Defining and Redefining Empathy
An Empathic Approach
IN THE JANUARY 2012 issue of the academic journal Emotion Review, scholars from around the globe and across the disciplines came together to share current research on empathy. Surprisingly, there is not yet a clear, agreed-upon definition of empathy or of the differing facets that constitute empathy. (As for empaths? Forget that! They’re not even a topic of scientific notice.) In fact, debates about empathy are in full flower in the fields of philosophy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, social work, primatology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive neuroscience—and the precise functional definition of empathy is currently being argued about all over the world.
This is not actually a problem (in most cases), because this kind of dynamic, multifaceted, and often-contentious interaction is what you want to see in a healthy scientific pursuit, especially in regard to something as crucial as empathy. In many disciplines, research on emotions and empathy is currently undergoing tremendous upheaval and renewal as we continually reassess human evolution and human (and animal) behavior—and as we increase our capacity to understand the inner workings of the brain.
Some researchers are looking at the words we use to describe empathy. They’re doing a kind of linguistic reorganization of words such as sympathy, compassion, and altruism,3 such that most current definitions of empathy now encompass the compassionate actions and responses that you and I included in the short café discussion we had just a few pages ago. This is an interesting transition, because in some older definitions, empathy was specifically restricted to the capacity to share emotions with others and did not include a compassionate action component (such as responding to the emotions you sense and doing something thoughtful for another). Today, this empathic action component is being redefined as a sign of empathy that is fully realized. This is an especially important distinction in empathy research with infants and toddlers,4 where children’s age-linked attainment of the capacity to do something helpful about the emotions they sense is treated as a sign that they have arrived at a specific developmental stage. At this point in our understanding of empathy, it’s not enough to merely share an emotion with another; you also have to be able to do something helpful and compassionate in response.
Other researchers are working to create, validate, or modify tests for empathy; identify whether primates and other animals have empathy (yes, they do) and in what amounts; determine when infants develop empathy and in what forms; and understand how empathy develops (and what impedes or supports its development). There is also a great deal of interest in how empathy works in the brain and whether (or if ) neurological structures called mirror neurons and the hormone oxytocin are central to empathy. Other researchers and philosophers are arguing about whether certain kinds of people can be categorized as either highly empathic or unempathic; while still others are looking at how empathy is related to the very formation of our species as an emotionally expressive and empathically connected band of highly social primates. The quest to understand empathy is an intensive, multinational enterprise.
The fact that you and I created a definition of empathy in our imagined café discussion a few pages back is useful for our purposes, but I do want you to know that we’re ahead of the curve here. The study of empathy is ongoing, and the academic definition is in flux. My approach comes not just from the academic literature but also from a lifetime of learning how to survive and thrive as a hyperempath and helping others learn how to thrive as well. As we move forward, we’ll rely upon the research, but we’ll focus on the lived experience of what it is to be an empath.
However, before we enter more deeply into our empathic study of empathy, there are a few problems we need to clear up. Some of these problems come from everyday prejudices, but some actually come from the research itself, and we need to address these problems directly.
WELCOMING THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN EXILED
An unfortunate offshoot of all of this intense interest in empathy is that there’s been a facile and frankly unempathic quest to exclude entire categories of humans from the empathic community. As an empath, I challenge these exclusions wholeheartedly, and I absolutely won’t perpetuate them in this book. Certainly, in popular culture, there’s a deeply sexist notion that empathy is a female skill and that males are constitutionally less empathic or less emotive than females are. This terrible idea has created untold suffering for boys and men, who are often not taught much about emotions and are not treated as fully emotive and sensitive beings. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve given talks and had men come up to me afterward and whisper, as if they don’t even have the right to say it, “I think I’m an empath.” What?
Of course men are empaths!
Certainly, many males have been excluded from an understanding of emotions and empathy, and sexist ideas about men are absolutely commonplace, but they’re not true. So let’s look at our definition of empathy again, specifically in terms of men and boys:
Empathy is a social and emotional skill that helps us feel and understand the emotions, circumstances, intentions, thoughts, and needs of others, such that we can offer sensitive, perceptive, and appropriate communication and support.
This definition does not exclude men or boys, and it doesn’t suggest that feeling or understanding emotions is a female skill. Males can easily understand the feelings, circumstances, thoughts, and needs of others. Males can also offer sensitive, perceptive, and appropriate communication and support. Empathy is not a gendered skill—it’s a human skill! The alleged problem of male empathy doesn’t come from inside the male body; there is no male-specific defect of empathy or emotional awareness; and there are no male-specific differences in early emotional development. Little boys love cuddling and love and emotions and empathy. So do men.
I wrote a piece on my website5 about this in connection to the wonderful book Pink Brain, Blue Brain, by neurologist Lise Eliot. She busts sexist myths about boys and girls, and in her book, she points out that the differences between the brains of males and females are actually quite small at birth and throughout childhood. Eliot focuses on socialization—on how we approach gender roles and how we treat boys and girls so wildly differently—as the chief contributing factor in the later differences between males and females in terms of their emotional, social, and verbal skills. Eliot also notes that although there are some early, sex-based differences in verbal abilities (girls are sometimes more verbal than boys, but not always), as well as some differences in activity levels (boys are sometimes more active than girls, but not always), there is not as much difference as we’ve been led to believe. In fact, there is more difference between girls in these traits and between boys in these traits than there is between the sexes. However, parents tend to support these gender-linked behaviors very early. For example, they may respond positively to baby girls’ vocalizations while subtly ignoring their activity levels (and vice versa for boys).
But tragically, we don’t tend to raise boys (or men) as if they’re fully empathic and fully emotive beings. As a direct result, males in our heavily gendered society may experience emotions more intensely than females do. However, because they’ve been socialized to view themselves as unemotional, many males may believe that their normal human emotions are strange or out of place. In general, males are not socially permitted to express a full range of emotions or to chat with friends about those emotions (as females are socially allowed to do), which leaves males with very few healthy or fully conscious outlets for their emotions. In our social training and our social myth making, we’ve created an appallingly unempathic environment for most males.
