An Empath’s Guide to Empathy
Developing Your Social and Emotional Intelligence
THE FIRST STEP in the process of becoming a happy and healthy empath is to realize that there is such a thing as an empath. You can now check off that step! Bing. Easy, right? The second step is to separate empathy into manageable pieces. Bing—we did that by identifying empathy’s six essential aspects. Your next steps are to gather specific skills and create a series of supports around yourself so you can become more able to identify and effectively address what you’re picking up (or what you’re missing, if your empathy levels are currently low). That’s what this book is for.
From this point forward, we’ll work from the inside out. We’ll start by creating a supportive structure of self-care and mindfulness skills so that you can work with your empathic sensitivity (or relative insensitivity) in new ways. Then we’ll look at ways to bring healthy empathy to yourself, your home, your family and friends, your love relationships, your communication skills, your work, and your approach to social justice. In essence, we’ll work to create a support structure that can function as a wonderful container—a terrarium, perhaps—for your sensitive self: a container, a framework, and a clear-eyed standpoint from which you can become a comfortable, happy, and healthy empath.
Before you learn these specific skills (in Chapter 5), I’ll introduce some concepts that can make empathy and emotions more comprehensible and more comfortable. The first is Howard Gardner’s concept of multiple intelligences. The second is Richard J. Davidson’s emotional styles framework. And the third is my empathic approach to emotions as tools that contribute specific skills and abilities that help you function in every area of your life—from basic cognition and self-awareness to your most skillful and perceptive empathic interactions.
YOUR SEVEN INTELLIGENCES26
When your empathic abilities are strong, you tend to get people and animals and their needs in the way some intellectual geniuses get mathematics or physics or in the way artistic geniuses get color, shape, and perspective. Empathy is one of the multiple kinds of intelligence we humans have. However, many of us grew up in a world in which there was not any idea about multiple intelligences. It was only in 1983 that Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences became known. Gardner identified more than just the logical intelligence that most people focused on at the time—which is the intelligence that allows us to do math and science, identify patterns, and use logic and deductive reasoning. Logical intelligence is the form that can most easily be measured on an IQ test; for decades, it was the only aptitude that was openly called intelligence.
Gardner saw intelligence differently, and he eventually put a name to many other forms of intelligence in addition to logical intelligence. It’s important to point out that some educators and researchers have strong criticisms of the implications of Gardner’s work. However, I’m not proposing any sort of teaching style or any reframing of IQ tests here. Instead, I’m using Gardner’s work to explore the idea of intelligence as a larger, more full-bodied constellation of talents and abilities than the merely logical one that many of us grew up with (and which is still the basis for formal designations of IQ). I’m also focusing on Gardner’s unique approach to social and emotional awareness as a distinct form of intelligence.
Gardner identified many areas of skill, talent, and ability beyond the logical, mathematical, and reasoning capacities that are the focus of most IQ tests. (Note: I’m not including every form of intelligence Gardner identified, because his categories are still in flux.) In Gardner’s framework, four of these extra intelligences are linguistic intelligence, which enables you to write, communicate, and learn languages skillfully; musical intelligence, which enables you to identify tone/pitch/rhythm, appreciate music, compose it, and perform musically; bodily–kinesthetic intelligence, which enables you to use your body with great skill (think of dancers, athletes, and gymnasts); and spatial intelligence, or the ability to recognize patterns in space and to use space in novel ways. Architects, builders, sculptors, geometricians, and most visual artists would be high in spatial intelligence.
The other two intelligences Gardner identified are interpersonal intelligence, which allows you to understand the intentions, motivations, and desires of others, and intrapersonal intelligence, which gives you the ability to understand your own motivations, intentions, and desires. These last two are incredibly important forms of intelligence that help you pilot through the social world. Because empathy is first and foremost an emotional skill, it’s important to focus on these interpersonal and intrapersonal areas of intelligence if you want to understand and develop your empathic skills.
With the ground of Gardner’s work to stand on, we can refer to intelligence as a rich constellation of talents, abilities, and traits and not simply those skills you use on IQ tests. However, here’s the problem for empaths: When most of us were growing up, the only kinds of intelligence that mattered were the logical and spatial kinds on those IQ tests. Even today, social and emotional intelligence are not considered true aspects of intelligence, except in Gardner’s work. Maybe our musical and artistic intelligences were accessed in school, and probably our bodily, sports-focused abilities were too, but P.E. and art were probably not an equal focus of our school day. When I went to school, P.E. and art were not seen as essential to learning, and now, with all the budgetary problems and the testing focus facing schools, P.E. and art are even less likely to be a large part of the school day. Therefore, schools don’t tend to access the full richness of our many different kinds of intelligence.
However, it is important to note that our interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences are not a part of our formal schooling at all. I think I took a citizenship class once, but I can’t really remember it. What I do remember, in school and out of it, is that behavioral and social skills were often taught on the fly. We learned how to act by watching others or by being praised or shamed, but there wasn’t any actual instruction. No one said, “Here’s what anger does, and here’s how it’s different from fear and sadness.” No one said, “When other people are feeling these specific emotions, here are some ideas for how to respond.” No one explained complex social behaviors to us: “Watch how that tall girl drops her body when she’s around boys; it looks as if she’s trying to project a version of femininity that is actually detrimental to who she is as a person.” Or, “Look at that gang of boys; it looks as if they’re not dangerous, because their body language is loose, and they’re making nonthreatening eye contact with out-group members. They’re probably a friendly gang and not a mean gang.” (These days, however, now that bullying has become such a problem in schools, some social skills courses, conflict-mediation workshops, and empathy curricula are being offered in schools.)
We learned how to work with emotions and how to understand people through osmosis or on the fly or by the seat of our pants. We didn’t receive direct instruction about our relationships or our emotions, unless we made some huge social mistake, such as openly displaying unwanted emotions or unwittingly trampling over someone’s obvious social cues. We were taught reading, writing, math, and perhaps languages; we were taught science, history, and P.E.; and some of us were taught art and music. But in regard to our emotions, our interpersonal skills, our intrapersonal skills, and our empathic skills, we were just supposed to figure it all out somehow.
As children, we were expected to come into school with our interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences already fully matured. We were expected to have our emotions, our social awareness, and our understanding of others under our belts already. We got demerits or gold stars for our behavior, but we didn’t learn how to identify our emotions or work with them skillfully in ourselves and others. So if we were angry or sad or afraid at school, we had to keep it hidden or risk being made the center of attention. If we openly cried or expressed our angers or envies, we were often sent to the principal or the school counselor, or we’d go to detention or stay after school. Our emotions would take us out of the normal school day, out of the classroom, and out of the way. If we acted out our fear or our sadness, other kids might see us as weaklings and make us targets, or we might become the teacher’s pet, which is often the same thing as being a target. Other kids would learn, “Don’t express most emotions, or you’ll be isolated, punished, or publicly shamed.”
