Little Fire

How To Train Your Dragon (Or Tame Your Incredible Hulk)

Posted by Boo , Friday, March 26, 2010 10:01 PM

My Little Fire and I went to the movies tonight to see the delightful How to Train Your Dragon. If you know me, you will not be surprised to discover the crying started, oh, about five minutes in, and simply gained in intensity during poignant moments throughout the film until I was choking back sobs.

Yes, choking back actual sobs. At a kids' movie. About dragons. Which are not real.

As a child, my mom wouldn't let me watch The Incredible Hulk because I became inconsolable when the closing music began and Bill Bixby was again forced to walk away from whatever tenuous connections he had made in Whereversville, U.S.A...alone.

Most people possess a degree of empathy. It is an emotional capacity the develops in early childhood. It is described by many as the ability to understand the emotional states of other people, and perhaps the ability to feel what they are feeling. You might think of it as the ability to cognitively put yourself in someone else's shoes, see how they feel, and start walking down the road for awhile with your thumb out, like David Banner when he wasn't busy smashing things up as The Hulk.

It appears my ability to empathize has gotten a heavy dose of Banner's gamma radiation, because it is alarmingly easy for me to slide into another person's shoes and not just assess their emotional landscape, but to integrate those emotions into my own emotional landscape.

This is not good.

I take that back. It can be good. My ability to empathize has given me a unique strength as a reporter, because I am almost always interested in the multiple facets (both sides?) of a story. Even if we're dealing with a straight crime story, where - to most folks - there's good and bad and right and wrong and hang 'em high is the only answer, I always want to know what's underneath. In the most evil actions, I want to understand how the evil person got that way. I want to walk in their shoes.

In my life, however, I struggle with this...empathy. I get angry with myself. I call myself names, like "idiot" and "sucker" and it is true that I have been victimized by my own ability to feel another person's pain. I am all emotion with no capacity for calculation. I became enmeshed with my father and my ex, and held on tightly to these relationships long after it was clear that each, in its time, was killing me. I could see these men as the little boys they once were, and I wanted to protect them. I thought if someone could just be kind to them...

Blah.

I was barraging myself with these sorts of insults one day when a friend stopped me and pointed out that this ability to empathize must have, at some point, been a very useful tool.

So I began thinking about some of the things I know about child development and infant attachment. I began to wonder what use empathy might have been to me, as a small girl, in a dangerous place. It seems a rather useless tool, when you're trying to stay alive.

Hmmmm....

The Wiki on the Hulk series from the 70s says this...

Doctor David Banner is a physician/scientist who is traumatized by the tragic car accident that killed his beloved wife Laura. Haunted by his inability to save her, Banner studies incidents of people who, while in danger, somehow managed to summon superhuman strength in order to save their loved ones.

My dad once related to me a tale I found chilling yet luridly fascinating. I don't remember this incident, but because of where he said we lived at the time (we moved a lot when I was small), I must have been about five or six. That would have made my brother - ten months my junior - about four or five.

Dad told me my brother and I had misbehaved in some way, so he took us out on the back deck, tied us up, and left us there. He said after some time, he heard a pounding on the door. It was as forceful a pounding as can come from a tiny fist. When he opened the door, he saw his oldest child, a quivering whisper of outrage, who immediately demanded he go untie her brother right now.

He said to me, with great and - to me - perverse pride, "That's when I knew you were strong."

Um...ok, dad. That may or may not be when I knew you were crazier than a shithouse rat, but I digress...

I hadn't been "strong" for me, if that, in fact, could even be called strength. I was "strong" for my brother. In fact, I can't think of a time when I was ever really "strong" for me.

When in danger (following the line of thinking from The Hulk Wiki lol), it is from this well of empathy that I summon the strength to save my loved ones, and in saving my loved ones, I save myself. Interesting.

I was able to love my parents, even when they did awful things, because I could recognize and even feel their pain. Every little girl needs to be able to love her parents. Empathy was the tool I used to be able to do that. And I still love them, um, most of the time, even though one is dead and one mostly drives me crazy.

It was when my empathy for my daughter became more powerful than my empathy for my husband that I was able to emotionally disengage from him, which eventually allowed me to leave him.

It is my empathy for my baby that allowed me to care for her in a healthy way when I had no models for positive parenting.

I guess it has been a pretty useful tool, now that I think about it. Maybe I haven't learned to control it yet. David Banner still hasn't learned to control his anger.

But, guess what? My Little Fire and I and learned tonight that you can make friends even with a Night Fury, put a saddle on it, and together you can soar.