In numerous disguised-gender studies, people describe identical behavior differently depending on whether they think a baby is a boy or a girl. A pink-attired sleeping baby will be called delicate and darling, while the same sleeping baby attired in blue will be called strong and dynamic. What? It’s the same baby! But in a heavily gendered world such as ours, it’s not the same baby at all. We actually attribute different (and sometimes opposite) emotional and empathic qualities to identical behaviors in boys and girls. We enforce gender so strongly and so incessantly that we don’t even notice we’re doing it; it’s the air we breathe and the ground we walk on.6
Most of our valenced ideas about gender roles for males and females are socially created; they’re not biologically or objectively true, and they can’t be found in the brains of infants. But because so few people understand the difference between objective reality and socially constructed reality, these myths and falsehoods gain the status of concrete truth. Accordingly, many little girls are encouraged to become relatively inactive people who love to talk about emotions and social relationships (but hate math), while little boys are urged to stop crying at a certain age, even when they’ve been hurt deeply. Boys are given guns and trucks and told to man up, stop crying, there’s nothing to be afraid of, stop being girly, stop talking about feelings, and basically stop being fully alive. When we enforce gender stereotypes, we actually reduce the intelligence, the emotional capacity, the empathic skills, and the very humanity of little boys and little girls. We also throw most of the emotional awareness tasks in heterosexual relationships onto women, which might seem helpful but which actually further reduces males’ emotional skills.
Enforced gender stereotypes can certainly interfere with the emotional and social development of human beings. And yet we all have the capacity for emotional and empathic awareness. All of us—males, females, and everyone in between—can intentionally learn how to identify and work with emotions and empathy at any age and from any position on the gender continuum. Empathy is a human skill; it’s not gender specific.
As we grow up, our brains do change, and adult women often have different emotional skills and neurological profiles from adult men. But the brain is a highly plastic organ, and it will change in response to any strong training. For instance, the brains of highly trained musicians or people who speak many languages look and behave differently from the brains of nonmusical people or speakers of only one language. But this doesn’t mean that music and language are forbidden to you if you weren’t trained early; your brain is plastic, and you can learn new things at any age. There may be some discernible differences in the brains of adult males and adult females, but the old myth about men being less emotional or less able to feel emotions has no basis in neurology. Even the idea that men have smaller corpora callosa than women (the corpus callosum carries information between the left and right hemispheres of the brain) was based on a study of just fourteen brains and has since been disconfirmed, as Eliot points out. But people hold onto this sexist idea, repeat it constantly, and write books and make whole careers around it, while males suffer silently (or act out) the emotions they clearly feel but aren’t invited (or allowed) to understand.
Even so, males have always found ways to feel deeply, to become highly skilled in the social world, to create great art, to parent lovingly, to care for animals, to heal the sick, to fight for social justice, to love fully, to dance and sing and act, to communicate meaningfully, and to be profoundly emotive beings. So let me state this right out loud: males have all the human emotions, males can feel and understand all emotions, males have empathy, males can display empathy, and males are natural empaths. As such, there will be no gendering of emotions or empathy anywhere in this book. I enthusiastically welcome men and boys into the empathic community. (We’ll talk more about the trouble we create for males from infancy forward when we look at empathy and child development in Chapter 9.)
Another group of people who are tragically and unfairly excluded from the empathic community are people on the autism spectrum, whom I and others7 have identified as hyperempathic rather than unempathic. In some areas of empathy research, the multiple hypersensitivities that many autistic people experience are not clearly understood, which has led to the mistaken assumption that because many autistic people have difficulty deciphering social cues, they must therefore lack the capacity for empathy. (When I describe people as autistic, I’m using “identity first” language very intentionally; please see the endnote.) This deeply unempathic assumption creates continual misery for autistic people, such that many otherwise caring people will blithely refer to autistics as being cold and incapable of meaningful relationships or even love.8 This is not only thoroughly and demonstrably wrong, but it’s also insensitive, discriminatory, and ableist.9 It also has terrible effects on the way autistic people are viewed, taught, portrayed, and treated in the larger community. Some researchers in the area of autism are becoming more awake to the humanity and dignity of autistic people, but there’s still a very, very long way to go.
In our work as empaths, however, we’ll enthusiastically welcome autistic people as fellow empaths—and often hyperempaths—who have unique sensitivities and immeasurable capacities for deep relationships, social interactions, and love. Let’s state this right out loud: autistic people have all the human emotions—autistics can feel and understand all emotions, autistics have empathy, autistics can display empathy, and autistic people are natural empaths.
The deeply mistaken exclusion of boys, men, and autistic people from the world of fully realized empathy tells us that the study of empathy is a very active and tumultuous (and, in some cases, very backward) undertaking. Clearly, the story of empathy is still being written.
There is yet another category of humans who are excluded from the realm of empathy; these people are variously called psychopaths, sociopaths (though this term is considered dated), narcissists, borderlines, or antisocial personalities. There is a great deal of interplay among these definitions, and diagnostic criteria shift (as do the diagnostic titles). However, each condition includes assumptions of a pathological lack of empathy. As a survivor of predatory abuse (I’ll explain what I mean by that, gently, at the end of this chapter), I’ve had a lifelong interest in the dark side of human nature: of criminals and victims, abusers and manipulators, and our many shifting conceptualizations of human evil. Right now, one approach is to attribute all human evil to a lack of empathy, but I find that explanation to be too pat and too simplistic. I’m also very concerned sociopolitically about the fact that early research on psychopathy was conducted on imprisoned people, who are a socially created category rather than a truly different type of person.10 Although there are certainly people who victimize others intentionally, attributing this abusive and predatory tendency merely to a lack of empathy displays an incomplete understanding of empathy, emotions, the nature of conflict, a sociologically grounded approach to crime and social control methods, and the many ways in which empathy development in early childhood can go awry.11
As we move into a deeper study of empathy, beginning with a short history of the concept, we’ll revisit abusers and predatory people not as ominously inhuman specimens with terrifying empathy deficits, but rather in a more empathic way altogether.
