Prisoner (and Best Buddhist Writing contributor) Scott Darnell on what he’s learned about compassion, for others and himself, during his time behind bars.

As a Buddhist, I realize the importance of compassion and service to my fellow man. The problem is, I have to be careful not to confuse this with a desire for emotional approval when things aren’t going well. When I’m not careful, things can go from bad to worse.

When I was seven years old my mother died of complications from diabetes. Being a child, I reacted as a child and blamed myself for her death. My feelings of guilt were further intensified because of incidents of verbal and physical abuse that occurred with increased frequency as her disease progressed.

As with most abused children, I believed my only means of avoiding that victimization was to try to please the abuser. Whether it meant bringing her that extra pillow and blanket, cooking lunch while she watched her soap operas sitting quietly in the corner as she napped or finishing the housework before Dad got home, in my seven-year-old mind I associated what I did or didn’t do with whether or not I gained her approval and love.

For years after her death, I tried to live my life in ways that pleased everyone around me, terrified that if they didn’t like me, they, too, would eventually “abandon” me like Mom did.

At first I tried desperately to be perfect. When that didn’t work out, things got twisted to point I thought the best I could be was the worst that could be done. By sixteen my worst had become so terrible that I was serving a sentence of natural life in a juvenile facility.

Even then I wasn’t satisfied, acting out until I was transferred to a more secure environment in an adult maximum security penitentiary. Once there, I caught the break of my life when I got involved in a group therapy program that cut through the Gordian knot of twisted thoughts and feelings that up to that point had ruled and ruined my life. While the aggressive and antisocial behavior is a thing of the past for me now, there are times I still feel those seven-year-old feelings and my need to be the helper bubbling to the surface.

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Last summer is a perfect example. As often happens in an overcrowded prison system, when one cellmate leaves, another quickly takes his place. When mine left on transfer to a minimum security camp, a new guy moved in the very next morning.

He called himself Preacher, and for the first couple of days he seemed a stand-up kind of guy. With only a few years left on his sentence, all he said he wanted to do was his own time and stay out of trouble.

But soon another side of Preacher came out. First, there was the incessant one-way conversations (sermons?) that went on for five, six hours straight. And before too long, his attention turned almost exclusively on me in what become a five-month ordeal that tested the limits of my vows as a Buddhist and at times left me in fear for my life.

When Preacher wasn’t educating me in things they didn’t teach in school — like how the Pilgrims had eaten their babies on the voyage to the New World — he would confide his suspicions that his last cellmate, a Wiccan, had put a curse on him. Within weeks, I, too, was suspected of having done the same.

Soon I became the Prime Suspect in every imaginable wrongdoing he could conjure. For instance, I was:

a thief who stole the very coffee, toothpaste, and shampoo I regularly bought for him.

secretly rummaging through his property box in order to both pour out prescription eyedrops and to steal family addresses.

having an affair with his (also-incarcerated wife).

accused of poisoning him.

I soon found myself forced to defend against a nearly constant barrage of accusations, fearing that if I didn’t, the time would come when what had so far amounted to verbal assaults would turn physical.

For the first couple of months we celled together, I tried to show Preacher that not only could I be trusted, but that given time the two of us might even become friends. When the accusations rained down, I exercised patience and tried to reason with him. I introduced positive options to negative behavior, subtly pointed out examples of deluded thinking and provided him with practical tools he could use to shatter the cycle of aggression, paranoia, and prejudice that plagued him. Above all I tried to listen and give him examples of what a real friendship could be like.

Sometimes it all seemed to work. He would have rational days, but those came and went all too quickly–followed by weeks of increased suspicion, castigation and threats of violence that on several occasions were almost carried out. Finally I decided enough was enough and began requesting a cell change. Unfortunately, my requests were ignored.

Without fully realizing it, I began to revert back to the patterns of behavior adopted at age seven. While intellectually I knew there was no substance to Preacher’s accusations, emotionally his constant abuse took its toll, and I began trying to make him like me by putting his needs and desires before my own.

When he accused me of stealing his coffee, I doubled the shots I gave him. When he called me a racist for not watching enough black entertainment, BET dominated the tv screen. When he got in my face for some imagined wrongdoing, I sat back passively, assuring him that as a Buddhist I practiced peace and nonviolence.

Over the next few months, I found myself growing increasingly depressed. I lost my appetite and nearly twenty pounds. Even my meditation practice suffered, as any attempt would spur an immediate fire and brimstone sermon describing the evils of Buddhism, followed by lengthy descriptions of the brutal, often obscene tortures that awaited all those who followed the “middle way to Hell.”

Unable to sit in meditation, I would often sneak a few minutes to read a sutra or other teaching from a Shambhala Pocket Classic I was given by a friend. One day I read the Sutra of Hui-Neng and learned that to save all sentient beings isn’t necessarily about personally trying to save everyone else, but about first recognizing the deluded sentient beings of our own mind and saving ourselves.

While I had seen Preacher as an abuser, giving him the same emotional control over me as my mother had, I resolved to reclaim that control and drop the seven-year-old’s baggage. This enabled me to see Preacher for the person he was: lost, confused, and afraid. I knew then that the best I could do for both of us was break from the dysfunctional relationship we were in.

The next morning I renewed by efforts to move to another cell. When Preacher heard0 about it he grew quiet and casually began to tell me about all the inmates he’d known who had killed their cellmates, making it look either like an accident or a suicide. Luckily he was interrupted by an overdue shakedown of our cell that busted him in the process of using an altered extension cord to heat up water for his coffee. A “stinger,” as they’re called, automatically earns a guy thirty days in segregation for his first offense.

After his denial of ownership was met with a heavy dose of skepticism by the officers, Preacher quickly changed his story and blamed me for setting him up. Thankfully, that, too, was dismissed and he was summarily walked to segregation. His accusations continued out the door, along with promises of revenge.

While I took his threats seriously, I refused to give in any longer to the negativity associated with him. Instead, I bow to Preacher and to the time we shared together that allowed me to see a part of myself that still cried out for closure.

The Buddha taught that there is no fixed and independent self, that we are all a part of the same whole. This means that the whole can only benefit if I learn to apply the vow to save all sentient beings to myself first. Whatever genuine changes take place, whatever liberation I can experience in my life will then have long-ranging positive effects on the whole without my purposely trying to save anyone.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have a responsibility to help out my fellow man when the opportunity calls for it. What it means is that the quality of that assistance will be more focused and beneficial if I’m not caught up in my own delusion, trying to defend or affirm ego-driven ideas I have about myself.

It means that I don’t allow myself to take on some role that wastes my energy trying to be a helper to someone who either doesn’t want it or isn’t at a place to accept it. Instead, I save that energy for who does, starting first and foremost with myself.