What I saw growing up—and what I still see—is that we’re asked to grow to maturity while keeping two of the most important aspects of our intelligence—our intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences—under wraps, in the shadows, out of the way, and off the radar. As adults, we tend to need therapists, counselors, and psychiatrists to help us access not only our emotions, but also these two intelligences, even though they belong to us and are essential to pretty much everything we do. It’s not surprising, then, that we don’t know what emotions are or what they do. It’s also not surprising that we’re left to figure out emotions for ourselves. And it’s not surprising that empathy, which is first and foremost an emotional skill, is such a difficult thing for so many of us to figure out.
Gardner’s multiple intelligences give us an excellent foundation for focusing on the intelligence that’s inherent in emotional awareness and social skills, but I also want to add another model, which I discovered more recently. In neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson’s work on emotional styles, I found something wonderful—Davidson’s assertion that even if your emotional or social training has been poor, many aspects of your emotional and social functioning remain malleable and flexible throughout your lifetime. With proper support, awareness, and retraining, you can modify your social and emotional skills, become more empathically aware, and actually change the way your brain responds to the world.
YOUR EMOTIONAL STYLE
In his book, The Emotional Life of Your Brain, neuroscientist and professor of psychology and psychiatry Richard Davidson (with science writer Sharon Begley) identified six dimensions of personality and behavior that can be linked to specific neurological processes. Davidson’s work is captivating to me because he moves away from the old psychological and pop-psych personality models (which I find very limiting and dubious) and instead describes human temperament in terms of six dimensions that exist in each of us at differing levels and that can be observed in the brain.
These six dimensions are very useful, not only because they’re based on actual neurological processes, but also because, in most cases, there’s something you can do about them. In many personality typing models, you’re just one kind of person, and that’s where you stay. You’re an introvert or an extrovert; you’re rational or intuitive; you’re a 9 or a 2 on the enneagram; you’re a Scorpio or a Taurus; you’re a highly sensitive person, or you’re not. I realize that the entire point of personality typing is to separate people into categories, and in some stages of personal growth and awareness, these categories can be very helpful ways to identify yourself and others. They can even be avenues to understanding and empathizing with people. However, I eventually tired of them, and I now find them to be restrictive rather than liberating. I speak to you as a person whose mother was an astrologer, who was once interested in Myers Briggs personality types, who once thought of herself as a highly sensitive person, and who spent a great many years looking at all sorts of ways to categorize and separate people into types, elements, or archetypes. It’s a thing we do—typing and categorizing and labeling people, sometimes as a path to empathy, but other times as a way to reduce our empathy for those people (whoever they are). At this point in my life, however, I’m no longer interested in personality typing, and I prefer to experience people as unique and unrepeatable beings, because honestly, there are only two types of people: those who separate people into types, and those who don’t. That’s a joke—but not really.
As I searched for a supportive framework to add to Gardner’s theory about multiple kinds of intelligence, I read through and discarded dozens of models, because each focused on personality types, polar opposites (where you’re one thing or the other, but never all things), and behaviors or temperaments that were written in stone. These models didn’t have the necessary fluidity to take into account the uniqueness of every person and the often-startling ways that people can change over the course of their lives. Davidson’s work was a wonderful surprise, because it is grounded not only in neuroscience and actual research but also in the understanding that people can and do change. It’s also wonderful to see the nuance Davidson brings to his six dimensions, because he doesn’t support polarization—that is, he doesn’t suggest that being all the way to one end of any of these dimensions is preferred. Instead, he suggests that moderation in all of these dimensions is a really good idea. So, even though he’s created a categorization model, it doesn’t put people into straitjackets. Wonderful!
These are Davidson’s six dimensions of emotional style:
Resilience is your capacity to recover from setbacks. In this dimension, perhaps you bounce back easily, or perhaps you take a long time to regain your equilibrium. In the dimension of Resilience, Davidson identifies people as fast to recover or slow to recover, and he offers skills to help people balance their recovery rates, because, depending on the situation, both fast and slow recovery rates can be either useful or problematic. If you recover too slowly, you can remain uncomfortably engaged in difficult situations for extended periods of time, but if you recover too quickly, you can speed right past situations that could help you develop better emotional and empathic awareness. This dimension is connected to your capacity for Emotion Contagion, Empathic Accuracy, Emotion Regulation, and Perspective Taking in our empathic frame.
Outlook is your overall approach to life, which Davidson identifies on a continuum from positive to negative. In my empathic approach to emotions, I explore the problem of using terms like positive and negative in regard to emotions. All emotions are necessary, and relegating specific emotions to the dustbin of alleged negativity can create a great deal of trouble. However, Davidson points out that a negative outlook can be very useful and purposeful in some situations, whereas an unrelentingly positive outlook can be completely inappropriate and dysfunctional—that is, overly positive people can have problems with planning, learning from mistakes, and delaying gratification. Davidson also has some helpful suggestions for creating appropriate balance in your outlook. The Outlook dimension is connected to your Empathic Accuracy and Emotion Regulation.
Social Intuition is your ability to read people and the signals they send. This dimension relates to a combination of Emotion Contagion, Empathic Accuracy, and Perspective Taking. It asks: How well can you decipher the signals you receive? Davidson measures this skill on a continuum from socially intuitive to puzzled. Although you’d think that being all the way to the socially intuitive end would be great, Davidson points out that, as many of us know, being hyperempathic can be too stimulating and overwhelming. He suggests ways to work toward balance in this dimension. For socially puzzled people, for example, Davidson suggests studying people, interactions, and faces intently in order to develop better Emotion Contagion, Empathic Accuracy, and Perspective Taking.
Self-awareness is your internal, intrapersonal capacity to identify your own emotions, sensations, and inner thoughts. In our frame, your capacity for Emotion Regulation and your ability to identify Emotion Contagion correctly through Empathic Accuracy exist in this area. Davidson measures this dimension on a continuum from self-aware to self-opaque, the latter of which means that your inner self is pretty mysterious to you. Again, though you might think that being on the self-aware end of the spectrum is the golden position, being too aware of what’s going on inside you—your heart rate, your pain sensitivity, your digestion, your transitory emotional states, your temperature, your hormonal shifts—can be exhausting! Balance in this dimension is crucial to your ability to focus on others, rather than being uncomfortably hyperfocused on yourself.