A SHORT HISTORY OF EMPATHY
Empathy and compassion have a long history in spiritual traditions. In Judaism, God is called the father of compassion, and in Islam, chief among Allah’s attributes are mercy and compassion. In Christianity, Jesus had such compassion and empathy that he chose to be crucified in order to take the pains of the world into his body and cleanse humanity of its sins. In Buddhism, the bodhisattva is an enlightened being who, in boundless compassion and empathy, forgoes Nirvana until all beings have achieved enlightenment. In Hinduism, daya, or compassion, is one of the three central virtues, and in Jainism, compassion for all life is the central tenet of the faith and of the Jainist dietary tradition of veganism. Compassion and empathy are vital aspects of sacred traditions all across our planet and all throughout recorded history.
Our current Western idea of empathy arises from two places. In English, the word empathy comes from the Greek root pathos, which means “emotion, feeling, suffering, or pity” (it also comes from a German word, as we’ll explore below). The English words empathy and sympathy are used interchangeably to refer to the sharing of or knowledge of emotions, whereas apathy relates to lack of emotions, and antipathy relates to antagonistic emotions. Some sources make a distinction between empathy (the ability to share an emotion viscerally) and sympathy (the ability to understand the emotions of others without actually feeling them yourself ), but this distinction isn’t concrete or stable. In some dictionaries, the definitions of empathy and sympathy are the exact opposite of the ones I just gave you. So, from this point forward, I’ll be folding the contested word sympathy into our larger definition of empathy, and I won’t focus on sympathy as a separate entity in this book.
In the research, these two seemingly separate categories of empathizing have now been renamed as affective (viscerally feeling) empathy and cognitive (objectively understanding) empathy. Although these new terms address the sympathy–empathy confusion very nicely, they create a distinction that is problematic (and we’ll come back to that problem later in this chapter).
I was surprised to learn that the English word empathy was coined in 1909.12 That’s so recent! I was also surprised to learn that the word came into our language as a translation of the German word Einfühlung (pronounced EIN-fhoo-loong), which means “in feeling” or “feeling into” and which first appeared in print in German philosopher Robert Vischer’s 1873 PhD dissertation on aesthetics.13 Vischer used the word to describe both our capacity to enter into a piece of art or literature, to feel the emotions that the artist had intended, and our capacity to imbue a piece of art (or any object) with meaning and emotions. Einfühlung adds a wonderful dimension to empathy because it helps us view empathy not only as our interactional capacity to share emotions with others, but also as our ability to engage emotively with the world around us and with the nuances and intentions underlying art, music, literature, and symbolism. With the concept of Einfühlung, we can easily see that men—great artists, writers, musicians, thinkers, and lovers of aesthetics—are absolutely equal to women in their capacity to interact deeply and empathically with the world. The same is true for people on the autism spectrum.
You may have already noticed that when I explain the act of empathizing, I don’t refer specifically to other people. Instead, I refer to others, because empathizing is not limited to human beings. The concept of Einfühlung really helps us encompass the larger aspects of the empathic experience, and it helps us include animals, art, literature, ideas, and symbols in the category of things we can empathize with. The concept of Einfühlung also helps us clearly identify people on the autism spectrum as empaths14 who, in some cases, focus their intense sensitivities, empathy, and interactional capacities on things other than human beings.
There’s a beautiful documentary from 2010 called Loving Lampposts, which filmmaker Todd Drezner made about his autistic son, Sam. In it, you can use your own Einfühlung capacity to watch Sam interact adoringly and completely with his beloved lampposts—he communicates with them wordlessly, interacts with them, and has full-bodied, aesthetic Einfühlung with those lampposts right in front of your eyes. It’s clear that the lampposts soothe, calm, and ground Sam. Empathy is an active, interactional, and deeply emotional skill, but it is not—and never has been—restricted to human relationships.
The concept of Einfühlung really resonates with my experience (does this mean I’m having Einfühlung about Einfühlung?), because the people I know who are most empathic are often very deeply engaged with the nonhuman world. Nature, animals, art, music, movement and exercise, dance, drama, literature, ideas, concepts, symbolism, science, mathematics, philosophy, and spirituality resonate very profoundly for my fellow empaths—and their empathic abilities help them develop not just talent in their chosen interests, but also intensive relationships with their interests. For an empath, playing music, for instance, is not just a physical act of hitting the right notes in the right order with the right intonation; rather, the musical experience is a fully embodied, fully emotive interaction between the empath and the art form.
We’ll return to this process of empathic embodiment and deep aesthetic engagement throughout this book, because for empaths, these full-bodied, sensual interactions with nonhuman entities can be vital healing activities. In a hectic world filled with the unmet (and often disowned) emotional needs of others, empaths can attain deep relaxation, restoration, and rejuvenation by focusing their full-bodied empathic abilities on art, nature, music, animals, intellectual pursuits, ideas, and interactions with other nonhuman entities. Nearly all current definitions of empathy focus on human interactions, but thankfully, the concept of Einfühlung will help us enormously as we learn how to become healthy and balanced empaths in a human social world that is often stunningly unempathic.
For empaths, interaction is food; it’s oxygen; it’s everything. Yet, if we mistakenly think that empathy can only occur in human relationships (and if we can’t find enough good and deep relationships), then our empathic capacities can wither on the vine. When empathic people can’t find deep and meaningful interactions, they can sometimes feel out of place in the social world. Unseen. Inappropriate. Unwanted. Too much.
If this form of social dislocation has been your experience, there is a cure—you can redirect your empathy toward healthy and delightful nonhuman entities, such as art, music, animals, literature, ideas, movement, dance, tactile activities, gardening, building, mathematics, physics—anything that engages you. A huge part of the art of empathy is to learn to behave empathically toward yourself and to honor your empathic nature, no matter what unempathic or counterempathic shenanigans are occurring in the human social world.
THE SIX ESSENTIAL ASPECTS OF EMPATHY
Empathy is an innate and accessible skill; however, because it operates in the often-hidden interactional world of nuance, gesture, and undercurrent, it can be a somewhat mysterious process. After many decades of helping people balance their empathic skills and increase their emotional awareness, I’ve separated the processes of empathy into six discrete (but interrelated), step-by-step aspects.
