The Art of Empathy (35 page)

PANIC AND TERROR:
Frozen Fire

Panic and terror arise when a person's physical life is directly and immediately threatened, and the choices are to fight, flee, or freeze. In the moment, there's very little that you need to do beyond helping people pay attention and react in whatever way feels right. However, if the panic and terror track back to an earlier trauma, you can help people get to competent help (see the Trauma Healing listings in Further Resources).

SADNESS:
The Water Bearer

Sadness arises when it's time for people to let go of something that isn't working anyway. If people let go, they can relax; but if they won't let go, they
might become very tense. If people try to hold on tightly to something that doesn't work, you may see anger jump out in front of the sadness. The question “What do you need?” will often help people find their voice again and identify what isn't working. Sadness is a very softening and interior emotion, so it's important that you set good boundaries and don't push or prod at people; gentleness is called for. When Rosalie got to her sadness, David remained very quiet.

GRIEF:
The Deep River of the Soul

Grief arises when people lose something irretrievably or when someone has died. Grief and sadness are intimately related, but with sadness, people still have a choice about letting go. Grief arises when there's no choice—the loss or death has already occurred, and it's time to mourn and grieve. When people are grieving, you can expect to see multiple emotions arising in clusters or shifting continually. Everyone grieves differently, at different paces, and with different clusters of emotions. If you can simply be present and provide some kind of thresholding or private space for people who are grieving, you can support them in this deep emotion form of work.

SITUATIONAL DEPRESSION:
Ingenious Stagnation

Situational depression is a specific form of depression that arises when there's an already-dysfunctional situation occurring in people's lives. This situation could be located in any part of a person's interior or exterior life, and it can usually be addressed through changes to lifestyle or behavior. You can help people identify this dysfunction by simply listening as they speak. (I'll introduce a very supportive three-step process later in this chapter that will help you do that.) Be aware, however: If the depression is cyclical or if it doesn't respond to the healing changes people make, please help them seek psychological or medical intervention. Depressions that last too long are not good for people's emotional, empathic, social, or neurological health, so it's vital to take recurring depression seriously and address it responsibly.

HAPPINESS:
Anticipation and Possibility

Happiness arises to help people look forward to the future with hope and delight. This playful emotion is one of the few that we're allowed to feel comfortable with, so it's not likely that you'll need to do much beyond share happiness when it arises. Yay! You may notice, however, that some people
downplay happiness as if it were childish or unserious to feel happy. In these cases, there may be some situational depression that is trying to point to situations that are regularly troubling or that reliably get in the way of feeling happiness. When people valence happiness negatively, they may need to observe their entire emotional realm (and the training they received about happiness in childhood) to find out what's going on.

CONTENTMENT:
Pleasure and Appreciation

Contentment arises to help people feel pride and satisfaction about a job well done. This emotion can be very tricky, because so many people have an uncomfortable relationship with self-respect and pride. Some people feel that pride and contentment are boastful and shameful, which means they may have a hard time feeling appropriate and deserved contentment about something they did well. Understanding shame will be helpful here, because when shame and contentment work well together, people will be comfortable with their own moral structure and be able to realize when they've done something to be proud of. But when shame and contentment aren't working well together, some people may be unable to feel appropriate contentment, while others may develop strangely inflated contentment levels that don't track to anything real. In
Chapter 9
, I explore inflated contentment in a section on bullying.

JOY:
Affinity and Communion

Joy arises to help people feel a blissful sense of expansive oneness with others, with ideas, or with experiences. Joy is a very powerful emotion that usually doesn't require much support from you, and it usually recedes naturally. However, extreme and exhilarated joy should be approached with care, especially if it cycles with depression or sadness. Repetitive exhilaration or flights of giddy mania may be a sign of emotional dysregulation, and it's possible that the person might need psychological support or medical help.

When you know which emotions you're dealing with, it's so much easier to communicate with people and be truly empathic, since empathy is first and foremost an emotional skill that is developed in interactions. However, as you increase your emotional vocabulary, your Empathic Accuracy, and your Emotion Regulation skills, you may come up against a strange situation: Some people don't want to talk about emotions . . . at all.

