When everything around us is crashing and burning, the gift of empathy revives our faith in human nature. This is what carries us through the heat of chaos in a tide swell of collective goodwill right after a disaster. It’s what saves us from the emotional riptide that drags us through currents of horror, helplessness, fear, and desperation. Minutes after an explosive event, individuals we never knew step up and give of themselves in that extraordinary moment when a “regular day” becomes transformed by a split-second decision.
So compelling is the gift of empathy in action that we can’t help watching the ones who leap from relative safety into an unscripted theater of life and death. Coverage of the hurricane trifecta in the summer of 2017 brought us face-to-face with people escaping death by water and wind because of the kindness of strangers who rushed in to help at significant risk to themselves. Not only do these unknown heroes inspire us; they bring positive distraction from the wear and tear of daily life.
Because it is a “feel good” gift, empathy builds its own momentum. It’s natural to want more of that feeling.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama describes how it works: “The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being.”
The uplift we get from empathy is immediate, available, and effective for overriding emotional states such as depression, irritability, and anxiety. It functions as a stand-alone gift, the only one among the five that any of us is likely to want.
In Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger cites a 1961 study by the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago, which explored the question, “Why do large-scale disasters produce such mentally healthy conditions?”60
Researchers hurried to scenes of disasters to interview a total of 9,000 survivors, family members of victims, and other members of the community about how they were adjusting to life after the critical incident. The authors concluded that “modern society has gravely disrupted the social bonds that have always characterized the human experience. Disasters . . . create a ‘community of sufferers’ that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others.”61
That “reassuring connection” comes through the third gift, empathy.
A study of mental health soon after the Belfast riots of 1969 and 1970 and published in The Journal of Psychosomatic Research suggested that “people will feel better psychologically if they have more involvement with their community.”62
It is not surprising that a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2013 found that one effective way to increase empathy for oneself is to show empathy to others.63
Empathy or Compassion
“It’s not about how other people handle their pain and your own struggle with pain. When you learn to empathize with others, you learn to heal yourself,” says journalists’ security expert Frank Smyth. “Empathy brings a grace that comes from understanding yourself.”
Although empathy is essential for compassion, the two are not interchangeable.
“Empathetic means you are separate. Compassionate means you are that person,” says the monk Dai-en Friedman.
Humanitarian worker Leslie McTyre finds it challenging to balance empathy and compassion. “Empathy is the gift of experiencing oneness with humanity,” he says. “In relieving pain for one, we are relieving pain for all.”
In order to do the grueling, demanding work of delivering medical supplies into war zones, he has learned how to empathize without feeling completely paralyzed by other people’s pain.
“I’m pretty tough, except for children and women. When I see them suffering, it breaks down my shell of protection,” he says, adding that it motivates him to work ten times as hard. “When the people I work with can see tears in my eyes, they say, ‘Leslie, don’t do that now.’”
Empathy in Action
McTyre received a heartbreaking lesson in the difference between empathy and compassion while he was working on a government project to reduce infant mortality in Bolivia. His assignment: to learn why female babies and young girls were dying at a rate four times greater than male babies and boys. One of the first women he interviewed was a mother who had just buried her baby girl because they could not afford to feed all their children. They had decided it was more important to feed the sons, and both parents let their baby daughter starve to death.
“She broke down and I broke down right with her,” says McTyre. “Then I went out and raised hell.”
Energized by concern and motivated for results, McTyre persuaded his boss to aggressively push for and obtain a grant from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to provide security when distributing food to mothers and babies in need.
But nothing prepared him for the bloody year of Rwanda’s 1994 civil war.
“By God’s hand I was the first white man to enter Rwanda during the genocide,” he says, adding that he doesn’t remember many details because he worked for days without food, water, or rest. An emergency ambulance driver, McTyre transported wounded children to the only working hospital in the capital city, Kigali.
“I was about ten miles out, and all of a sudden, I knew we were getting close to Kigali because I could smell death,” he says. “You became part of the bittersweet smell. It’s a weird kind of communion. I was a weird white man ready to go in and help. After they realized I had no hidden agenda, they loved me for it.”
One night, when his housekeeper needed a ride home, McTyre parked close to her street, which was blocked by rubble. As she picked her way through construction debris, he noticed people emerging from the rubble to follow her. Curious, he joined the back of the crowd.