I’ve organized empathy in this way for two important reasons. First, I want you to understand empathy as a process that is accessible and malleable (no matter where you currently reside on the empathic continuum). That way, if you have issues with empathy, you’ll be able to zero in on your specific area of concern. Second, I’ll be using these six aspects throughout this book to explain the purpose of the empathic skills and practices I’ll be teaching you and to help you learn how to identify your strengths and challenges (and those of your loved ones). I’ll first quickly define my six aspects of empathy before I move into a deeper examination.
1. Emotion Contagion: Before empathy can take place, you need to sense that an emotion is occurring in another or that an emotion is expected of you. There is currently great debate about how Emotion Contagion occurs and how we realize that emotions are required from us, but it is agreed that the process of empathy depends on our capacity to feel and share emotions. Empathy is first and foremost an emotional skill.
2. Empathic Accuracy:15 This is your ability to accurately identify and understand emotional states, thoughts, and intentions in yourself and others.
3. Emotion Regulation: To be an effective empath, you have to develop the ability to understand, regulate, and work with your own emotions; you have to be self-aware. When you can clearly identify and regulate your own emotions, you’ll tend to be able to function skillfully in the presence of strong emotions (your own and others’), rather than being overtaken or knocked out of commission by them.
4. Perspective Taking: This skill helps you imaginatively put yourself in the place of others, see situations through their eyes, and accurately sense what they might be feeling and thinking so that you can understand what they might want or need.
5. Concern for Others: Empathy helps you connect with others, but the quality of your response depends on your ability to care about others as well. When you feel emotions with others, accurately identify those emotions, regulate them in yourself, and take the perspective of others, your sensitive concern will help you engage with them in a way that displays your care and compassion.
6. Perceptive Engagement: This skill allows you to make perceptive decisions based on your empathy and to respond—or act (if necessary)—in a way that works for others. Perceptive Engagement can be considered the pinnacle of empathic skill, because it combines your capacity to sense and accurately identify the emotions, thoughts, and intentions of others; to regulate your own emotions; to take the perspective of others; to focus on them with care and concern; and then to do something skillful based on your perceptions. Notably, in Perceptive Engagement, you’ll often do something for another that would not work for you at all and that might not even be in your best interests. Perceptive Engagement is about meeting the needs of the other.
These six aspects of empathy build upon one another. Although Emotion Contagion tends to occur instinctively, the rest are more intentional. However, all of these aspects can be developed (or calmed down in the case of hyperempathy) with the empathic skills you’ll learn in this book.
Let’s look at each aspect in a bit more depth.
Emotion Contagion is central to an understanding of empathy, which always includes some form of transmission of emotion from one to another. There is currently a great deal of debate about how this transmission occurs. Is emotion transmitted primarily through the face? Is it moderated through a few specific visual structures in the brain? Is emotion copied in a more intentionally cognitive manner, such that I can only feel an emotion from you if I can understand it in myself? Or is there more to the story?
As I write this book in 2013, a great deal of our capacity to empathize is being attributed to a group of structures in the brain called mirror neurons. These structures are thought to activate movement-related areas in your brain when you view movement in someone else (for instance, if you see someone moving his or her arm, your brain will fire the same neurons you use when you move your own arm). The mirror-neuron hypothesis puts forth the idea that these structures do the same kind of thing in response to emotions—that is, when you see someone feeling happy or sad, for instance, your brain might fire the same neurons that you use when you feel happy or sad.
The hypothesis behind mirror neurons is that they help you empathize because you can actually feel the movement or the emotion of another in your own body—the idea is that you can empathize because you can actually feel like the other person. However, I don’t find this to be a full enough explanation for empathy. Because this hypothesis focuses so much attention on visual cues, I’m concerned that it leaves out a great deal.
Emotion Contagion is so much more than simply mirroring emotion. To accurately pick up on the emotion of another, you also have to understand social contexts and the specific display rules16 of your community. (Each family, community, and culture has a different set of rules about how emotions are displayed, which emotions are accepted, which emotions are denied, and how intensely group members can feel and display some or all emotions.) You also have to be able to identify moods and multiple gradations of emotion, hear vocal tone changes, watch for subtle body-language cues, understand social relationships, and read nuances, undercurrents, and gestural language—you even have to rely upon your sense of smell in many cases (most of us are not consciously aware of the many decisions we make based on our very sensitive noses). There’s a great deal more to this contagion process than mirroring others17—you really have to understand the full context in which the emotion occurs in order to sense which emotion it is. Although this contextual sensitivity is a part of the second aspect of empathy—Empathic Accuracy—it’s important to mention it here. Emotion Contagion can feel completely autonomic, as if it somehow happens to you without your involvement; but it is also something you learn how to do as a social being.18
In the academic realm, there’s a great deal of debate about Emotion Contagion and its relationship to empathy. Some researchers argue that contagion, in and of itself, is not empathic—and, in fact, may be counterempathic. This idea was very surprising to me, because for many years, my definition of an empath was someone who felt the emotions of others strongly in his or her own body. And yet, I have to agree with this new approach. Let’s look at the distinction.
In research performed by German psychologist Doris Bischof-Köhler,19 infants and toddlers were presented with situations in which both the experimenter and the infant played with either teddy bears or spoons. In this study, the experimenter’s teddy or spoon was rigged to break, thus causing the experimenter to act distressed and to cry. Bischof-Köhler carefully watched what happened next. If the child noticed the distress and cried alongside the distressed experimenter, Bischof-Köhler did not consider that response to be empathic. Rather, she called this example of contagion self-centered, because the child merely became wrapped up in his or her own distress. Only when the child offered some form of consolation (patting the experimenter, trying to fix the teddy or the spoon, or offering his or her own teddy or spoon to the distressed experimenter) did Bischof-Köhler consider the child to have developed true empathy.
This action-based definition of empathy is currently contested in empathy research, and some researchers want to roll back the definition to include only Emotion Contagion (in everyday English, the consoling actions that Bischof-Köhler wanted to see in her young subjects would be called compassion rather than empathy). I understand these reservations, because it’s very helpful to make clear separations between the different aspects of empathy. However, for our uses as working empaths, I find this action component of empathy to be extremely important, and it’s something we’ll focus on throughout the rest of this book.