Sensitivity to Context is your capacity to understand the usually unspoken and hidden rules of social interaction so that you can respond in a socially sensitive way. This skill is very dependent on all six aspects of your empathic capacity, and it’s a skill I illustrated very intentionally in the empath-cam scene with Joseph and Iris. Almost none of the social rules or signals that Joseph or Iris displayed were openly discussed; instead, their signals primarily existed in undercurrent, subtext, gestural language, and nuance. Reading those signals required Joseph, Iris, and me to have strong Sensitivity to Context. Davidson identifies this skill on a continuum from tuned in to tuned out. I would characterize both Joseph and Iris as being on the tuned-in side of this continuum. However, as all of us know, the skill of tuning out context is invaluable when we’re surrounded by conversations we shouldn’t hear, conflicts we don’t want to be a part of, and people we don’t want to interact with. Davidson also suggests that being too tuned in can mean that people might lose their own sense of self in deference to the multiple inputs that are a part of each social context they encounter.
Attention is your capacity to focus yourself or to screen out unrelated emotional, social, or sensory input. In this dimension, Davidson has identified a continuum that ranges from focused to unfocused. He discusses ways to reduce hyperfocus and to increase focusing capacity in people who are unfocused.
These six dimensions of emotional style are malleable—some more so than others. Davidson explains each in terms of the neurological structures that underlie each dimension. He also makes specific suggestions for how to manage, reduce, increase, or temper each dimension so that you can live more comfortably. (See Appendix B for a description of Davidson’s suggestions.) Davidson’s focus is primarily on Buddhist meditation practices (he developed his theory of the six dimensions after performing extensive functional magnetic resonance imaging observations on mindfulness meditators); on cognitive behavioral therapy; and, in some cases where change isn’t currently possible, on creating environments in which specific emotional styles can be accommodated rather than changed.
Davidson’s work is theoretical. Although he has more raw data to back up his six dimensions of emotional styles than Gardner has to back up his multiple intelligences, I want to be clear that Davidson is working in a new area and is bringing a very specific frame to his observations. Because this work is new, it can and will change over the next few decades. I’m including it not as a concrete set of facts, but as a useful set of ideas and approaches.
I’m drawn to the emotional styles frame, as well as to Davidson’s assertion that the brain can change and that people can modify ingrained patterns, because I’ve experienced this change myself—and I’ve helped many other people experience it. I didn’t have Davidson’s framework underneath me as I struggled to become more resilient; to ground my outlook in the present, rather than on the horrors of my past; to balance my extreme Social Intuition, Sensitivity to Context, and Self-awareness; and to manage my ADHD-like lack of focus, which I combined with hyperfocus when it suited me. In my work as an empathic healer, however, I created mindfulness practices to address each dimension (you’ll learn these practices in Chapter 5), and I’ve watched thousands of people use these practices to make significant and lasting changes in their social, emotional, and internal functioning.
It is vitally important to realize something as you move deeper into the art of empathy: you can change. If your empathy is way off the charts, to the extent that it’s making you miserable, you can modify and work with it intentionally, and you can change. If your capacity for empathy is currently low or if you hit empathic burnout quite a while ago, you can address your areas of difficulty (now that we have these frameworks), and you can change. And if your experience of your own or others’ emotions is very uncomfortable, you can approach emotions in new ways so that you can access their wisdom and their gifts, and you can change.
EMPATHIC MINDFULNESS MEDITATIONS FOR KINETIC SCULPTURES
I want to make these next points carefully and with respect to people whose neurology and physiology are different from mine: Davidson’s approach, which I outline in Appendix B, relies in most cases upon various stillness meditation practices. These forms of meditation are very helpful for many people; however, they don’t work for everybody. In my particular case, they actually make things worse. My mother became a yoga teacher when I was ten years old, so I was introduced to stillness meditations very early, but sitting was never my path. I’m a kinetic sculpture, and I learn through movement. Extended imposed stillness is not supportive for me. Specific kinds of meditations work for specific people, and they don’t work for others. For instance, people with anxiety disorders may experience increased anxiety and even panic attacks during stillness meditations.27 If stillness practices work wonders for you, then by all means, keep doing them. Just know that there are other ways to achieve similar outcomes.
The simple empathic mindfulness techniques I developed more than three decades ago were my way to achieve the kind of grounded focus, integration, and relaxation (in real life and in everyday situations) that people seek in extended stillness practices. Many very empathic people often do not have the time to sit on a cushion or wait for a long meditative retreat when situations become intense. Instead, empaths and sensitive people need to work on their feet in each moment to understand, reframe, ground, refocus, respond to, and shift their perspectives. I find that I need to be able to access my inner resources and my mindfulness immediately, and that’s what these empathic mindfulness skills allow me to do.
This book contains many empathic mindfulness techniques that you can use in the moment, on the fly, with your eyes open, and with your thoughts and emotions fully engaged. I certainly want you to read Davidson’s book, and if his forms of meditation and therapy work for you and your body, then by all means, focus on those. But I also want you to know that there are many ways to become more mindful. If you’re an emotionally aware kinetic sculpture who simply doesn’t respond to stillness meditations, that’s cool. I’ve got your back.
Now that we’ve looked at the working theories of Howard Gardner and Richard Davidson, I’d like to introduce you to my empathic theory of emotions. Since empathy is first and foremost an emotional skill, let’s look empathically at the exquisite world of emotions themselves. And let’s add a new category of genius to the kinds of intelligences we can have.
DEVELOPING EMOTIONAL GENIUS
Understanding emotions has been a lifelong process for me. From my early days as an emotionally inundated hyperempath, I struggled to make sense of my own intense emotions and of the intense and confusing emotions that ruled my neighborhood after the case against my neighbor was dropped. With the help of my wonderful animal friends, I found a place to explore emotions in safety—out on the lawn with my cat and dog friends, I could relax and think aloud about what I saw in the land of emotions. For instance, I watched anger in people who expressed it as rage, and I studied what they were trying to accomplish. I also watched people, like my mother, who were never openly angry; I contrasted their behavior with the behavior of the rage-filled people I knew. How did life work for them? What did their anger do for them? What did it prevent them from doing?
I watched people who expressed lots of fear and anxiety and contrasted them with people like my father, who never seemed to feel much of either emotion. I studied how people lived and the things they were able to accomplish in their relationship with these emotions. I also watched neighbors who were seemingly always depressed, and I contrasted them with people who always seemed to be upbeat. I studied how people’s lives worked or didn’t work in relationship to depression and happiness. For me, emotions were the most interesting parts of human nature; but in this special area of interest, I was pretty much alone.
