3 Reinforcements:
Empathy and Bargaining
We already know that a child who is particularly empathetic is likely to be picked as the child to carry the projections regarding goodness and badness. But in this chapter, what we will see is that empathy continues to reinforce the good-guy identity, as does the stage of grief or acceptance called bargaining. Empathy allows a developing child to feel others’ feelings. But for the good guy, each time he feels another’s feelings, he is triggered and compelled to begin to carry those feelings and attempt to do something about them, reinforcing his identity as a good guy. Bargaining allows the good guy to make psychological bargains with himself, his circumstances, and life patterns in a way that keeps him identifying with goodness instead of becoming more authentic. In this chapter, we will learn how each of these two primary reinforcements work.
The Gift and Curse of Empathy
Most of us have some degree of empathy. We know, for example, when someone is in emotional pain as a response to something we did or said, and we feel their sad feelings as if they were our own. Because of this kind of empathy, we make amends. We might feel especially empathetic for people who are experiencing a problem or trouble that we have personally experienced in the past. Then we might say, “I know exactly how they feel,” and we are probably right. We might see someone across the room with a painful expression on his face and go over and ask him if everything is okay—because we are reading that painful expression and feel what he is probably feeling.
But for a person who is gifted in a special way with empathy, or perhaps just more aware of it than others, there is a greater level of that. These people can feel the mood of a room when they walk in the door. Empaths—a label that seems to fit these folks—can sense what a person is feeling before the person even shows it on his face. There’s just something subtle, some nuance of expression that the empath picks up. Since skilled empaths are often so familiar with the inner world, they are also able to name others’ emotions—so that those other people can understand their own inner worlds a bit better. This is one of the gifts of empathy.
Empaths can more readily tell when someone is lying than others. They can more readily read between the lines of any conversation to tell that a person is uncomfortable with a particular topic or if they are hiding something. Though this is not always true, they tend to be very good communicators, because they are constantly trying to understand and put words to what they are picking up.
All of that is healthy stuff. We definitely need empathetic people in our world. But the problem is that no one has taught the empath how to use this as a skill. Therefore, it is not uncommon at all for an empath to be very confused about where she stops and others begin. It’s one thing to care about someone, but it’s a whole other thing to carry someone. And many empaths don’t know the difference. A person who knows how to use empathy instead of allowing it to use her is able to know the difference between her own stuff and someone else’s. She is able to put up boundaries by saying “no” to being around certain people who want to project onto her. She is able to put up psychic boundaries by refusing to accept and carry other people’s stuff. She knows how to walk around in the soft regions of her own inner terrain so she can feel the subtle distinctions between intuition and fear, between my stuff and your stuff, between judgment and discernment, and between the subtle ways we try to trick and fool ourselves and the truth. An empath must learn to live from the authentic Self in order to make the best use of this gift—indeed, in order to keep it from becoming a curse.
But empathy is often a curse for many people who do not know how to pull back the red carpet they have laid out for others to enter into their mind. In fact, they don’t even know how they laid that carpet out in the first place. Even more don’t know that the many anxieties, frustrations, sorrows, and angers that they carry around every day are not even theirs. This is why empaths need to be very skilled at determining the subtle nuances of energy that go on inside of them. If they are skilled they will be able to differentiate. If not, they won’t.
The feelings that are taken in by the good-guy empath are those others do not want to take responsibility for. Feelings, which we do not own, are unresolved flotsam and jetsam left hanging around in our energy—our auras. When empathic people come close to or are able to walk into our energetic fields, they can pick up on whatever is floating around in there. When, however, a person takes responsibility and ownership for their own feelings, they are not available to the empath. So the empath needs to surround himself with people who know how to own their personal stuff. The empath will also need to learn that he cannot be responsible for the well-being of others, that he doesn’t have to carry others’ unresolved psychological issues for them. We will be discussing boundaries and responsibility in later chapters.
Ways We Can Help Children
Learn to Use Empathy as a Skill
We can teach children how to use empathy as a skill. When David says something about how another child feels, for example, the parent might encourage David to ask the other child about that feeling—giving the other child an opportunity to own the feeling. If the child denies the feeling, the parent might tell David, “Well, his feelings belong to him, so you can let that go now.” But the child will also need help with psychic boundaries. So, for example, if you, as his parent, learn from him that he is feeling sad during and after his visits to Bobby’s house, then you might say something like, “Do you know if this is your sadness, or is it maybe Bobby’s sadness or someone else's in his family? ” This tells him that he can carry other people’s feelings and that he can discern the difference between his own and other’s feelings.