Here’s why: If your experience of empathy is primarily contagion, such that you act as an emotional sponge and become overwhelmed by the emotions of others, you’ll probably be unable to provide much support to them. You’ll be like the children in the experiment who dissolved into the emotion of the experimenter and who could neither soothe themselves nor offer any support. In other words, you’ll shut down. It may also be difficult for you to take the perspective of others if they are a continual source of emotional discomfort for you, and your ability to engage perceptively may therefore be reduced. Too much empathy is just as much trouble as too little. In fact, many workers in healthcare, counseling, emergency response, and criminal justice have to learn to reduce their Emotion Contagion in order to do their work.
If you experience strong contagion, hyperempathy, and emotional sponging that is very uncomfortable for you, you can learn to focus on increasing your ability to identify, understand, and work with your own emotional states and emotions in general (specifically, you can develop your skills in Empathic Accuracy and Emotion Regulation).
Emotions are tools for empaths, and learning to understand them, welcome them, and work with them skillfully is a central empathic activity. However, this empathic understanding is continually impeded in our everyday emotional training, to the extent that many people are afraid of emotions and actually try to avoid them altogether. We’ll look very closely at why people are so afraid of emotions (or so dismissive toward them), because humankind’s nearly universal problems with emotions truly impede empathy. Most of us have been trained to view and approach emotions in a way that makes contagion problematic—not because emotions are problematic in and of themselves, but because our training is so backward and unhelpful. We are actually trained to be emotionally avoidant and therefore empathically unskilled; accordingly, if our Emotion Contagion skills are naturally strong, we may experience a great deal of discomfort simply because we have no idea how to work with the emotions we feel and perceive.
If your current empathic condition is primarily one of uncomfortable contagion, I’ll help you learn to identify and work with emotions as tools so that you can become grounded in and comfortable with them and the other five aspects of empathy. With this empathic emotional grounding, you’ll be able to have a fuller and healthier experience of empathy, instead of being stuck in an uncomfortable and unworkable level of contagion. Conversely, if your current capacity for Emotion Contagion is very low, I’ll teach you a new way to approach emotions and to clearly identify them as reliable responses to very specific situations and stimuli.
Why might your capacity for Emotion Contagion be low? There are many possible reasons, but the ones I’ve seen most often are (1) sensory hyperawareness that is overwhelming and leads a person to turn inward and reduce his or her receptivity as a form of protection (this is true for many people on the autism spectrum); (2) early-childhood experiences with depressed and low-affect caretakers who didn’t give the child enough experience with a full range of emotions (we’ll talk more about this in Chapter 9); and (3) early childhood experiences of (or extended periods of contact with) emotionally explosive or abusive people, such that the person learns to turn away from (or distrust) emotions as a survival tactic.
If you experienced any of these situations, this book will support you in retrieving and rebuilding your empathic capacities in a way that is understandable, accessible, and reliable for you. However, you may also benefit from the support of a trusted counselor or therapist. The capacity to experience the full range of emotions (inside yourself and with others) is your birthright, and you can do a great deal to retrieve this empathic capacity, no matter what kind of obstructions you experienced. And, of course, engaging with your artistic, literary, and philosophical Einfühlung capacities will help you explore emotional and empathic skills in intentional and self-expanding ways. We’ll explore more about the specific healing effects of artistic expression in Chapters 5 and 6.
EMPATHIC ACCURACY
Empathic Accuracy is your empathic capacity to accurately identify emotions, thoughts, and intentions in yourself and others. This is an interior skill, an interactional skill, and an observational skill. The quality of your accuracy depends on your own internal emotional awareness and your capacity for emotional self-regulation.
Emotions are a world unto themselves—I call them a language. In order to learn the language of emotions, it’s important to have a rich emotional vocabulary with plenty of words for differing intensities of emotions. In the Appendix, I provide you with an Emotional Vocabulary List so you can become sensitive to and accurate about differing emotional states. If you know which emotions you or others are feeling and if you can gauge the intensity of those emotions, your empathic work will be much more precise and skillful. But if you don’t know which emotions are occurring or in what intensity, you’ll continually miss important social cues about what people are thinking and feeling and what their intentions are. Emotional awareness and accuracy are crucial to skilled empathy.
It’s also important that you know how to work with each emotion in yourself. If you don’t, your accuracy could be compromised. For instance, you might accurately pick up the emotions or intentions of another through Emotion Contagion, but due to a preexisting problem with your own emotional regulation skills, you might get the entirely wrong idea about what’s going on. For instance, let’s imagine that you have sensed fear in another; however, due to an issue inside yourself, you might intensify that fear into anxiety or panic, and then imagine that you have picked up those emotions instead. Without realizing it, you may incorrectly attribute emotions, thoughts, intentions, and reactions to another based on your own difficulties with and reactions to that emotion (or that intensity of emotion).
The way to gauge your Empathic Accuracy is both very simple and infinitely hard: you ask people if what you’re sensing from them is true. This is simple, because it’s a very easy thing to ask, “Are you feeling (afraid, anxious, angry, sad, happy, ashamed) right now?” Yet it can be infinitely hard because people can be unaware of their own emotional states, embarrassed or confused by emotions, or unwilling to admit to what they’re feeling (worry not—Chapter 8 illustrates a number of ways around this). For empaths, this lack of emotional transparency is a very sticky problem, because even though we’re surrounded by emotions, we tend to grow up without any clear or workable understanding of them. In fact, many of the things we learn about emotions are so backward that it’s amazing we can function at all.
For instance, the idea that there are negative or positive emotions is a completely unempathic and unhelpful fallacy. Our deeply unfortunate tendency to divide emotions into positive and negative categories has dreadful consequences in our everyday lives—many of us focus most of our attention on the supposedly positive emotions of happiness and joy, while ignoring, suppressing, trying to change, or running from the supposedly negative emotions (anger, hatred, fear, anxiety, sadness, grief, envy, jealousy, rage, depression, etc.). This misguided pathologizing of normal emotions actually makes us less able to work with emotions in intelligent ways and creates an empathic capacity that is stilted and incomplete. We’ll look at this and three other serious impediments to emotional awareness in the next chapter.
