarchies and if and when they resist, bully them until they submit to it, and self absorption to the point where it seems that most people only care what they themselves think, rather than caring about the truth (the truth has to involve what others think and experience if it is to be "the truth"). 

It means the world we live in is a world of "untruths", of made up or exaggerated stories and explanations.

That is the world I have been shocked by since 2013 when my father died (more explanation HERE and HERE). That world was largely "his world", past and present, or many of the people who surrounded him. He protected me from it when he was alive, thus the "full force" did not hit me until he died. Many, many nights I have cried over what he lived through (because I had to come face to face with those same people). He deserved so much better. It became obvious very fast to me that too many people around him did not listen to him, or really hear him, or even really care all that much about him. I saw it in more vague terms (more as an outsider), and then when it was thrust on me after he died, it became overbearingly obvious to me as if I was continuing his lesson of it. 

But he had also left me instructions in dealing with them: "don't be docile." 

In these people's lives he merely provided "a role" in their lives, and in that role, he was greatly taken advantage of (even professionally: his architecture for a house on the coast, for instance), selling his things, you name it. Some people did understand him, and I thank people like Moonlight Davis, Paola DiStephano, Richard Hooke, Ken Webb, the Traschens, and some of his older students who really sought him out and understood his true nature. 

So, here was my father, the great listener and empath, out to love, out to gently understand, out to create peace and beauty in the world, surrounded by people who never cared about him, who never listened to him or cared to understand what he was about, only to defend what they were doing in relation to him (which was not about doing right by others by a long shot). These were people with snap judgments, interested in "what he could give" them and their creature comforts, rather than what they could contribute to his life and to his memory. How awful! 

Serving as his daughter in his steed and as his trustee did not garner better behavior. I was treated much the same as he was. His compromises and being bullied to submit to their demands did not help me in my fight "not to be docile". I occasionally melted into docility and hopelessness (what I call "The Cinderella role" they wanted me to play), but I also heard his voice in my head enough to get police involved and begin a campaign of exposing, something he would never do. As with him, they used what ever power and control they could gain from the situation for them, in the utmost way they could use it. In living through what he lived through, I understood the all-night high-anxiety walks through the town that lasted off and on for years, the inability to sleep, getting up at the crack of dawn to keep the mental wheels from spinning and the desire to fix un-fixable things from driving him crazy, the long walks by himself to clear the air, the need for exercise and finding beauty in the natural world (i.e. the world without people in it, the world he photographed), the drawing inward towards projects, the sad voice over the telephone, the panic over whether he was going to be able to hang on to what he built, the call to help when he was being strong-armed and threatened, the confusion over being smeared (confusion because what could they possibly gain?). 

There were the town meetings where he was ever-polite, and knowledgeable, and explained things in patient detail, but where others with less knowledge shouted over him. And there was even the sadness he had over seeing a woman whom he regarded as family never acknowledge or appreciate the work he had done for her (even selling it to get something else she wanted more, and using the hard work he had done for her to gain personal profit). 

In fact, too much of what he accomplished in his life was either sold, given away, claimed as theirs, destroyed or taken for granted. This will probably always bother me. So to keep it in perspective, it is my duty to show what he accomplished so that it doesn't just get forgotten or end up in someone's next garage sale or attic or distant unsure memory.

I also understand that he was hurt much more over what these people did to him than I could ever be, thus my tears over understanding the extent of what he lived through. Why the emotional brutality, when he also was a soldier in World War II where he lost his entire unit? Why couldn't you all be kind to someone like that? Why couldn't you appreciate it instead of using it for your own self gain?

I was never close to them in the way he was, where they could rattle my resolve to the core or effect my life to the extent that they effected his life. Who he had in his life would certainly effect me, but I have a happy marriage and I was able to pinpoint ways he and I were doing things that weren't working, and "go into the new" -- i.e. less brutal lessons. 

But, the "going into the new" was something I felt I did for both of us, as a path to answer our joint problems and issues, especially when I was around empaths. I was able to accomplish a lot in the way of both work and understanding for both of us with empaths in my life. Our paths were very, very similar before then, even down to education, making things, music, teaching, and criss-crossed a lot, until 2001, or so, when I met my future husband, and began the very slow journey of discovering what both my father and I were missing and needed to know (i.e. in order to get beyond "being effected", beyond being Cinderellas in someone else's play, and at "the truth"). 

My mistake was that the way my father behaved, in terms of really listening, really making it his first duty to understand from a compassionate point of view, to get all of the facts, to realize the emotions, normalized the experience for me at an early age. I thought I'd find a lot of people in the world, just like my father, who would hear me and care. Nope. If anything, I experienced too much of the opposite: people telling me what I experienced, what I felt, what my intentions were (to dominate me) without asking once for accuracy, talking over me, demanding from me what they wanted and expecting me to take orders at all times, or just being asses in trying to get their own way all of the time, every time. In other words, the opposite from the way my father treated me. 

But, he was also often treated this way too with the exception of his childhood. So he understood my dilemma.