People never seemed to want to talk about emotions at all. It was almost as if they were ashamed of emotions and couldn’t bear to hear anything about them. This was very strange to me, and it took me almost two decades to acquire a functional, empathic understanding of emotions and their purpose—not because it takes decades to understand emotions, but because our ways of approaching, thinking about, and dealing with emotions are so backward and unhelpful. Even today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, people who come across my work are startled by the absolute newness of it (it is still the only work anywhere that covers all of the emotions in terms of what they do and how to work with them) and by the absolute “Well, duh!” aspect of what anyone should have known.
Emotions were not well understood when I was young. Although a great deal of work is now being done in emotion research, emotions are still an area of massive confusion in numerous academic fields. If you’d like to read about the process that I underwent in my quest to understand emotions empathically, my book The Language of Emotions is a chronicle of that decades-long work. In this book, however, we’ll move forward without too much preamble, except for an introduction to the most helpful definition of emotions that I’ve found so far, plus a discussion of four key problems that lead directly to emotional confusion.
ACTION-REQUIRING NEUROLOGICAL PROGRAMS
In his work as a neuroscientist of emotion, Antonio Damasio has been able to study people who have lost their ability to feel some or all emotions. If you have been trained to think of emotions as mostly problematic, you might think of these people as lucky. Many of us imagine that without emotions, people would be completely rational, like a computer or like the hyperlogical and seemingly unemotional Star Trek character Mr. Spock. However, nothing could be further from the truth. What Damasio discovered as he worked with many emotion-impaired patients throughout his career is that each emotion has a specific role in the maintenance of essential social and cognitive functions. If you take emotions away from people, they don’t become smarter; instead, they become less able to function independently, they lose many of their interactional skills, and they often require direct assistance to care for and protect themselves.
For instance, Damasio wrote about a male patient28 with brain damage that severely impaired his emotions. Although this patient was still able to think, speak, and drive, he had a fascinating inability to make simple decisions. Damasio described giving this patient two possible dates for an upcoming appointment and then watching in frustration-tinged fascination as the man spent nearly thirty minutes listing all of the possible differences between the two appointment dates (weather, driving conditions, other appointments—he was exhaustive). Finally, Damasio spoke up and suggested one of the two dates. The man agreed willingly and easily—nothing in his meticulous list seemed to matter to him in the least—and then he left.
This patient’s logical, linguistic, and sequencing abilities were intact. His memory was intact. He could easily orient to day and time. But he couldn’t make any decisions about his preferences, and he couldn’t respond appropriately to the boredom and hurry-up signals Damasio was sending. He was as smart and as logical as anyone needs to be, but without his emotions, he couldn’t make decisions. Damasio eventually realized that decision making is the emotional process of attaching value and meaning to data. This patient knew all of the facts, but he didn’t know how he felt about any of them, and he was unable to make even a simple decision without assistance. Emotions are intimately involved in our cognitive processes, and without them, facts just pile on top of each other without meaning or value. Emotions help us understand what’s important and what isn’t, and they help us attend empathically to the signals and needs of others.
Even the allegedly “negative” emotions are intrinsic to our functioning—even shame, even fear. Damasio wrote about another patient,29 a young woman who had a head trauma in early childhood that interfered with her ability to feel shame, guilt, or embarrassment. Although you might think that this would be a wonderfully freeing state, it was a disaster. Without the ability to feel ashamed or embarrassed, this young woman was a social hurricane, unable (and unwilling) to behave in ways that worked for others and, eventually, for herself. She was insensitive, unapologetic, unreliable, self-endangering, other-endangering, and so disruptive that she landed in multiple treatment facilities as a teen. Eventually, as a young adult, she had to be conserved because she was so socially disabled. She was intelligent, she came from a good family, and she had plenty of therapy and support. But without her shame, guilt, and embarrassment, she couldn’t function socially, feel concern, empathize effectively, maintain relationships, complete schooling, keep a job, amend her behaviors, apologize for her misdeeds, or live independently. Without her shame, she couldn’t live as a fully functional member of the social world.
Damasio wrote of another woman30 with a very rare disease that caused calcium deposits to collect in, and essentially disable, her amygdala—a small, almond-shaped region of the brain that’s involved in processing fear. This intelligent woman, an artist and mother, was able to feel and identify all other emotions except fear. She couldn’t even draw a fearful face, though she could draw facial expressions of other emotions. She was a happy, outgoing person who had no social impediments, but she couldn’t tell instinctively whether people or situations were safe. She had to learn the hard way, and she reported that many people she had trusted had gone on to take advantage of her. Without access to her fear, this woman was not completely safe in the world; she didn’t have the instincts or the intuition she needed to identify people and situations that might have harmed her. We’ve been trained to think of fear as a negative emotion, but without it, people are actually quite vulnerable.
Patients like these helped Damasio see through the confusing mists that obscure our understanding of emotions and helped him identify the purpose of emotions. These patients and their disabilities helped Damasio create a working definition for emotions that brings them into clear focus: emotions are action-requiring neurological programs. They’re not positive or negative, glorious or shameful, right or wrong; they’re action-requiring neurological programs.
With this definition in place, we can approach emotions empathically—not as problems to be eradicated, but as action-requiring programs that are essential for the maintenance of our whole and healthy lives. Understanding emotions as action-requiring neurological programs helps us observe them more intelligently and more functionally. Because if an emotion requires an action, the next obvious question is (1) Which action? And then, the question after that is, (2) What happens when I perform that action?
The answers to these questions are (1) The action you perform depends upon which emotion has arisen, and (2) When you perform the correct action, that emotion should recede naturally. This action-requiring approach helps us reframe not just emotions but also the conditions we usually blame on emotions, such as repetitive anxiety or depression, or problems with anger, fear, or envy (and so on). Instead of looking at emotions as problems in and of themselves, we can—with this action-focused approach—become more empathically intelligent about them.
WHICH ACTIONS ARE REQUIRED?
Let’s look a bit more closely at Damasio’s assertion that emotions are action-requiring neurological programs by focusing on the requirements of specific emotions. I’ll go into more detail in the next chapter, but for now, let’s look at five emotions and their related actions (the following is based on an essay that originated on my website31).
Fear requires that you take action to orient to change and novelty or to avoid possible physical hazards. Anger requires that you take action to protect or restore your sense of self or your standpoint (or the selves and standpoints of others, if your anger is related to social justice). Shame requires that you take action to avoid embarrassing or offending yourself or others (if the shame is authentic to you, it’s important to first identify whether the shame has been applied as a control mechanism from the outside). Sadness requires that you take action to let go of something that isn’t working anyway. Grief requires that you actively mourn something or someone that is lost irretrievably. And so forth.
