Teachers are women who believe that their lives are connected to the lives of other people in the world who suffer from loss, or who live under oppression. Although the Teachers have pain in their own lives, they move through their personal struggles by acting with others in mind with a hope for a better future. Their stories articulate their principles of social action and political justice. They aren’t deterred by personal or political obstacles from working in difficult situations. They call out to us to join them in their work.
In my blog I will write about two teachers: Kaethe, a psychotherapist, writer, and political activist from Massachusetts who has lived with serious life-threatening illnesses for many years; and Suraya a women’s activist from Afghanistan who has been tortured in prison and lives in fear for her life due to her political beliefs and actions. These Teachers connect their personal suffering to the suffering of others and work against the negative effects of silencing peoples’ stories of illness and injustice.
Kaethe–a woman who looks at death and finds life
I have known Kaethe for many years as a colleague and friend. I hoped to learn from her how, in the face of unrelenting illness, she has transformed her own suffering into understanding the suffering of others. Kaethe found in reviewing the occurrence of illness in her family that in every six-month period from 1974 through 1993, either she or someone close to her had been seriously ill. Since that time the intervals between illnesses have increased to a year, but these include two bouts of cancer that followed Kaethe’s first cancer in 1988. At present, she struggles with a life-threatening lung infection that may be a result of her radiation treatments. Although these illnesses have constrained Kaethe’s choices, she has a rich family life and has worked as a teacher, writer, political activist, and family therapist in some of the most difficult places on earth.
Kaethe has written over forty articles, chapters, and books, including her most recent book, Common Shock: Witnessing Violence Every Day: How We Are harmed, How We Can Heal.[1] She teaches in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Kosova, South Africa, and New Zealand. Her long-time friend and colleague Corky Becker says that Kaethe, “spins silk from pain and suffering” by speaking when others are silent.
Kaethe wrote Common Shock from the perspective of many years’ work on connecting her own suffering with broader human suffering and global peace. In her book, Kaethe describes the violent world in which we live and the dangers of not naming and acknowledging daily violence. She describes what it takes to become what she calls a “compassionate witness.” Step-by-step, she teaches us to observe, to describe, and to take action against pain and suffering.
In both her life and work, she always remembers what she learned as a child about the significance of every action, no matter how small. Not long ago, at a conference on literature and war at Brandeis University, Kaethe saw a man speaking haltingly from the podium about his mother’s experience of the Holocaust. The moderator became impatient with him and cut him off before he had finished. The man quickly left the auditorium. Kaethe quietly got up and found the man standing outside smoking a cigarette. She went up to him and told him that she was sorry that the moderator had cut him off while he was telling such an important story. The man was surprised that she had noticed. He looked at her and thanked her.
In reflecting on this event, Kaethe explained to me how she acts as a witness by integrating her thinking with her emotional experiences:
“I bring an emotional and intellectual perspective to what is before me. I have come to understand that small interactions, ordinary things, can be the seeds of issues that are much larger. I work to make distinctions that are often omitted in difficult circumstances. I was sensitized to such omissions and how much information they contained as a child, but it has taken me a long time to make use of words to express what is going on that is being suppressed.”
I asked Kaethe how she learned to shift her attention from herself to others. She told me that she has felt connected to the world outside herself for as long as she can remember. As a young child, she believed that she and the moon were related. She remembers feeling compelled to push her bed around her room so that every night she could sleep in the light of the moon. Growing up, she expanded this feeling of connection to aspects of nature to a feeling of connection to other human beings.
Kaethe told me that she also stays in balance and attentive to the world around her by maintaining a sense of herself as a healthy person, rather than an ill person. Even as she struggles with the effects of illness, she refuses to allow illness to define who she is or will be.
She said,
“One of the distinctions I make is between having a disease and being an ill person. Without doubt, I have a disease and I often feel sick, but I never experience myself as an ill person. Disease is a fact. I have a number of diseases and that is my biological condition. Sick refers to negative physical sensations. I can divert myself from how intensely I feel sick, even though I feel sick much of the time. Whether I perceive myself as an ill person is a category of choice, and I don’t feel ill. ‘Ill’ is also a category of identity, and I don’t identify with this category.”
More about Kaethe in my next blog.
[1] Kaethe Weingarten, Common Shock Witnessing Violence Every Day: How We Are harmed, How We Can Heal. New York: Dutton, 2003.
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