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What's on my mind

Being fully human: A workshop on compassion

by daniel j. siegel

Most of us want to live a more fulfilling existence, a life free of imagined limitations. But we are often held back by a variety of psychological defenses. Earlier this year, I had the honor of introducing a workshop, “Creating a Life of Meaning and Compassion,” offered through UCLA Extension’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. The workshop provided a framework for looking at the various barriers to change and offered step-by-step exercises for participants to use to challenge the negative thoughts and behaviors that prevent them from moving toward a more fulfilling and meaningful life.

The workshop was based on a book, “Creating a Life of Meaning and Compassion: The Wisdom of Psychotherapy,” by Robert W. Firestone, Lisa Firestone and Joyce Catlett. I was honored to provide the foreword for this book and want to share my reflections on the workshop centered around it.

Participants discussed such issues as the value of generosity versus withholding; the difference between coping effectively with anger versus the adoption of a victimized posture; and the contrast of genuine friendship with fantasy relationships. These topics define the challenge of living a meaningful life in the face of existential realities, offering methods and exercises that individuals can use in their daily lives.

Essentially, the workshop was about what it really means to live a full life. The presenters shared their professional and personal search for an understanding of what it means to be human, to be real. Lisa Firestone and Catlett, in particular, went beyond a traditional focus on individual development to provide us with a banquet of insights into the nature of our inner lives and emotional relationships. I share their perspective that deeper self-understanding and authentic interpersonal relatedness go hand in hand, reinforcing each other as they deepen and become unburdened by restrictive adaptations from the past.

Through research in attachment theory (the bonding that occurs between mother and infant in various species) and convergent findings from neuroscience, we can learn how the development of our neural circuitry for self-knowledge overlaps with that for emotional communication and empathy. This feature of our social brains was beautifully revealed in the experiences described in the workshop.

Presenters at the workshop generously shared the blueprint of their collective wisdom on how to live a fuller life, as well as their insights into the human experience. This vision illuminates the dilemma of fighting off the defenses that attempt to protect us from the pain of the past, while at the same time trying to stave off the anxiety of the human realization of mortality that comes with a life full of feeling and awareness.

That balance is not easily struck — it is a challenge to find a way to feel real while avoiding becoming overwhelmed by the existential pain of our awareness of death. Such awareness may be our uniquely human legacy, emerging from our cortical capacity to represent the future and be aware of the movement of time and our limited place in its passage. Within this challenge to live, with eyes and heart wide open, rests the ultimate goal of our lives: how to be fully human.

Siegel is associate clinical professor of psychiatry.