Each emotion represents a unique action-requiring neurological program that, as Damasio explains, has evolved over millions of years to help humans become a successful social species. In the following excerpt from his book Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, my explanations of Damasio’s terms are in brackets:
Emotions are present even in cultures that lack names for the emotions. . . . The universality of emotional expressions reveals the degree to which the emotional action program is unlearned and automated. The execution of the same emotion can vary from occasion to occasion but not enough to make it unrecognizable to the subject or to others. It varies as much as the interpretation of [George] Gershwin’s song Summertime can change with different interpreters or even with the same interpreter on different occasions, yet it is still perfectly identifiable because the general contour of the behavior has been maintained. . . .
The fact that emotions are unlearned, automated, and predictably stable across action programs [emotional responses] betrays their origins in natural selection and in the resulting genomic instructions [human genetic inheritance]. These instructions have been highly conserved across evolution and result in the brain’s being assembled in a particular, dependable way, such that certain neuron circuits can process emotionally competent stimuli [anything that evokes an emotion] and lead emotion-triggering brain regions to construct a full-fledged emotional response.
Emotions and their underlying phenomena are so essential for the maintenance of life and for subsequent maturation of the individual that they are reliably deployed in early development. [All normally developing human infants are born with specific emotions intact, and all develop further emotional responses at dependable stages.] (123–124, emphasis mine )
Emotions are essential for the maintenance of life. That powerful statement stands in stark contrast to what most of us were taught about emotions—even in otherwise supportive meditative practices, in which we’re often taught to disengage from our emotions or to breathe them away as if they are impediments to consciousness. Sadly, in most places you look, many of our emotions are treated as signs of pathology in and of themselves. We’ve received endless instructions about how not to have the allegedly negative ones or how to have the allegedly positive ones all day long. But that’s not helpful, because it teaches us to treat emotions as problems, when they’re actually essential and highly evolved aspects of consciousness, cognition, social skill, empathy, and human nature.
It’s so helpful to understand emotions as action-requiring neurological programs, because it means that you get to decide which action (out of dozens) you want to take. This gives you intentionality and agency in regard to your emotions; you become a person who can act intelligently when your emotions arise, rather than being their puppet or their puppet-master. This concept also lifts away the blotch of pathology that has been smeared onto emotions for so many centuries. Emotions are necessary, evolved, and reliable.
When a snake crosses your path, your fear program starts so that you can orient yourself to change, novelty, and possible hazards. You take action to avoid the snake, or you pick him up gently and get him out of harm’s way, or any number of other responses. Then your fear recedes.
When your brother calls you a jerk, your anger program starts so that you can address challenges to your sense of self and your standpoint. You can take action to repair the damage: you could yell, but that might just start a war; you could ignore the slur, if that’s the best idea; you could lean into the relationship and gently ask him to explain his behavior, if you want to protect his sense of self and move the relationship to a new place; or you could laugh and defuse the intensity. Whichever action you take will complete the program—though fighting back will require a new and stronger anger response that could get you into trouble. (We’ll explore this in the section on repression and expression of emotions in this chapter, and in “How Much Emotion Is Too Much?” in Chapter 4.)
When you move toward a bad habit or you’re about to say something really insensitive, your shame program starts so that you can avoid offending or embarrassing yourself or others (note that this example involves healthy and authentic shame). Shame also brings its own actions—it fills you with heat, flushes your face, and stops you in your tracks, because you’re about to do something potentially injurious. Your job is to check in, think about your next move, and hopefully stop yourself from doing it. If you don’t, your shame program may intensify or other emotions may arise, depending on your relationship to shame. You might start to feel depression, apathy (“I don’t care; I do what I want!”), fear, and so forth. Each emotion has its own action-requiring program, and though there’s a tremendous amount of nuance and individual distinctions in how each of our emotions works and interacts, they are reliable and “perfectly identifiable,” as Damasio states.
FOUR IDEAS THAT ENSURE EMOTIONAL CONFUSION
Damasio’s groundbreaking reframing of emotions as action-requiring neurological programs is wonderfully helpful, but there’s so much trouble in the emotional realm that I want to clear away four ideas that create endless emotional confusion. Before we can empathically explore the specific actions that your emotions require (in Chapter 4), we need to take a look at some commonly accepted ideas that actually prevent you from being able to approach emotions intelligently.
THE PROBLEM WITH VALENCING
Valencing is a way to separate things into specific categories. Emotions are valenced in two ways: they’re categorized as either positive or negative, or they’re framed as either prosocial or antisocial. So, instead of being viewed as a constellation of important, action-requiring programs that are reliable parts of your cognitive abilities, emotions are often separated into categories that have come to mean good versus bad, wanted versus unwanted, or nice versus mean.
Here’s the problem: If you believe that emotions are either positive or negative, you’ll tend to focus on the allegedly positive ones and avoid the allegedly negative ones. As such, you won’t develop a full range of emotional or empathic skills. You might be able to work skillfully with the emotions you identify as positive, but you might be clueless about the ones you identify as negative. Likewise, if you believe that emotions are either prosocial or antisocial, you’ll think that only a few emotions are acceptable in your relationships. Therefore, when supposedly antisocial emotions arise, you may become shocked or destabilized, and you may view yourself and others in ways that actually reduce your social and emotional intelligence. You may think, for instance, that people are trustworthy only when they display emotions that you approve of, but that people who display emotions you don’t like should be shamed, changed, or avoided altogether.
If you valence emotions, you’ll also lose awareness of and access to a great number of the skills your emotions bring to you. If you look at the five emotions I described earlier (fear, anger, shame, sadness, and grief), you’ll notice that they would all be valenced into negative or antisocial categories. They would be typecast as emotions that cause trouble, don’t feel good, and don’t look good to others. However, without them, you would have no instincts or intuition (fear), no capacity to set boundaries or protect your (or others’) standpoint or sense of self (anger), no capacity to manage your behavior (shame), no capacity to let things go when it’s time (sadness), and no capacity to mourn when irretrievable loss has occurred (grief). When any of these emotions are necessary—when any of these actions are required—then each of these emotions is the most positive emotion possible. When any emotion is necessary and appropriate, it’s always positive (if you really need to use that word).
If you had inserted one of the allegedly positive emotions, such as happiness, into the place of these five emotions, you’d see something very negative indeed, because happiness was not required in the situations I described. Happiness is a very specific emotion that arises to help you look forward to the future with delight and amusement, and it’s wonderful! But so are anger, fear, shame, grief, sadness, jealousy, envy, and so forth. All emotions are wonderful and necessary when you need them, and all emotions can be a problem if they arise at the wrong time.