The kind of people I wished he had quizzed were some of the domestic violence counselors I have met over the years. Then he would have been able to understand so much more, even down to why people want to make war or fight for civil rights. Then he would have been able to not only point me in the direction of not being docile, but he would have understood every step needed in the process on how to do it and what it takes.

And this is when I hope that "the spirit" of our dead loved ones truly linger, to see it all through, the blunders we make, and the successes we realize. 

With love

P.S. This is to say that true empaths really listen.

P.P.S. This is also to say that empaths also need to be awesome lie detectors and bullshit detectors. 

lessons about bullying

This is a photo I took of my father at age 15 (I was taking care of him at the time).
I took this picture to never forget what he had been called to go through.
The original wasn't blue, but that is all I changed about it.
It is clear to me now that he was going through severe PTSD at the time.

(written by Lise Winne, Robert's daughter)

There were some issues that my father struggled with all of his life. Some of the conversations went on for days, as though he was trying to crack the code. One of those issues had to do with "bullying."

I would describe my father as ill-prepared for that darker part of human nature. He didn't grow up with controlling parents and he had a loving, respectful relationship with his sister which rarely broke out in fights.

He sometimes acted up as a child, which, as I understood it, happened most often when he was put to bed. Like a lot of children, he still hadn't finished playing or talking and would somehow manage to do both in a dark room with the lights out. His parents would come into the room and say in a reasonable calm voice, "Now you're getting awfully obstreperous in here; it's time to go to sleep, Bobby." They would keep saying it, through the evening if they had to, but they never punished him or made him do a "time out" (isolation for a period of time). He was certainly never physically disciplined by them and hated the thought of them being disappointed in him, so for the most part, he worked very hard to gain their approval. They exhibited a very gentle style of parenting and gave him a lot more independence than a lot of parents in those days. So there was no bullying in the home.

His parents were a very loyal couple. My grandmother in her sixties and seventies, was still good looking and young for her years, and became a "desirable catch" among older men in her senior living home. Her husband had passed away a decade earlier. She would tell these elderly gentlemen that she was already married. To her, marriage was forever, and if she went off with someone else, it would mean she was unfaithful. She took "until death you do part" to mean her death, even as she outlived her husband by twenty years. Even so, it was clear that she deeply loved and adored Mr. Winne Sr., that he was the apple of her eye, that no one could replace him, and she would always keep her marriage vows in honor of him.

My father's grandparents lived only blocks from his home and he would often stop to chat with them on his way home from school. They treated him with the same kind of respect that his parents treated him with.

His town neighborhood consisted of families very much like his own. Everyone had unlocked doors, and children could go into a house and announce their presence. My father would let the neighbor know he had entered a neighbor house by yelling, "It's me, Bobby! I'm downstairs in your livingroom!" and the woman of the house would greet him and ask him a bunch of questions, and even give him a snack if he wanted one. He learned how to talk to many adults, and I think this is why he always had a very respectful manner of speaking and an unusually keen way of listening and absorbing what was said. My sense is that neighbors were a resource for all children, and if a child couldn't get a skill from his parents, he simply went to another house to learn the skill.

The other children in the neighborhood were brought up in the same style as my father, respectful of adults, in homes with loving faithful parents who took their vows seriously, so there was no bullying to be found in his neighborhood.

He went to school in a town renowned for its teachers' college. The teachers were non distracted spinsters who were fabulous at their professions, but also very strict. As my father told it, "There was no nonsense in my school. You toed the line or else!" There were many young student teachers as well, but they were under the watch of these heavy-handed nun-like matrons of education. So there was no bullying there.

The camp that he went to every summer was run by a couple of lovey-dovey Quakers who believed in talking things out in a systematic, non-confrontational way. He became heavily influenced by them and sought the same ideals they did. So he didn't experience bullying there either.

For all intents and purposes, he was a sheltered child in the way that he never saw unpleasant human interactions, much the way the Buddha never saw old age or death until he left home.

I would describe my relationship with my father very much like the relationship he had with his parents: I was never physically disciplined by him, he had a calm way of parenting and I didn't want to disappoint him. I was probably a good deal more misbehaving than he was as a child (I did have a lot more anger than he did, but it had nothing to do with him at all). I did experience quite a bit of bullying as a child, but never quite understood why I was a target (what child does?). A few incidents had to do with bigotry and sexism (I was naturally non-prejudiced) and in school, my clothes were sometimes an issue (out-dated clothes make one a target). But beyond that I never understood what makes a person a target. Even when given reasons, the reasons always seemed irrational.

So, both my father and I were ill-equipped to know how to deal with bullying, why people wanted to bully, how they got that way, what was the grand purpose, and so on. We couldn't even muster up the thoughts "because of the bully wanting to dominate, for power and control" in those days. I can tell you that it was the single-most troubling issue of his life. It became the most troubling issue of my life too. The times in his life where he was hurt deeply, had to do with this subject. The pain festered in his heart for years, even decades. It took direct assault on his self esteem, his sense of security (in a world where a brutal war had already done quite a bit of damage in terms of PTSD). I didn't know what to do to ease his misery, to pluck it out of his mind or heart, or understand it myself. All I could do was commiserate. I would just try to find distractions, suggest walks, look at art together, talk about projects. In the end, it would sometimes amount to a long conversation about morality.

