The Art of Empathy (7 page)

In my definition from
Chapter 1
, I wrote that an empath is someone who is aware of reading emotions, subtext, nuances
to a greater degree than is deemed normal.
In my work, this greater degree does not simply refer to a talent for Emotion Contagion and Empathic Accuracy; it also refers to an empathic understanding of emotions and how to work with them with skill and grace. Emotions are tools for empaths, and you have to know how to work with all of them—not just the allegedly “positive” ones. Emotional regulation skills are vital to empathy, and yet a major impediment to regulating emotions intelligently is that most of us have been trained to view emotions as annoyances to be avoided, rewards to be pursued, or problems to be eradicated. Intelligent, empathic Emotion Regulation isn't about controlling, eradicating, or chasing down emotions; rather, it's about working with them as vital, irreplaceable tools. When you can do that, all aspects of empathy become much, much easier.

PERSPECTIVE TAKING

Skilled empathy helps you take the perspective of others and to imagine what life feels like for them—how they feel, how they approach situations, what their intentions are, and how they'll respond to others and to circumstances. When you take the perspective of others, you often imagine the emotions that they might be feeling (or might soon feel in response to an action you might take), rather than directly sharing those emotions with them.

Let's return to the concepts of affective and cognitive empathy. As I noted a few pages back, some researchers make a sharp distinction between
affective
empathy (directly feeling the same or similar emotion in concurrence with another) and
cognitive
empathy (the capacity to understand the emotion of another without currently sharing it). Although this distinction is central to some areas of empathy theory, I don't find it to be valid in actual empathic practice.
²¹
Instead, I've focused on Emotion Contagion as the direct, affective dimension of empathy, and on Perspective Taking as the somewhat detached cognitive aspect. However, I don't see the two as distinct or separable abilities; rather, I see your capacity to take the perspective of others as totally dependent upon your ability to feel, share, and understand emotions. It is not likely that you would be able to skillfully take the perspective of others unless you also had the capacity to feel and understand emotions in the first place.

When you take the perspective of others, you essentially don their demeanor, attitudes, expectations, emotions, and intentions; you put yourself in their shoes so that you can see the world from their perspective and understand what they might do next (or what they might wish for). Skillful Perspective Taking certainly relies upon your ability to share emotions with others, but it also relies upon your Empathic Accuracy and your Emotion Regulation, so that you can work with anything that might trigger you and then quickly refocus yourself on what is happening with the other.

When you take the perspective of others, the point is not to ask yourself what you would do in their place; it's to try to understand what
they
would do. If your Empathic Accuracy and your Emotion Regulation are strong, you'll have the emotional range and depth needed to imagine attitudes, expectations, and intentions that may be very different from yours.

There's also a wonderful Einfühlung aspect to Perspective Taking—a feeling into, an aesthetic, literary capacity to embody characters and imbue them with life, hopes, dreams, wishes, and attitudes. When you skillfully take the perspective of others, you bring all parts of yourself to the process of trying to
understand how they might feel and respond.
Skilled Perspective Taking helps you see things clearly from another's standpoint.

CONCERN FOR OTHERS

Concern for Others is an empathic aspect that is both crucial and tricky. If you have too much concern, you may expend all of your time and energy on the needs of others, while essentially ignoring your own. On the other hand, if you have too little concern, your relationships may suffer, because others won't feel your interest, and they'll assume that you don't care about them. Interestingly, I find that some people who feel a great deal of concern shut down their empathy pretty early in life because they simply don't know how to meet all the needs they perceive. These people can appear to be deceptively low in empathy when, in truth, they may simply be low in empathic self-care skills.

For an empath, the other tends to be an endless source of fascination, frustration, confusion, joy, struggle, delight, exasperation, comfort, and discomfort (remember that
the other
also includes art, ideas, music, movement, literature, animals, etc.). In service to this empathic need for engagement, some of us focus all of our attention on the other and totally ignore our own needs until we burn out. I address empathic burnout throughout this book so that you can learn to balance your Concern for Others with healthy concern for yourself. The world needs empaths, but your health and well-being are equally important. If you burn out, not only is it very painful for you, but it's also a loss in the larger sense. If you burn out, there will be one less healthy empath in the world.
Self-care and Concern for Others should and must coexist.

On the other side of this equation is a lack of concern for or a lack of interest in others. I've put forth the proposal that unconcerned behavior
may
actually be masking or obscuring hyperconcern or hyperempathy (or empathy that has not been supported). When I see obviously empathic people who exhibit very little Concern for Others, my suspicion is that they have burnt out already; I don't immediately think that they're
incapable
of empathy. If you scratch underneath the surface just a little, you'll find that some of the angriest, most anxious, most arrogant, and most antisocial people harbor a profound well of concern that they're either unable to manage or unwilling to acknowledge—or both.

It's very easy for a highly empathic person to burn out and retreat inward. I'd even go so far as calling that process an empathic tendency. In a world in
which emotional awareness is often low to nonexistent, such that Empathic Accuracy is continually impeded and skilled Emotion Regulation is rare, being highly empathic can be a pretty grueling situation of uncontrolled Emotion Contagion. We'll tackle this situation head-on in this book, but just be aware: people (and animals) you might think of as uncaring and unempathic might actually be hyperempathic and burnt out. And the way you approach them can make it better or worse.

Most of us are gruff, cold, or angry toward those we've identified as uncaring, but I'll tell you, empath to empath, that a complete and constitutional lack of empathy is rare. It is hundreds of times more likely that seemingly uncaring others are burnt out or impaired in their emotional regulation skills than that they are pathologically unempathic. Therefore, approaching them somewhat neutrally is a more truly empathic thing to do. Too much coldness will only cement them in their isolation (and confirm their belief that others aren't worth their time), whereas too much warmth might feel threatening. When a person is in empathic burnout, they can be likened to real burn patients; their defenses are down, and their emotional pain receptors may be hyperactivated. Gentleness is called for.