For instance, if you’re at a funeral, happiness is completely inappropriate. You need your grief to help you mourn your losses. At a funeral, grief is the positive and prosocial emotion, and happiness is negative and antisocial. Of course, emotions move and change all the time, and they certainly do so during a funeral, so it’s normal to cry, and then laugh, and then smile, and then cry again. However, pasting an unchangeably happy smile on your face during a funeral is not prosocial.
Or let’s look at fear: if a car is veering directly toward you on the freeway, happiness would probably lead to injury, because you need the lightning-fast instincts and intuitive actions of fear to get yourself to safety. In a situation of immediate physical danger in which fear is required to save your life, happiness is a ridiculous emotion—it’s completely inappropriate.
So instead of valencing emotions into simple-minded either/or categories, the empathic approach is to observe all emotions as reliable and evolutionarily evolved responses that are uniquely appropriate to specific situations. When you stop valencing, you’ll learn to empathically respond to what’s actually going on, and you’ll learn to observe emotions calmly and perceptively, without demonizing them or glorifying them. This calm and unvalenced approach will make your experience of Emotion Contagion infinitely more comfortable, which means that you’ll have an easier time understanding and working with every other aspect of your empathy.
When you can understand emotions as action-requiring neurological programs, you can ask whether each program is appropriate for its situation. If it is, you can support the emotion and take suitable action. If it’s not, you can help yourself or others take a look at why that program got activated or why that emotion is so prominent that it steps into situations where another emotion would be more appropriate. (We’ll explore situations in which emotions are confused or seemingly inappropriate later in this chapter, and in Chapter 4.)
In this empathic approach to emotions, you’ll learn to welcome all of your emotions—and the emotions of others—as valid and legitimate action-requiring aspects of social skills, empathy, and intelligence, because all emotions are necessary. Unvalencing emotions is a crucial first step in addressing Emotion Contagion, increasing your Empathic Accuracy, and gaining extensive Emotion Regulation skills—all of which will help you skillfully perform all six aspects of empathy. Befriending and welcoming your emotions—all of them, valence free—makes becoming a healthy, happy, and intentional empath significantly easier.
THE PROBLEM WITH EXPRESSION AND REPRESSION
When an emotion arises and requires an action, many of us fall into a simple binary world in which we can only express the emotion outwardly or repress it inwardly. It’s as if we have an on/off switch with no middle ground. This situation is almost a form of valencing in itself, in that we’re given two simpleminded choices that actually obscure our intelligence and reduce our options when emotions arise. And of course, this, in turn, reduces our emotional regulation skills and our empathic awareness.
In many instances, expression and repression are fine. If you’re happy, sometimes it’s awesome to express it—Yay! And other times, it’s a really good idea to repress your happiness if it’s not shared (say, when you’re happy that you didn’t get picked for a team at work, but you don’t want to offend everyone). Expression and repression aren’t problems in and of themselves. They’re fine in many instances. They’re only problems when they’re the only choices you have.
For instance, when an intense or socially unacceptable emotion arises and requires an action from you, both expression and repression can be deeply problematic. Let’s say that you’re at a party, and a friend does something deeply offensive in public. Let’s say that he makes a sarcastic joke about your clothing that’s funny but also really cruel. Now, because your self and your standpoint have been offended (and shockingly so), your anger will need to arise, and it will probably be accompanied by some shame and maybe even fear. This is an intensely embarrassing attack that came out of nowhere! If you express your intense anger, you might score some points against your friend, but you might also injure him and come off looking like a jerk yourself—like you’re so uncool that you can’t even take a joke. Also, you might not know how your friend will respond to a counterattack (your shame and fear might have arisen specifically to alert you to this). Your friend could become even meaner, and then the whole evening would be ruined for everyone.
So, if you know that expression can be dangerous, you might take the other option in our restricted either/or scenario. Let’s say you repress your anger and your shame and your fear. You might laugh and pretend not to be offended, or you might make an even uglier joke about your own clothing. Ha-ha, you’re a good sport—you can take a joke! But when you repress an emotion, you interfere with the basic operation of your emotional and neurological functioning. In this instance, your anger arose for a specific reason. It required that you perform a specific action to restore your voice (your capacity to express yourself, your opinions, your ideas, and your morals), your standpoint, and your sense of self. You chose not to, which was probably a good idea, socially speaking, because exploding at your friend might have ruined the party for everyone. But by merely repressing your appropriate anger, you’ve interfered with its natural progression, and because you didn’t perform any appropriate action, your anger will remain activated. You might paste a smile on your face and go get a drink and a snack, but for the rest of the night, you’ll repeat the situation in your head, and you’ll think of what you should have said. Your anger won’t relieve itself; in fact, it might become more intense, your fear might increase, your shame might become hyperactivated, and yow! Repressing your emotions when they’re intense and immediate can really cause trouble inside you.
Luckily, there is another option. There’s a middle path between expression and repression. I call it channeling your emotions—by that, I mean completing the actions your emotions require so that they can recede naturally and gracefully. In the situation above, expression and repression were both problematic. Your anger was very intense, and it was accompanied by two other strong emotions. As we all know, that can be a powder-keg situation. But if you have access to an empathic view of the gifts your emotions contain (these gifts are listed in the next chapter)—if you know anger as the Honorable Sentry and fear as Intuition and Action, and if you know that shame is about Restoring Integrity—then you can take actions with all three of these emotions that are respectful toward yourself, toward your mouthy friend, toward onlookers, and toward your own emotions.
I don’t have a simple, step-by-step process for dealing with the situation above, and I am really suspicious of people who do. Interaction is so incredibly situation specific, and your responses usually need to shift in each second. However, I do have a simple approach, which is this: listen to your emotions and work with each of them empathically, interact with others honestly, and then you’ll know what to do.
If you make a mistake, you can apologize, and then you can try something different. The trick to this isn’t any kind of trick at all: you simply listen to your emotions and pay attention to others and to their responses. This empathic and interactive approach will actually give you untold resources, because your emotions have evolved over millions of years to help you become a socially successful member of an intensely social species. Emotions are millions of years older than spoken language, and simply put, they’re smarter than words, they’re deeper than any technique, and they can help you in ways you cannot imagine (especially if all you’ve ever done with emotions is express or repress them).
So let me put myself into the situation above. Let’s say that my friend said something cruel about my clothing in front of other people. I feel the power of anger filling me, and there is some fear activating me as well—this tells me that, sure, my boundaries have been crossed, but there could also be some hazard here. My shame also arises, and I know that its function is to help me moderate my behavior. I’m pretty good friends with shame, so I listen carefully to its warning. With the power that anger gives me, I stand up a little straighter, I ground myself (we’ll learn this practice in Chapter 5), and I make eye contact with my mouthy friend. I know that I could attack him if I need to, but my fear and shame are warning me: Don’t. There’s further danger here.