If he says, “I don’t know,” then the parent can encourage him to experiment with feeling the difference between his own and Bobby’s family’s feelings. He might experiment with this by really paying attention to how he feels just before going into Bobby’s house and then noticing how he feels right after entering Bobby’s house. If he says he thinks that they have come from someone else in Bobby’s house, then the parent might say, “Well, I know it’s easy for you to feel those feelings, but since they are not yours, you can give them back now.” The parent might even add that “It’s more helpful to Bobby’s family if they carry their own feelings, because then they can do something about them.”
If he asks how to give the feelings back, the parent can help him by imagining with him that he throws the feelings back or supporting him as he simply says, “I’m giving these back to you now, they belong to you.” When the child senses the difference in how he feels after having given back the feelings, this will teach him that his own discernment is necessary. In this way the child is learning what is and isn’t his and also what he can do to create boundaries that allow him to own what is his and give back what isn’t.
Empathy as Reinforcement
for the Good-Guy Identity
Most kids are not taught how to use empathy, however. In particular, the good-guy identity develops and maintains out of the misuse of empathy. The good guy picks up others’ emotions and unresolved issues and not only feels them but begins to carry them as if they were his own. By the time this child is five years old, he already believes that this is what he is supposed to do with the emotions he picks up in the family. This is the role he plays in every dynamic from here on out, unless he develops an understanding that this is not how empathy was supposed to be used.
Good guys have been taught by the projections they have introjected to believe that it is good to carry other people’s emotions for them. In fact, they are doubly attached to carrying other’s emotions because (a) doing so makes them feel important, giving them a valued mission in a world where their authenticity is rejected; and (b) they feel that they are the stronger of the two people and should carry the emotion for the weaker person. So, even if they are challenged to let go of the emotions they are carrying for others and get in touch with their own more authentic emotions, they might resist for the above reasons. Now add the enormous, overwhelming guilt that comes up if they don’t carry the emotions of other people and you have a person who will continue to carry the burdens of the people in his life.
The good guy is reinforced in carrying others’ stuff every time he is triggered by feeling the emotions of others in her life. It works like this: Anytime the good guy feels the sorrow, fear, torment, or anxiety of another person, he is compelled to energetically pick up those feelings and carry them. Now those feelings belong to him, and now he must do something about them. If he can’t or does not do something about them, he will feel very guilty, even shameful or unworthy. This guilt pushes him to do something about these feelings he has picked up. He will do something or he will worry that he’s not doing something. He is being compelled by guilt to make his existence all about the well-being of others.
Others may add their voices to this guilt by blaming the good guy if he doesn’t do what they want him to do. Others may also praise the good guy for following the urgings of his guilt. Thus he is being reinforced by his own introjections and guilt, as well as the voices of others to continue in the good-guy identity. As time goes by he will become so used to this response that it becomes automatic. From then on every relationship, every dynamic with another is infused with this sense of mission and this deep urgency of guilt. Anytime he questions this automatic response, the introjections, guilt, and the reinforcement of others will push him to keep doing what he’s always done. In order to put an end to this compulsivity, he must discover the authentic Self—which we will learn to do in upcoming chapters.
Bargaining
Bargaining is one of the five commonly known stages of grief that we first became familiar with because of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s research and her 1969 book On Death and Dying. Since that time we have expanded our awareness of the grief process to include any number of things a person might grieve about, including the original wound of not being received and welcomed as an authentic being by parents who are truly present. The stages include denial, anger, bargaining, sorrow (originally called depression by Kübler-Ross), and acceptance. I call this fourth stage sorrow, because it is only when we don’t deal well with the other stages that we become depressed.
Many now understand that these stages of grief are also stages of acceptance. Anything we are trying to accept in life comes, at least to some degree, with these stages. Further, these stages don’t necessarily happen in any specific order, so we might be in two stages at the same time, or bargaining may come first, etc. There is naturally a grief process around the original wound of not being accepted for one’s authenticity. When a person is required to sacrifice his authenticity as a child, this may cause a wound for which he might experience various stages of grief throughout his lifetime. Hopefully he will eventually reach a stage of acceptance and begin to allow himself to accept the fact that his original authenticity was rejected. From there he can begin to assimilate an authentic Self.
Bargaining is a stage where the good guy might be stuck for years. Bargains always carry an IF and a THEN. IF I am always kind and loving toward others, THEN I won’t ever have to feel that awful guilt waiting in the wings to pounce on me at the slightest thought of not doing what it urges me to do. IF I am always sacrificing for others, THEN they will like me and I won’t ever have to deal with that awful loneliness waiting to envelop me in its awareness that even I am not present with me. IF I take on the problems and issues of others, THEN I am a good person and I can count myself worthy.