Luckily, despite the problems in our emotional and empathic training, it’s fairly easy to become more empathically accurate internally, because it’s a simple process of tuning in to your interior life and learning to articulate your different emotional states. This can take a bit of practice if you’ve had bad training in one or more emotional categories (sadly, most of us have bad training in pretty much every emotion except happiness!), but it’s actually fairly easy to become more accurate about your own emotions once you have an empathic understanding of what emotions are and what emotions do.
However, the relationship others have with their own emotions can make accuracy in interactions with them more difficult. In addition, many empathic people grow up without much confidence in their skills, because they’ve been told repeatedly, “I’m not mad! You’re projecting!” Or “We don’t talk about grief in this family.” Or “Why would I be afraid? There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Or “I’m not laughing at you; I’m laughing with you.” Emotional subterfuge, emotional bait-and-switch, emotional squelching, and straight-up emotional dishonesty are common everyday behaviors that can make Empathic Accuracy very hard to master.20
Another impediment to this accuracy is the unfortunate focus that’s been placed on reading facial expressions and body language, as if they provide precise or reliable cues. Simply put, they don’t. Frowns don’t always signal anger, yawns don’t always signal boredom (or fatigue), looking up and away doesn’t always signal lying, looking down doesn’t always signal insecurity, smiles don’t always signal happiness, tears don’t always signal sadness, fidgeting doesn’t always signal nervousness, and crossed arms don’t always signal anger. Faces and bodies are as individual as fingerprints, and though you can generalize about some things in regard to the bodies and faces of others, you can’t really know what a gesture or expression means until you know another person for a while—or unless you ask.
Body language and facial expressions can provide a wonderful entrée into the empathic space of others, and we’ll focus on ways to use these signals in our communication. However, our focus won’t be on discovering secrets people think they’re hiding or on becoming all-powerful body-language experts. Instead, we’ll learn to use body language in a nonthreatening way to open conversations about emotions and empathy. And I mean that literally: “When you curve your body downward and sigh out loud, it seems to me that you’re feeling discouraged, or maybe really tired, or both. Is that what’s going on?” “When you use very short sentences and don’t look at me when you speak, it seems that you’re feeling impatient and frustrated with me. Is that true?” Body language and facial expressions are extremely important, but Empathic Accuracy is built, moment by moment, in empathic interactions. What others mean and what they’re signaling are individual, and the key to understanding those signals cannot be found in a book. Instead, you have to get out and interact, make mistakes, be vulnerable and curious, and be deeply interested in the individual ways that others signal their emotional states.
Empathic Accuracy is developed in interactions—in honest, vulnerable, and curious empathic interactions inside yourself, as you learn to identify your own emotional states, and with others, as you learn the myriad ways that individuals signal their emotions and intentions. In this book, we’ll look at many ways to develop and nurture those kinds of honest, vulnerable interactions.
EMOTION REGULATION
Emotion Regulation is a vitally important aspect of empathy. If you’re good with contagion and you can accurately pick up on, identify, and feel the emotions of others, yet you have no internal capacity to regulate those emotions in yourself (to understand them, work with them, and get some perspective on them so that you can focus on the other person), you won’t be able to empathize perceptively. You’ll just be engulfed in emotional contagion, and you won’t be able to engage or empathize with much skill (or possibly at all).
We’ll explore numerous emotional regulation skills in this book. As an intrinsic aspect of those skills, we’ll explore emotions empathically, so that you’ll be able to approach each emotion as a tool that contains specific gifts and skills. Admittedly, this is a startling approach, because there are extensive problems in our understanding of the emotional realm, such that many people are deeply suspicious of—or even outright afraid of or offended by—actual emotions. But this is not a situation that can go unaddressed.
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.
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 helping23 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 experiment24 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.
In Perceptive Engagement, you listen and watch carefully for what another wants and needs; then, to the extent that you are able, you interact based upon those wants and needs (or, sometimes, you don’t interact at all, if that’s what would work best for the other). Perceptive Engagement is the culmination of the previous five aspects of the empathic process. To engage perceptively, you have to be able to share emotions, accurately identify them, regulate them in yourself, take the perspective of others, be concerned enough to want to engage helpfully, and, finally, engage from an unselfish position of empathic knowledge of the other.
That sounds like an incredibly complicated process, but we’ve all done it since early childhood, and we continue to do it every day—at home, at work, with animals, in e-mails, at the store, when we drive, when we walk down the street, and when we interact with art, literature, and music. We’re in constant empathic contact with each other and with the nonhuman world, and it’s important to remember this. We humans are an actively empathic species, and though our empathy is often problematic, hyperactive, or seemingly absent, empathy is the nonverbal language we all speak fluently.
EMPATHY FOR YOURSELF
Did you notice something missing in my six aspects of empathy? There’s an important factor I didn’t include. You may find this omission rather startling, but hear me out. This missing aspect might be called self-care, self-love, selfempathy, or something along those lines. To be a happy, healthy, and effective empath, you have to take care of yourself first—in essence, you have to be able to put on your own oxygen mask before you help other passengers with theirs. And obviously, developing and nurturing empathy for yourself is what this entire book is about. I want to help you develop self-awareness, self-care, and self-love as central features of your life. These are absolutely vital things.
Yet I have to be honest with you. You can perform effectively as an empath even if you’re self-abandoning and even if you’re filled with self-loathing. Some of the most amazing and hugely empathic social justice workers the world has ever known have been self-abandoning people who were running from the deep trouble in their own souls. Their homes, their love lives, and their family lives were often chaotic or nonexistent (and many of them burned out). The process of empathizing skillfully does not require that you take good care of yourself. Of course, you’ll burn out if you don’t take care of yourself, and your empathic work won’t be social activism as much as it will be martyrdom. But you can empathize pretty effectively, even if you have very little empathy for yourself. In fact, most of us have performed skillful empathy from a self-abandoning position, and many burnt-out empaths have turned away from empathy precisely because it can lead to martyrdom.