“By the time I got to her, she was standing on the biggest pile of rubble in the entire community, and she was directing the reconstruction of the community at about two in the morning. She had men doing the physical work. She was directing women to take care of the children and put them to bed,” he says.
He watched her give her entire salary to people to buy food for everyone.
“She was directing the spirit and survival of the community. I looked up at her and thought, ‘This is what it’s all about. This is how they survive.’”
Assigned to retrieve corpses from the streets and set up mass graves, he remembers, “While I was working there, we were bonded together. There was no black or white, no he or she; it was masses of humanity bonding together first for survival and then retrieving those who were close to the jaws of death.”
But when he discovered a swamp in south central Rwanda where the killers had dumped 40,000 people, McTyre’s life depended on the empathy of people whom he had never met before.
“They had been mauled by violence. I knew I would never see them again,” he says. “It was like living in quicksand. I was a grain of sand in the universe.”
Standing on the edge of the swamp, he announced, “We have to pull these bodies out and put them in body bags and identify them with the help of family members in this community.”
Everybody took a step back and stared. McTyre figured they were thinking, “The white man has talked the great talk and now he has to walk the great walk.” Holding his breath, McTyre stepped into the ooze.
Inspired by what he discovered in Rwanda and later in Liberia during the Ebola epidemic of 2014, McTyre believes that traumatic memories have to be released.
“You need to tell and retell your stories and learn to listen to each other,” he says. “We can’t get better by ourselves. We are wounded together and we need each other for healing.”
Like the indigenous healers I met, McTyre believes that we, in the industrialized world, can learn about community and empathy from other cultures.
“The African people understand the concept of expanded love more easily than most Westerners. Continental identity is more developed in Africa than in other continents. It is easier for them to understand humanity’s struggle for survival. Half of them live in the world of magic and intuition. We have gotten lost in this logic thing.”
Empathy for Survival
I was sitting with Margie Miller at a recent memorial for those killed in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center when I noticed a woman sitting nearby who looked familiar. I recalled that her two older children sometimes came on baseball outings with my WTC teen group.
Ros Thackurdeen’s sister-in-law, Goumatie Thackurdeen, was killed when the second plane hit the Twin Towers. Goumatie worked at Fiduciary Trust, on the 97th floor of Tower Two. When the first plane struck, she joined a group going downstairs, but by the time they reached the 78th floor they received word that Tower Two had not been struck and it was safe to go back upstairs. She called her mother to say everything was okay and was returning to her office when the second plane hit.
“Life has not been easy. It feels like we live on a cycle. When 9/11 comes around, you think about that day,” says Ros. “The pain is still very raw. You do what you have to do every day. You live with it. You wait for it to explode every year. It feels like my body knows the date. It’s time stamped in my cells.”
Eleven years later, Ros’ younger son, Ravi, was killed in a remote section of Costa Rica where he was on a premedical study abroad program. After playing soccer on the beach, he went into the water to cool off and was swept out to sea. He struggled for forty minutes but nobody came. Ravi Thackurdeen was nineteen when his mother brought his ashes home.
His parents, Ros and Raj, never got an incident report. They say that the university that organized the study abroad program refused to release it to them. Neither did their son’s four-year college.
“The loss did us in. My husband and I both suffer from depression and my other son was in depression for a long time,” she says.
Her daughter dropped out of medical school due to post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. She left home and was living in a homeless shelter but her family no longer hears from her.
“They say time heals but I can tell you it doesn’t,” says Ros. “A piece of your heart is ripped out and there’s no getting better from it. Technically, I would like to stay in bed and not get up. But empathy is the only thing that gets me up.”
After Ravi’s death, she started to research other cases of students who died while studying abroad. Shocked to learn that there are no regulations requiring universities to fully inform students and their families about the dangers and risks at an overseas site, in 2016, she teamed up with Elizabeth Brenner, another grieving mother whose son died while studying abroad. Elizabeth’s son, Thomas, fell to his death from a cliff in India, where he and his fellow students were hiking at nightfall. His body was never found.
Ros and Elizabeth founded Protect Students Abroad (www.protectstudentsabroad.org), whose goal is fatality prevention for students studying overseas.
“The world has become quite a different place since September 11th. As Americans, we are walking targets,” says Ros. “We need to educate our students in how to travel. They need information in their back pocket.”