This gentleness is especially necessary for those people who have been exiled from empathy—men and boys, people on the autism spectrum, and those who have been nearly tossed out of the human race altogether: psychopaths, sociopaths (a dated term in the United States), or those with antisocial, narcissistic, or personality disorders. I organized the six aspects of empathy, in part, to help myself think about and locate where allegedly unempathic people might have difficulties. Certainly, we can all have trouble with excessive Emotion Contagion abilities, and that's definitely where I place people on the autism spectrum—many of whom are hyperempaths. Empathic Accuracy is also a huge problem for many of us, in part due to our deeply unempathic and unhelpful emotional training, which confuses us about emotions. Emotion Regulation is another area in which many of us need help, because we'll often pick up an emotion, then react to it, then react to our reactions, and then become completely overwhelmed with emotions
about
emotions.

We can also fall down in the area of Perspective Taking if our skills in the first three aspects of empathy are impeded in some way. If our own capacity to receive, identify, and work with emotions is not strong, then we're not going to be able to develop a true and valid picture of others. We won't be
able to take their perspectives skillfully, and we'll attribute thoughts, emotions, ideas, and intentions to them that might be
way
off base.

However, when I look at the ways we talk about those who seem to lack empathy—and when I look at what scares people the most—I rest my gaze on Concern for Others. Think about it: You can be an absolute clod in the empathic realm, taking in too much, being emotionally volatile, overreacting, being clumsy and emotionally imprecise, but if others know that you
care
about them, then a great deal of your empathic clumsiness will be forgiven. But if people sense that you don't care about them? Oh, no! That will shut everything down. If you don't seem to care about others, then every other aspect of your empathic skills will be discounted as unimportant at best and manipulative at worst. Concern for Others is a deal breaker: If you seem to have it, you can get away with almost anything, empathically speaking. But if you don't seem to have it, you'll be exiled.

It's interesting, then, to note which kinds of people are causally referred to as being absolutely antiempathic and psychopathic; certainly criminals are,
²²
but so are bosses, ex-spouses, capitalists, and politicians. But, in fact, these people have to be able to read us and meet our needs in order to influence us skillfully and get their own needs met. There are many aspects of empathy working in all of these seemingly unempathic people; where they fall down is in their Concern for Others. Anyone who doesn't seem to have this concern gets exiled from our empathic community—we display a distinct lack of empathy for people who don't demonstrate their Concern for Others!

Concern for Others is vital and life affirming, but it can be a very difficult aspect of empathy, especially when those in your life are suffering, repeating painful behaviors, or mismanaging their emotions and their lives. Because Concern for Others can be very problematic, we'll explore ways to maintain (or restore) your concern without throwing yourself away and to temper your concern without completely abandoning your connections to others.

PERCEPTIVE ENGAGEMENT

In empathy research, the aspect that I'm renaming Perceptive Engagement is often called
targeted helping
²³
or
consolation
. In general, empathy researchers focus a great deal of attention on empathy as an active and obvious response to pain or need. However, this focus unnecessarily reduces our understanding of the totality of empathic responses. Empathic responses are just as likely in situations of joy, laughter, and a
lack
of need as they are in troubling or
consolation-requiring situations. Empathy is first and foremost an emotional skill, and skilled empaths work with all emotions, not just the painful ones. It's just as empathic to laugh and joke with someone as it is to offer them a shoulder to cry on. Empathy is about
perceptive
emotional interaction and engagement; it's not restricted only to consolation.

In renaming this aspect of empathy, I also chose the word
engagement
carefully. Many empathy researchers focus primarily on action as a sign of empathy, which makes sense in a testing environment, where you have to chart observable, action-based behaviors. In the real world of empathic interactions, however, this focus on action can be very misleading. In many situations, it's actually more empathic
not
to act or not to notice the pain of others (if they're signaling that they want to be left alone) than it is to make a great show of being outwardly consoling. When you engage with others in a truly perceptive way, the choices you make are not about what you would like or what would work for you (or what would make you look most empathic!); instead, they're about the needs of the other. And sometimes others need to be unseen, untouched, and undisturbed. Sometimes the most empathic response possible is to do nothing, to look away, and to ignore people (if that's what would comfort them the most).

And yet action-based research can tell us very useful things about the development of empathy. In a wonderful experiment
²⁴
done with toddlers, University of California–Berkeley psychology researcher Alison Gopnik placed an adult and a toddler at a table with two bowls of food between them. One bowl contained Goldfish crackers (which the vast majority of children love) and the other contained raw broccoli (which the vast majority of children decidedly do
not
love). To determine whether the toddlers had developed targeted helping skills, Gopnik asked the adult to mime strong distaste for the crackers and strong, yummy love for the broccoli—and then to ask the child to share some food.

At a certain stage in their development, toddlers will offer crackers to the adult, perhaps, because in their experience, the crackers are delicious, and therefore everyone should want some. Although offering the crackers is very generous (since the children love the crackers), it is not
perceptive
. Gopnik would call the giving of crackers a selfish and egocentric act and not a fully empathic one, because it is only when the child understands that the adult has entirely different needs that he or she can be seen as being empathically aware. I was fascinated to see that in Gopnik's study, the age at which
children offered broccoli to the experimenter was at around eighteen months, which suggests that babies develop the capacity for the most advanced aspect of our six-part empathy model even before they can speak full sentences.