This is a central reason that empathy is such a difficult subject—and why it can be in such short supply. To be good with empathy, especially in Perspective Taking, Concern for Others, and Perceptive Engagement, you must have empathy for the other. Empathy is not about you. If you have a healthy inner life, healthy relationships, and clear-eyed emotional awareness, empathy can be fun, engaging, and delightful—especially when it’s not about you. You can learn so much when you empathize, particularly when you empathize with people who are nothing like you. However, if your inner life is unstable, if your childhood was chaotic or traumatic, if your caregivers were inconsistent or neglectful and didn’t support your empathy development, if your personal life isn’t supportive, if your self-care and emotional awareness are negligible, or if your human social interactions are unsatisfying, empathy can drain the lifeblood out of you. But even so, you’ll still be able to empathize, because it’s an innate skill that tends to operate whether or not you ask it to, and it’s a skill we all possess to a greater or lesser degree.
So as you move forward to build skills, awareness, support, and multiple foundations under and around you, know that all of these will make your experience of empathy more rewarding and more fun. But even on your worst day, or even in the worst of circumstances, know that you’re already an empath, and that these six aspects are already a part of your life. What we’re doing in this book is making sure that your innate empathy is a beneficial and workable part of your whole life.
With the foundation of these six aspects of empathy, you can move forward into a deeper engagement with the process of becoming an accurate, emotionally well-regulated, self-aware, self-respecting, perceptive, happy, and healthy empath. And I’m telling you that it’s not only possible to do this but also actually achievable. If you have difficulty getting into sync with others, I’ll teach you simple ways to empathize more gracefully. If you overidentify with others, I’ll show you many different emotional and social awareness tools that will help you create effective boundaries to regulate your own emotions. If your empathy has been more like uncontrolled martyrdom than intentional activism, and even if you developed empathic burnout a long time ago, empathy is an innate feature of human nature and human intelligence, which means you can retrieve it. But this time, you’ll be able to engage with your empathy in a way that will work for you.
Throughout this book, I’ll refer to these six aspects of empathy as we delve into your emotional life, your home life, your communication skills, your work life, and so forth. These six aspects will help you gain a tangible understanding of your empathic abilities so that you can address your specific empathic strengths and challenges.
WHEN ALL SIX ASPECTS ARE CHALLENGED
In Chapter 1, I shared my empathic observation of Joseph and Iris so that you could experience a felt sense of empathy and see the world through a kind of empath-cam. I chose that situation carefully, and most important, I chose the time period carefully, so that you could feel how empathy works for me now. As I wrote in that chapter, it hasn’t always been like this for me. In my childhood, the world of emotions, empathy, and interactions was a very painful place indeed.
When I was a little hyperempathic child, I felt every emotion in every room. I compare myself to a malfunctioning radio, because I picked up all emotional frequencies from every direction—yet I couldn’t home in on specific ones, and it all felt like static. I experienced a constant sense of emotional overload (unless I was alone with one calm human or in the presence of animals), and I felt fundamentally unsafe in the human social world. Being in a crowd, at school, or at a party was excruciating. There was even a joke in my family that parties didn’t really start until little Karla dashed around the house, threw up in response to all the commotion, and had to be put to bed. Yeah, that’s awful! I wish things had been different, but an empath wasn’t even a thing when I was little, so my family gets some leeway for their ignorance and insensitivity. At least they used humor; they could have punished me instead. I’m glad I grew up in a funny ignorant family instead of a cruel ignorant one.
I grew up the fourth of five children in what is a fairly normally dysfunctional family. My mother was a brilliant woman who was not able to go to college; she was also a brilliant painter with five children and an unfortunate perfectionist streak that prevented her from being able to fully live her artistic life. She was a childhood trauma survivor and had trouble with a number of emotions (though she could be an absolute champion in the face of abuse). Mom could be emotionally erratic, but she was not emotionally loud or obvious; her emotions were deeply felt, but they were usually only expressed in undertones. For instance, when she was angry, she never swore or expressed it outright; instead, her body would heat up, and she’d avoid eye contact, or she’d move more quickly and avoid talking about what bothered her. My father was also a brilliant man who wasn’t able to complete college and a wonderful writer who published two children’s books but primarily worked as an insurance adjustor. Dad was emotionally very steady and rather unaffected. He didn’t display most emotions openly, but unlike Mom, he didn’t actually feel them very strongly either. If I had an extreme emotion to deal with, I simply didn’t go to Dad; Mom could help to a certain extent, but Dad seemed entirely perplexed by extreme emotions.
Extreme emotions were a central feature of my childhood, because we lived across the street from a child molester (Empath alert: I will not go into detail; I respect your sensitivity). From the age of about thirty months until I was four years old, I was molested by the dad across the street, who also molested many of the little girls in my neighborhood. Although my childhood was filled with normal kid stuff, it was also filled with extreme fear and anxiety about what would happen next. I learned to rely heavily upon rage and intense (often violent) physical activity to help me deal with what was happening to me, to my little sister (who is sixteen months younger than I am), and to the other little girls in our neighborhood. This ongoing abuse was discovered and stopped when our elder sister (who was twelve at the time) found out and told our parents. The police interviewed us, and we eventually went to the district attorney. But the other girls were too ashamed to talk about what had happened (and their parents were unwilling to believe us), so the case was dropped. After the case was dropped, no one ever spoke openly of the situation again, and we continued to live in a neighborhood filled with toxic secrets for another seven years. The molestation stopped, but things didn’t get much better.
I was an intense kid—fiercely angry, wildly active (I liked to run fast and throw myself off of high things)—and I was filled with a sense of terror that I tried to cover in any way I could. I had a stutter and multiple learning disabilities, and I had so many nightmares that a family friend created a monster catcher for me out of an old radio that he painted and decorated. (I could turn the dial to whatever level of monster I wanted to be protected from, and I always turned it all the way up to eleven!) At that time, my hyperempathy was both a survival tool and a burden. I had learned to ramp up my empathic skills and read my molester’s moods carefully so that I could give him what he wanted and avoid excessive harm (though what he wanted was directly harmful, so my relationship with my own empathy became deeply conflicted and entwined with hazardous levels of self-abandonment). But I couldn’t turn off my intense empathic skills, because I didn’t know how I had turned them on. My hyperempathic skills became involuntary, unmanageable survival mechanisms in a human emotional world that was pretty much incomprehensible to me.