ANGRY ABOUT ANGER, AFRAID OFFEAR, ASHAMED OF SHAME

Knowing which emotions you're working with is wonderful, but I have a little warning for you: some people feel strong emotions
about
their emotions, and if you say the name of certain emotions out loud, you can trigger strong reactions. For instance, if you mention anger, shame, or fear out loud and suggest that people might be feeling them, you might start a huge argument: “I'm not angry—your
mother's
the angry one!” “Of course I'm not ashamed, shut up, yeesh!” “Fear? Are you calling me a coward?” Whoops.

This is a problem that people have asked me about for years: “If I understand the language of emotions, but no one else wants to hear anything about them, what do I do?” Until recently, my answer was that people should be honest about their own emotions and model emotional awareness as much as possible. But that answer bothered me, because it put a lot of pressure on people who were just learning how to work with emotions themselves. So in 2012, when I taught “Emotional Flow,” a live, eight-week online course to people from all over the world, I took advantage of this empathic crowd source to have some fun and to create a new method for addressing emotions honestly, even when other people don't know how to.

WEASEL WORDS
⁴⁹

In my work, I refer to stress as a
weasel word,
or a word that people use to hide emotional awareness from themselves. If you observe the experience of stress empathically, you'll see that it's very clearly an emotional reaction. The sense of tension, the rise in cortisol and adrenaline, the tightening of the body, the rise in heart rate—these are all activations that occur in fear and anxiety (and often anger) responses. Luckily, you have skills for each of these emotions, and you can work with your stress responses in the same way you work with any other emotions: You figure out why you've become activated, you listen to each of the emotions you feel, you perform the actions for those emotions, and then you use your empathic mindfulness skills to return yourself to equilibrium. Easy.

However, if you don't know which emotions you're dealing with—or if you use a weasel word like stress to trick yourself out of emotional awareness—things stop being easy. Misidentifying emotions is a way to avoid what you're truly feeling and to dissociate from the situation—“Help! Stress is
happening!
It's an overwhelming force over which I have no control! I'm
powerless!” People learn to weasel away from the truth, and they lose their emotional awareness when stressors are present. But stress isn't the only weasel word for emotions; there are dozens—maybe hundreds—and they're used all day, every day. People rely on weasel words like
fine, okay,
or
good,
each of which can mean nearly anything, depending on the context.

Another all-purpose weasel word that we looked at earlier is
emotional.
“Let's not be emotional!” “We can't talk if you're gonna be
emotional.”
“I'm sorry I was
emotional
yesterday.” What in the world? Which emotions are we talking about here? If you don't know which emotions you're feeling, your Empathic Accuracy will be kaput, and you won't be able to regulate or work with your emotions, because you won't know which ones they are! Weaseling away from emotions seems to be full-time emotion work for many people, but it's not good-paying work in terms of emotional skills and empathic awareness.

However, we can use weasel words to our advantage. As empaths, we can use weasel words strategically to help people gain a better understanding of their own emotions. If precise emotion words are so threatening to people that they use weasel-ish masking language in ingenious ways, then let's perform a kind of empathic aikido and use those same words in service to emotional awareness.

I and the empathic crowd in the “Emotional Flow” course discovered numerous weasel words that you can use to support emotional awareness in yourself while you set good boundaries around the emotional ignorance of others. We also took advantage of the
soft
category of vocabulary words in the “Emotional Vocabulary List.” For instance, if people are clearly angry but they can't even approach the word, you can ask if they feel
peeved, annoyed,
or
displeased.
They may then be able to connect to the fact that their voice, standpoint, or sense of self has been challenged in some way. Or if people are afraid but can't stand the word, you can ask them if they feel
curious, cautious,
or
uneasy.
They may then be able to identify the change, novelty, or possible hazard they're sensing.