I also know that if I don’t say something (if I repress my anger), I’ll be telling all of the people surrounding us that I can be attacked without any repercussions. My shame and fear tell me that this is not a good approach to my social survival, so I ask myself the questions for anger (which are from the list in the next chapter): What must be protected, and what must be restored? Certainly, my fashion sense isn’t that important, but this direct attack cannot go unaddressed. Ignoring this situation would leave me vulnerable, but equally important, it would train my friend to be obnoxious and verbally abusive without consequence, which would severely reduce his social viability. Anger is the Honorable Sentry, and if you channel it honorably, it will protect everyone—not just you.
However, I know from past experience that people who attack others have trouble with their own anger and shame, as well as trouble with their own boundaries. Therefore, one thing that needs to be protected in this situation is my mouthy friend’s already damaged sense of self. Wow, that’s a tremendous amount of social information that my emotions brought to me.
Okay, anger helps me feel empowered and energized, which means I have a third option: I have the strength that I need to be vulnerable without too much danger. I lean over and say something very direct and slightly humorous, but nonthreatening, like, “Whoa, I like your sense of humor, but man, that stings! Why you gotta be like that?” I tell him that I see the fun and that I appreciate him, but that he went too far. When I channel my anger appropriately, I have the strength that I need to say, “Hey, that hurt” in a way that isn’t brutal. I don’t pretend to be invulnerable, because that’s not a position of strength—that’s just a lie. No one is invulnerable.
When I can complete the action my anger requires, which is to reset my boundaries honorably, then my anger will recede naturally. In this situation, my shame will also recede, because I managed my behavior respectfully and acted appropriately to protect my friend and myself from excessive social harm. My fear will recede as well, because I oriented myself effectively in regard to possible dangers and hazards.
Where we go from here is completely individual. My friend might hear me and apologize, and this might set him on a path of wondering why he finds it so easy to be cruel. Or he might escalate and get more pointed, at which time I could identify the new emotions that arise and work with each of them to figure out what the heck to do next. But whatever he decides, we’ll be in a new place, and I’ll have new information about who my friend is in the presence of honesty and vulnerability. By responding empathically to the true emotions that arose, I helped my friend understand exactly who I am and exactly how his behavior affected me. What he does with that information is up to him, but his subsequent behavior will show me true and pertinent things about who he really is.
With anger, the problem of expression (which often damages others) and repression (which often damages us) is a function of how we’ve all been trained to use anger as strength over others instead of strength within ourselves. When emotions have been thrown onto the trash heap of negative and antisocial valencing, we’re almost forced to take a moral stance for or against the emotions instead of learning how to work with them intelligently. This happens with a great many emotions, but it’s most obvious in regard to anger. If anger is about cruelty, then you have to take a moral stand: will you express anger and be cruel when people deserve it, or will you repress all anger and never defend yourself? These simpleminded either/or options flow naturally and tragically from simpleminded either/or valancing and either/or expression and repression.
Had I used only emotional expression of my anger in an attempt to dishonor my friend or had I used only emotional repression to essentially dishonor myself, our interaction would have been very different, and my friend would have learned very different things about me. When I only know how to repress or express my emotions when a difficult or socially uncomfortable emotion arises, people will become acquainted with whatever emotional training I’ve ingested in my life. They won’t meet me as an individual; they won’t meet my true self, my hopes, my dreams, my preferences, my intelligence, my humor, my challenges, and my strengths—no. When my emotional skills are poor, people will meet my emotional reactivity and my problems with whichever emotion has arisen, but they won’t meet me.
In a situation in which I have only two rigid choices about how to work with my emotions, a fully empathic exchange is very unlikely, because I’m not even being empathic with my own emotions. But when I can channel my emotions and interact with more suppleness and authenticity, people can meet and interact with me as a unique individual—and if they feel able to, they can interact in a more authentic and empathic way with me as well. When I can work with my emotions honestly and in diverse ways, empathic exchanges are far more likely, because they’re a natural outgrowth of emotional honesty and availability. Remember that empathy is first and foremost an emotional skill. Empathy is also honed in honest, emotionally awake interactions that help you develop deeper and more accurate empathy for yourself and others.
As I said earlier, emotional expression and repression aren’t bad in and of themselves; they’re actually fine in many situations! When a snake crosses your path, express your fear and jump and yell a little! Or when someone trips on the sidewalk and you think it’s funny, repress your laughter so you won’t hurt the person’s feelings. When you drop your phone, express your shock and anger by swearing. When you feel like crying but you know that the person with you cannot handle it, repress your tears until you’re in a safer place. Expression and repression are excellent options in many instances, but this third path—this middle path of channeling your emotions—gives you infinite options when repression isn’t healthy and expression isn’t wise.
There are, of course, situations in which your emotions will be out of place or strangely repetitive or dysfunctional in some way. We’ll look at those situations in Chapter 4 in the section “How Much Emotion Is Too Much?” As I like to say: Emotions are always true, but they’re not always right. We’ll learn some simple ways to tell the difference between the two. Learning to channel your emotions will help you manage Emotion Contagion and increase your Empathic Accuracy and Emotion Regulation, which will help you in all areas of empathic awareness and engagement.
THE PROBLEM OF NUANCE
Emotions arise in many different intensities and gradations, but our simplistic emotional training doesn’t help us identify or understand emotional nuance. Understanding nuance is a critical part of understanding emotions, but we don’t tend to have much training in it, especially if we’re taught that emotions should be valenced into very rigid categories. For instance, all anger is negative and antisocial; therefore, you should repress and avoid all of it! Or all happiness is positive and prosocial; therefore, you should express happiness all of the time in every possible situation, yay! But emotions don’t work that way. Emotions arise at many different levels of intensity, from the subtlest nuanced attitudes to obvious moods to the most fervent outward expressions. Identifying emotions when they’re at the mood level or the very intense level can be quite easy; however, if you only focus on those two intensities of emotion, you can overlook massive amounts of vital emotional information.
Emotions are action-requiring neurological programs, and, as such, they bring you specific gifts and skills that you can identify, even when you’re not in an obvious mood state. Emotions are intrinsic aspects of your most basic cognitive abilities and your intelligence, and I can tell right away whether you’re good with anger, fear, shame, or a dozen other emotions just by asking questions about your everyday social skills. I even created a short quiz to help people gauge their current relationship with their own emotions.32
Take a look at these eleven questions. Even if you can already identify which emotion-based gifts and skills I’m looking for, try to answer them honestly.