Ros keeps a growing database of more than 3,000 families whose children lost their lives studying in foreign countries.
“When your kid dies overseas, you are left alone. Sometimes the child’s body doesn’t return home for months and there is no investigation,” she says. “There’s a sense of community because the parents know what you are going through, too. We help each other and it makes it a little bit easier.
For parents who are coping with the shock of a child’s death, ProtectStudentsAbroad.org offers practical advice from the heart. Here are some of their members’ recommendations:
Among the community of families she serves, Ros is aware that very few people get answers but some get clarity.
“Getting answers can help you deal with what you have to deal with,” she says.
In the meantime, she is committed to putting one foot in front of the other, reaching out in a personal way to other grieving parents.
“The gift we need to rebuild our support systems is empathy,” she says. “We must create new institutions founded on empathy because we need them for our survival.”
Empathy and Evolution
Dr. Jonas Salk, inventor of the first polio vaccine, believed that empathy is essential for our survival as a species. In his book, Anatomy of Reality: Merging of Intuition and Reason, he wrote that for our species to continue to evolve successfully, “the evolution of the human mind . . . depends upon the evolution of intuition and reason.”
Recent neuroscientific research suggests that intuitive intelligence may be more complex than was previously understood but, traditionally, intuition is considered a right-brain intelligence while reason originates in the left brain. Dr. Salk’s call for integrating left- and right-brain thinking has never been as important as it is now.
We need to become a species that is conscious and respectful of our interconnectivity; thus, the third gift will get us through these troubling times together.
The Three C’s: Contagious Connectivity & Community
After the first few months following a crisis, when friends and family start drifting away or perhaps become more remote, possibly shaming you for “not being over it already,” empathy becomes critically important. In times of hardship, it’s the gift that promises and delivers The Three C’s: Contagious Connectivity & Community.
The warm, good feelings generated by empathetic choices are contagious. Empathy equals connection in action and is integral and necessary for community resilience. According to government studies, empathy gets expressed in behaviors concerned with other people’s needs.
According to the US Department of Health and Human Services Public Health Emergency website, “A resilient community is socially connected and has accessible health systems that are able to withstand disaster and foster community recovery. The community can take collective action after an adverse event because it has developed resources that reduce the impact of major disturbances and help protect people’s health. Resilient communities promote individual and community physical, behavioral, and social health to strengthen their communities for daily, as well as extreme, challenges. Building social connectedness can be an important emergency preparedness action.”64
Researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of Delaware Disaster Research Center have been studying emergent collective behavior in a disaster.
“We think about community resilience like an ecosystem. The same is true for a community,” writes the lead researcher Jon Links. Emergent collective behavior grounded in empathy brings together “a group of everyday people . . . to aid the formal emergency response.” They are developing a quantifiable model called the COPEWELL project (Composite of Post-Event Well-Being) to help predict how well a community will bounce back after a disaster.65,66
Trending #Empathy
Seven months after Superstorm Sandy, when piles of moldy debris higher than the rooflines still lined the streets of our Long Beach neighborhoods, Moore, Oklahoma, was destroyed by a tornado. Twenty-five people, including seven children, were killed and 377 people were injured. Property damage was estimated at $2 billion.
The sight of families having lost everything touched many of my neighbors, including people who attended the weekly group meetings in the courthouse. The path to empathy runs through the heart, and ours opened instantly when we saw the devastation in Oklahoma.
Sandy sensitized us to the hurt and suffering of tornado survivors. Not only did the City of Long Beach respond with a call for donations of essentials, such as toilet paper and cleaning supplies, a few groups of neighbors took up their own collections.
Long Beach City Manager Jack Schnirman told the Long Beach Patch, “Here in Long Beach we know the devastation a storm can bring, and we know how critical it was for so many agencies and kind people from across the country to come to our aid, and that’s why we are again paying it forward.”
The #Empathy trend continues to build.
Recently, Long Beach residents opened hearts and wallets to help new survivors rebuild after events like Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. In response to Harvey, Long Beach first responders collected donations from all around the island. One local family set up a GoFundMe page to raise $5,000 for a rental trailer and a driver to bring the donations to Houston. Within a few hours, they had raised the money they needed.
Empathy and the Starfish
As he took his morning walk along a beach, a scientist came to a stretch of sand between two jetties covered in starfish. Hundreds, possibly a few thousand starfish had been coughed up by the high tide. Now, they lay dying in the sun.