Here’s why: Even when you put aside actual instances of abuse, the following are normal everyday behaviors among humans—lying about our feelings; avoiding sensitive subjects that are glaringly obvious; leaving important words unsaid; pretending to like things we don’t like; pretending we’re not feeling an emotion that we’re clearly feeling; using language to hide, obscure, and skirt crucial issues; attacking people who frighten us without ever realizing we are full of fear (most people think they’re angry when they do this; they’re not); stopping all movement toward change without ever realizing we’re full of anger and grief (most people think they’re being careful when they do this; they are, but they don’t often know why); and claiming that we’re being rational when huge, steamy clouds of emotion are pouring out of us. My experience of human interaction was one of noise, static, emotional absurdity, and continual bewilderment. Humans were emotionally exhausting, and they made me feel confused, afraid, unsafe, angry, and desperately lonely.
Thank goodness, my home and my neighborhood were filled with cats and dogs. They gathered around me and provided safe, emotionally honest relationships in which I could hone my empathy in understandable interactions. My wonderful dog and cat friends never lied about their emotions, and they never confused me about what they were feeling. If they were crabby, they’d growl. If they were afraid, they’d become hyperalert or they’d cower or snap. If they were happy, they’d smile and waggle. If they trusted me, they’d cuddle and give lots of affection. If they were tired, they’d nap. If they were in pain, they’d whine and ask for help or withdraw and get very quiet. There was no lying, no subterfuge, no pretense, no blaming, and no projecting. No animal ever told me that it wasn’t polite to point out an emotion. No animal ever laughed at me for feeling fear or sadness or anger or anything else. No animal ever tried to victimize me. And no animal ever blamed me for things they did to hurt me. Animals were my sanctuary, and they made it possible for me to survive the overwhelming emotional realities of my childhood. When people ask me jokingly, “Were you raised by wolves?” I proudly say, “Yes, house wolves and housecats.”
As I look back at my situation in regard to my six aspects of empathy, I can see that my hyperempathy in childhood consisted of extreme Emotion Contagion and an adult’s level of Empathic Accuracy (about the darkness inside the human soul), combined with no Emotion Regulation to speak of. I used perpetual activity to moderate my intense emotional receptivity, and I used anger and anxiety to create emergency boundaries—either I’d lash out with anger if I felt too emotionally vulnerable, or I’d dash around or fidget anxiously if too much input came at me. Although all of these emergency tactics worked to get me away from people, none of them was very effective in helping me regulate my emotions. As a result, my ability to perform skilled Perspective Taking with humans wasn’t great, unless I was in imminent danger, and my Concern for Others (and myself) was often negligible. People were overwhelming for me, and I really didn’t have the internal resources or the interest to offer any sort of Perceptive Engagement. I often just raged or ran—or both.
If you were to observe me as a child, you would never have thought, “Say, there goes a very empathic child!” No, you would have thought that I didn’t care about people at all and that I was a little hellion to boot. In a different family, my arc as an empath might have turned out very badly indeed, but my mother (with the help of that wonderful neurologist I wrote about in Chapter 1) protected me from a lot of people who wanted to punish and control me. To the extent that she could, she provided a safe place for me to grow up. Mom identified my hypersensitivities as what she termed plus disabilities, and she did what she could to surround me with love, music, art, animals, books, laughter, physical activity, and lots of freedom.
I contrast the scene that I wrote for you about Joseph and Iris to so many scenes in my childhood, in which my social, emotional, and empathic awareness was excruciatingly difficult for me to tolerate, moderate, organize, or even comprehend. With Joseph and Iris, I chose a scene in which the emotional situations were rather delicate and large, obvious actions weren’t required from me. I also chose that scene to give you a sense of all six aspects of empathy working together for me now, in a way that’s comfortable, understandable, manageable, and accessible to my conscious awareness.
AN EMPATH IS SOMEONE WHO IS AWARE
I’m going to return to my definition of an empath, but this time I’ll emphasize my sentence a bit differently:
An empath is someone who is aware that he or she reads emotions, nuances, subtexts, undercurrents, intentions, thoughts, social space, interactions, relational behaviors, body language, and gestural language to a greater degree than is deemed normal.
As a little girl, I wasn’t aware of what I was reading or why; I wasn’t aware that I could perceive things others couldn’t or that my abilities were greater than normal. I was just struggling to keep my head above water as wave after wave of emotions and social information hit me full force, while other people stood by, comfortable, seemingly uncomprehending, and more upset by my behavior than by the truckloads of emotions careening all over the joint. What? Until I gained awareness of what an empath was, I really wasn’t able to make heads or tails of the human world.
It took me about a decade to discover a preliminary definition for empath (from an episode of the original Star Trek TV show,25 of all places), and it took about another five years to get on top of my hypersensitivity and hyper-reactivity. I’ve spent my life since then studying emotions and social interactions empathically, helping hyperempathic people learn how to work with their sensitivities, and helping fellow trauma survivors heal. I also wrote an entire book on reframing emotions empathically (The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You) to help people at every level of empathic ability learn how to work with emotions skillfully and how to view emotions as absolutely essential aspects of cognition and social functioning.
I’ve told you my story so that you’ll know there’s hope for you if you’re a hyperempath, no matter what kind of early training you had. There’s also hope for you if you’ve experienced empathic burnout. And there’s hope for you if your current level of empathic awareness is pretty low. The empathic world of emotions and interactions is a hidden world, but it’s a tangible, knowable, and marvelous world that babies as young as eighteen months can access. You can access it, too.
I’m glad you’re willing to do so, because we need more healthy empaths in this world. Empathy and the extensive sociability it makes possible helped early bands of hairless, clawless, small-toothed hominids become the dominant mammalian species on Earth. Now that we’ve reached a population of approximately seven billion souls with wildly differing notions of what’s true and what’s important, empathy has become a crucial element in helping us learn how to live with one another. Empathy is what made us such a successful species in the first place, and now, empathy is what will help us address our many conflicts so that we can survive and flourish.