In my own life, as a child, I either put up with bullying by counting days I would be at summer camp (safety) or I would isolate to my room with a guitar, art supplies or by writing. In adulthood, I dealt with it by running away from it and the people who perpetrated it.

So when this subject was continually brought up by my father, I would listen for long periods of time, shrug my shoulders and say, "I guess some people are just bad and don't care." In other words, I didn't think to study it. All I knew was that I didn't want bullying in his life, or in my life.

The last few years of his life, I began to resent his insistence on returning to this subject. I don't know why I had such little tolerance for it other than it disturbed me that he hadn't found a way to work it through his system all the years, but I see now, that it was an unresolved, not-understood issue in his mind, all the way up to and through his death. In a way he was looking to me to absolve him of this terrible burden. "Oh, but Dood, I love you. You're the apple of my eye," I'd say, hoping that would ease his pain.

I think it is so clear to me now why being bullied was such a festering wound: no tools, so ill prepared, the arrows went right to his heart and he didn't know how to block it, other arrows went to his head and he didn't know how to block it there either. There was very little understanding of why people indulge in this activity when it is so unpleasant and hurtful to other people (I don't think he ever felt a lack of conscience, so he couldn't understand why other people weren't haunted by their actions).

I don't think lessons ever stop because a person dies. I was with him when he died, so in a way, I felt that the lesson simply jumped over to me and continued within my life. And oh boy, did it ever!

The one thing that I did differently was to try to understand it at every angle through research and talking to thousands of people (yes, thousands). Every time I would discover something, I'd say, "Are you listening Dood? Did you just hear what I heard? It has absolutely nothing to do with you."

I have had many vivid dreams of my father on this journey with me. Even though he has passed away, I feel it is a discovery for both of us and I'm working so hard to uncover what it all means in his honor. This is one of the reasons I am making illustrations on the subject, why I wrote this blog post on family scapegoating and why I ended up writing an entire blog on the subject. I could make art in his honor 'til kingdom come (and my art and studio are very much linked to my father), but resolving the bullying issue, even if it never gets resolved with the bullies themselves (and becomes only a contribution to society) is what I seem to be living for, for both of us.

My father, as soon as he was an adult, became part of the force of pushing back one of the most notorious bullies and sociopath narcissists of all time: Adolf Hitler in World War II. He lost his entire unit and almost lost his life. Going from a serene polite childhood surrounded by honest people of integrity to an all-out assault kind of war with inadequate equipment (no winter coats or boots, very few reinforcements, sleeping on the ground in winter), had to be incredibly traumatizing for him. I can't under-estimate the trauma that it caused.    

In civic and personal life, bullies were even more perplexing, i.e., "why does this have to go on in peace-time as well?"

Bullies can't see you for who you really are (the divine self, agape love); they only see you in terms of what they can or cannot control. You live or die in their hearts based on that. They see you only as an extension of their wants and needs and you can be demoted and discarded at any time for not feeding it. They have an intuitive sense of your vulnerabilities (where they can play on your shame and self esteem, and even where you'll get sucked in by pronouncements of love) but beyond that, they can't see a thing. They are pure manipulators, always trying to get a talon into you or punish you if you get too far out, always trying to get you to think about them, even if they have to use fear to do it.

War is probably not much different: a soldier's divine self is probably rarely considered and, at any rate, much like the uniform where one soldier looks like another, not about a person (their individuality), but only about their fitness, their resources, their abilities and how they can be manipulated and controlled to bring about an outcome. My father described the war as "deeply impersonal" (his quotes). In other words, who knows who you're firing at between the trees: saints? an only son? a father of a sick boy and a deceased mother? What horror!

So he never wanted to be put in a position like that again and was determined to live in peace ... except: bullies found him! And rattled him to his core!

The thing is, my father died in peace, with a clear conscience. You have to have incredible courage to go through the dying experience. He died with unresolved issues, but no regrets. Both he and I have had near death experiences (that is, before he died). We knew that near death experiences could make regrets loom huge over your consciousness and practically take over. In fact, regrets can be like demons (yes, you hallucinate, and no, you don't have control over them -- the regrets are in your face all of the time, totally terrifying, haunting). Many therapists say that this is when people who have been sleeping through life with their egos on begin to wake up. If you have near-death experiences, you begin to want to clear your conscience sooner before the BIG D. When you are in the throes of experiencing pain, you do not want to cause pain to others, and the memories of the pain can linger, meaning that you won't hurt people long after the experience either.

People always have a chance to wake up at any time and do the right thing, but for some reason, bullies usually run away from doing the right thing. They leave behind the good people. Honest people don't think about their egos; they think about intimacy. Life always challenges us: we can either take on more regrets or lessen the regrets we already have.