But there, in the middle of all the starfish, a young boy was picking them up, one at a time, and gently tossing each one back into the sea.
“What are you doing?” the scientist asked.
“I’m saving the starfish. They’re dying,” said the boy.
“That’s nice,” said the scientist. “But as you can see, there are thousands of starfish. Surely you don’t think what you’re doing can make a difference?”
Smiling, the boy picked up another starfish, and as he was preparing to return it to its home, he answered, “To this one, it does.”
Catastrophic events can be so overwhelming that the desire to step back and say, “That’s too much for me,” is natural and understandable. That makes it exceptional when someone steps in with a similar intention, as the young boy did with the starfish.
If anyone deserves a Starfish award for stepping up for the forgotten, it would be Sue Hecht. Sue had recently moved to her mother’s home in Island Park, the town facing Long Beach on the north side of the Reynolds Channel/Intracoastal Waterway. Two months prior, she had undergone spinal surgery and was on disability leave when Hurricane Sandy destroyed everything she owned.
Depressed, angry, and broke, Sue teamed up with a group of women in Rockaway, Queens, to organize free flea markets. Held in open parking lots, the flea markets gave people recovering from Sandy a place to pick up cartons of water, canned goods, bathroom products, first aid, and household supplies. The local fire departments donated cases of drinking water and Meals Ready to Eat (MREs). CVS and Walgreens donated travel-size shampoos, talcum powder, and toothpaste. People brought in kitchen implements, cooking ware, pots, pans, and cutlery.
“Sandy gave me sustainable empathy,” says Sue. “It’s more wired into my personality than it was five years ago.” Looking at her Facebook posts before the storm showed her that her interests were “going out with my friends and what kinds of shoes people were buying.”
The Oklahoma tornadoes were a turning point for her. Even though she was still unable to work due to complications from spinal surgery, Sue organized donations from medical supply houses. Her empathy was contagious. Our support group chipped in to help pay storage fees for the commodes, wheelchairs, walkers, nebulizers, oxygen concentrators, and baby formula.
After a few false starts, Sue rented a truck and found someone to help her drive the supplies to a church in Moore, Oklahoma, which served as a distribution hub for the tornado survivors.
“If I was able to do something for other people, it made me feel a little bit better,” says Sue. “Today, I am no longer consumed with myself like a twenty-year-old. I am more connected to what’s happening in the world, not just with what’s happening in my life.”
Look Out for Starfish
When you are walking through your day, look for a “starfish” situation where something as simple as making eye contact or saying hello can show another person she matters. Empathy is a renewable resource. You may be surprised to find that the more you give, the more empathy you receive.
The Element of Metal
The Chinese element associated with empathy is metal. At first, that made no sense to me. Metal is rigid; empathy requires flexibility. The mind cannot hold onto two apparently contradictory concepts at the same time, and the resulting confusion produces cognitive dissonance. Facing into contradictions with logic always lands me in the lost terrain of analysis paralysis. While meditating on the contradiction, a strong and flexible gold chain came into my mind’s eye.
Empathy as metal, metal as empathy.
Bringing empathy home can be as simple as wearing beautiful jewelry and white or neutral beige clothes. The element of metal can be a catalyst for connecting with others by allowing your grief to show and permitting them to express their empathy. This interconnection is reflected in the symbol of a metal chain.
Rx: Empathy
When a patient declared her plans to commit suicide, her doctor, the late Milton Erickson, came up with a prescription that saved her life. When he asked about her hobbies, she mentioned her love of growing violets in her home greenhouse. He suggested that the woman give violets to her neighbors for special events, such as weddings, births, or even someone’s death. If she still felt suicidal after a month, he wanted her to come back. But he never heard from her again.
More than two decades later, an obituary in the local paper caught his eye: “The Violet Lady” had died at the age of eighty-three. It was his former patient. She had filled the prescription and spent the rest of her life giving away what she loved. In return, she was loved for the empathy she expressed through her violets. (Unbeknownst to her, violets are traditionally associated with the gift of humility.)
If you are curious about what it can be like to look, sound, and feel empathetic, try Dr. Erickson’s prescription: Give away what you love. The more you give, the more you receive.
Five Minutes a Day to Empathy
Choose one activity and practice five minutes a day for five days.
“May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be safe. May you live with ease.”67