These are the bargains that go with the good-guy identity. The good guy makes these bargains over and over, hoping to finally belong and thus heal the old wounds. This reinforces the good-guy identity. When, for example, she is kind to others, sacrificing herself for them, and they don’t notice or don’t like her any more than they did before she made the sacrifice, she might feel disappointed or sad. But these feelings just trigger her to do what she has always done harder, so now she will sacrifice more and be even more kind to win that approval that will finally make her feel worthy.
Bargains are a kind of magical thinking—they assume all kinds of connections between people and events that are not really there. If I decide to sacrifice for you, for example, that does not mean that you will know that I have sacrificed, that you will feel healed or helped by my sacrifice, or that you will like me more because I have sacrificed. It only means that I have decided to make a sacrifice. But when we bargain, we make the assumption that there is a connection between my sacrifice and how you will feel about me and about yourself as a result of my sacrifice. These bargains are evidence that we are still stuck in the magical thinking of the child. In later chapters we will learn how to think and do more realistically in this area, but for now, what we need to know is that bargaining is a stage of grief. It keeps us hoping that we won’t ever have to realize that our authenticity has been rejected by primary relationships.
Relationship as a Bargain
This is one of the ultimate bargains. Attractions come out of the unconscious—right along with all of the unresolved issues. Therefore, we are often attracted to people who will repeat the same patterns of our childhood relationships. For the good guy this often means being attracted to people who need her to take care of them. These dynamics are commonly very familiar to the good guy and she feels confident that she knows what to do in these relationships. The problem is that the authentic Self wants more than this. The authentic Self wants a real relationship with a real person who can be equal in the partnership. Every now and then the good guy will long for this, but she keeps being attracted to people who serve the bargain: IF I stay with people who need me to take care of them, THEN my good-guy identity will remain in place and I won’t ever have to deal with that original wound of having my authenticity rejected.
These attractions to people who need to be taken care of run the gamut from the very disenabled to the very violent. But since the good guy is used to bargaining, the answer to any problem that arises in the relationship is typically to just bargain harder. The bargains made by the good guy have to do with guilt, sacrificing self for others, always being good, and being seen as good. She will sacrifice more, feel guilty and responsible for the partner more, try harder to be good, and be seen as good. And even though it might be evident to others that these bargains are not paying off, she is not likely to see this because she has been so habituated for so long to the idea that her bargains are making her into a very good person.
Identity as Bargain
Indeed, the identity itself is a bargain, for it hopes that IF we wear this mask and costume, THEN we will get to belong in this family system. IF we wear this mask and costume, THEN we will be the mask and costume and others will like and appreciate us. And ultimately, IF we wear this mask and costume, THEN we will get to survive.
These bargains may take up considerable time, even years of our lives. I have certainly worked with many people who have spent 30, 40, even 50 or more years bargaining with unresolved issues from childhood. Daughters who still feel that they must take care of alcoholic moms, even though Mom abandoned them to her alcoholism when the daughters were young. They spend their lives hoping against hope that one day Mom will finally love them, IF they can just rescue her this one more time. They simply have not realized that the mother’s refusal to change has nothing to do with their worthiness.
Sons become workaholics to continue that pattern until it nearly kills them, just to prove to mom or dad that they are worth something, that they can be “somebody.” Marriages in which each partner, rather than relating authentically to each other, is still bargaining with the fear of parental rejection by inviting the parents to run their marriage. Many who are maintaining a career they despise just so that they can make enough money to finally prove that they are successful and worthy people to parents whose rigid order of right and wrong left the children’s psychology out in the cold. Even if these parents have passed on, they still live and reign supreme in the minds of the child, who has learned this one thing: how to bargain. Relationships are often a repeat of old parent-child dynamics that remain unresolved. Regardless of the people involved, they all still look like Mom and Dad or the unresolved issues to the person who is bargaining the same bargains over and over again for a lifetime.
For the good guy, the bargain may involve rescuing, fixing, financing, doting, tolerating, or other such interactions with others, but the bottom line of all of it is that the good guy hopes to continue to survive by continuing to sacrifice for others. Deep down he hopes that he will finally belong and this sense of belonging will convince him of his worthiness. To turn this around, he must rediscover his authentic Self and relearn how to belong to himself, which is exactly what you will learn all about in the healing sections to come.