We also found some very powerful words that can stand in for pretty much any emotion, and I call them the Wonder Weasels:
stressed, bad,
and
unhappy.
You can use these three Wonder Weasels pretty much anywhere and in relation to any emotion without unduly triggering people. I particularly love the wildly valenced word
unhappy,
because it suggests that happiness is the preferred emotion, while everything else is unhappy.

Two other words are nearly universally useful, and I call them the Lesser Weasels:
upset
and
hurt.
However, you have to be a little more careful with these Lesser Weasels, because both
upset
and
hurt
suggest emotional sensitivity, and a lot of people like to pretend that they're emotionally impervious and invulnerable (like superheroes, except with no emotional or empathic skills). We also have a delicious weasel word from parents of teenagers:
whatever.

THE FABULOUS EMPATHS' LIST OF WEASEL WORDS!

If people don't seem able to identify or own up to their emotions, you can use soft emotional vocabulary words, or weasel words, to gently bring attention to what is actually occurring.

Weasel Warning:
Don't be annoying by naming people's emotions for them or forcing them into the awareness that
you
want. Instead, have fun and know that for some people, even the mention of the real names for emotions can be triggering. If you can gently bring awareness (even weasel-ish awareness) to the actual emotion that's present, and if you can frame your observation as a question (or use the phrase
it seems),
you'll support people in beginning to develop their own Empathic Accuracy. Nice!

In each list, I start with soft emotion words that are less weasel-ish, then I move into weasels, and finally to the Wonder Weasels and the Lesser Weasels if they're appropriate to each emotion.

Anger:
Peeved, Annoyed, Frustrated, Displeased, Affronted, Vexed, Tense, Agitated, Disappointed, Whatever, Stressed, Bad, Unhappy, Upset, Hurt

Apathy and Boredom:
Detached, Disinterested, Indifferent, Whatever, Unhappy

Shame and Guilt:
Awkward, Flustered, Exposed, Demeaned, Stressed,

Bad, Unhappy, Upset, Hurt

Sadness:
Low, Down, Disappointed, Discouraged, Blue, Bummed, Whatever, Stressed, Bad, Unhappy, Upset, Hurt

Grief:
Low, Lost, Down in the dumps, Blue, Whatever, Stressed, Bad, Unhappy, Upset, Hurt

Depression:
Disinterested, Detached, Low, Blue, Whatever, Stressed, Bad, Unhappy, Upset, Hurt

Fear:
What do you sense?, Cautious, Curious, Uneasy, Jumpy, Unsettled, Off, Stressed, Upset

Anxiety:
Concerned, Tense, Agitated, Unsettled, Off, Bothered, Jumpy, Stressed, Bad, Unhappy, Upset

Jealousy:
Sensing disloyalty, Insecure, Stressed, Bad, Unhappy, Upset, Hurt

Envy:
Sensing unfairness, Insecure, Stressed, Bad, Unhappy, Upset, Hurt

Contentment:
Satisfied, Pleased, Proud, Happy, Good

I'm not including happiness and joy in this list, because people are fine saying those words outright. As you go through this list, just notice how many ways we have to skirt emotional awareness and how five weasel-ish words can describe pretty much every emotion, except the three happiness-based emotions. Wow, that's stunning, and it really highlights the problems we have in developing emotional skills and accuracy.

This list belongs to you now; use it with the blessings of an international band of funny empaths! This list may also be useful in the following communication skill.

MOM'S MAGICAL THREE-STEP EMPATHIC COMMUNICATION SKILL

I want to bring my late mother back into this chapter, because she was a brilliant woman and a quick learner; she stopped using reflective listening immediately after my younger sister and I reacted so comically to it. However, as an empath herself, Mom saw the value of reflective listening, and over the years she developed a modified version of the practice that's more interactive and empathic. Now that we'll be learning her practice, I think you should know her name: she was Billie Karyl Lucy Rogers Hubbard; she changed her name to Kara as an adult, though most of her friends called her Sam. If you want to refer to this empathic practice with her name, you now have many options! In my mom's three-step empathic communication process, you learn how to
listen, reflect,
and then
share.