1. I feel heard and respected in my interpersonal relationships.
2. I’m comfortable speaking up for myself, even during conflicts.
3. I tend to remain calm and focused in emergencies.
4. I tend to know when new situations and new relationships are going to work out.
5. I can relax and calm myself, and I have reliable self-soothing skills.
6. I’m able to change my mind when I discover better information and ideas.
7. I have a fairly easy time changing problem behaviors or old habits.
8. When I make a social blunder, I’m able to apologize and correct myself.
9. I’m comfortable talking about my talents and my achievements.
10. I’m good at asking for what I want in regard to money, possessions, and recognition.
11. I have good time-management skills, and I follow through on my plans and commitments.
Questions 1 and 2: The Gifts of Anger. If you don’t understand that emotions can be reliably identified as everyday skills and capacities that underlie your more obvious mood states, you might not even connect questions 1 and 2 to the gifts of anger. These gifts help you set and maintain effective interpersonal boundaries. At its subtlest level, anger helps you uphold mutual respect and keep open the lines of communication in your relationships. Sadly, most of us can only identify anger when it gets to the level of a mood. And since most of us were never taught how to take effective actions with our anger, we don’t know how to access the skills and gifts that anger brings us.
Questions 3 and 4: The Gifts of Fear. If you have no understanding of emotional nuance, you might think that the gifts in questions 3 and 4 relate to being focused and intuitive—and you’d be right. However, you’d miss the fact that those are the gifts of fear, which help you orient effectively to change, novelty, or possible physical hazards. If you and your fear are working nicely together, you’ll calmly and instinctually identify hazards and safety, though you may have no idea that you’re working with fear, because you won’t feel obviously afraid. However, all emotions exist at this subtle gift-and-skill level, and identifying them at this soft and flowing stage makes working with their more intense variations much easier.
Questions 5 and 6: The Gifts of Sadness. These questions may seem to relate to calmness, self-soothing behaviors, and flexibility, but they’re actually the gifts of sadness, which help you identify things that aren’t working so that you can let go and make room for things that do work. It’s interesting to note that all relaxation techniques (and many meditation practices) intentionally evoke the relaxing and softening gifts of sadness, though this is not usually stated or even understood. I laugh when I see heavily valenced, emotionpathologizing relaxation techniques that teach you to breathe away pesky emotions (including sadness) by intentionally relaxing yourself with the gifts of sadness. Ha!
Questions 7 and 8: The Gifts of Shame. These questions may seem to relate to behavioral maturity (and they do), but they’re also the gifts of shame, which help you monitor and modify your behavior. (Note: I make a very strong distinction between guilt and shame, and I don’t actually classify guilt as an emotion at all.33) When your shame is working gracefully, you won’t feel it. For instance, you’ll floss because you like clean teeth (and not because you’ve been shamed into obsessive dental hygiene), you’ll avoid larceny and abusiveness because they don’t feel right (and not because you’ve been shamed or terrorized out of them), and you’ll manage your intense emotions skillfully because you respect the basic human rights of others. As I wrote earlier, many of us have a problematic relationship with shame because it was applied to us as punishment when we were young. However, as we saw in Damasio’s story about the shameless young woman, shame is absolutely crucial for your social viability. Without your shame, you cannot live independently or safely.
If you and your shame do not work well together, the skill called Burning Contracts in Chapter 5 will help you reclaim and return your shame (or any other problematic emotion) to its proper functioning.
Question 9: The Gifts of Contentment. This question may seem to relate to a healthy sense of self-regard, and it does, but it also relates to the gifts of contentment. Contentment is a little bit like happiness, but it brings its own set of gifts to you. Whereas happiness helps you look outward with amusement and delight, contentment helps you turn toward yourself with pride and satisfaction, so you can say, “Hey, good job!” Contentment arises when you’ve worked hard and well, and it relates to your healthy self-image. This means that it has a close connection to your healthy anger and especially to your healthy shame—and I bet you won’t hear that anyplace else, but hear me out.
When you set clear boundaries, behave honorably, and act conscientiously (actions that your healthy anger and shame will help you take), your contentment will arise naturally as a kind of reward—”Good job!” Contentment arises to tell you when you’ve done good work—not only in your accomplishments but also in your treatment of yourself and others. If you attend to your anger and your shame honorably, you’ll naturally feel content and proud of yourself, because you’ll have done good work inside yourself and in relation to the people in your life.
If you don’t work well with your anger and shame, and if your shame is primarily inauthentic and self-tormenting, your contentment might not arise reliably, and your self-regard and self-image might be pretty low. Accordingly, when you have a problem with self-esteem, you’ll often look for ways to increase contentment and happiness first, so that you can feel better about yourself. But it doesn’t work that way, because contentment arises for specific reasons, and you can’t take a shortcut to get there. If you have low self-regard, contentment is probably the emotion you’d like to feel, but working on your boundaries (the gifts of anger) and your behavior (the gifts of shame) will actually help your contentment arise naturally. Interestingly, too much self-esteem and contentment can be problematic and can actually be a factor in bullying. We’ll look more closely at bullying in Chapter 9.
Question 10: The Gifts of Envy. This question may seem to relate to your capacity for self-preservation and financial and social viability—and it does. But these are also the gifts of envy, which help you create and maintain stable connections to security, material and financial resources, and appropriate social recognition. Envy is related to the emotion of jealousy, though the two have distinct differences: envy helps you function effectively in the area of security, resources, and recognition, whereas jealousy helps you create and maintain stable connections to loyalty, mate retention, and love.
Envy and jealousy are possibly the most hated emotions in the entire emotional realm, but they are absolutely crucial to your social survival. As we explore relationship skills in Chapter 7, childhood rivalries in Chapter 9, and workplace relationships in Chapter 10, we’ll look at how healthy envy and healthy jealousy can help you become more effective in your relationships.
Question 11: The Gifts of Anxiety. This question may seem to relate to being a good planner, and it does, because that’s one of the gifts anxiety brings to you. People are often surprised to learn that anxiety contains specific gifts, because anxiety is usually described in terms of disorder or disease. However, at its most subtle gift level, anxiety (which is related to fear) helps you plan for the future and complete important tasks. I call anxiety your procrastination alert system; a bonus with anxiety is that if you’re feeling it, then there’s probably nothing to fear in the present moment. If there’s a problem in your immediate environment, fear will help you orient to change, novelty, or possible hazards. But if you’re feeling anxiety, it relates to the future, and its presence usually means that things in the present moment are pretty stable.
As we all know, anxiety can become problematic if it isn’t attended to, and it can become uncomfortably repetitive. We’ll look at a specific practice for anxiety (Conscious Questioning) in Chapter 5.
All emotions bring you specific gifts, and all emotions exist in a continuum of different intensities. As the questions in my short emotion quiz demonstrate, your emotions actually contribute vital skills that support your basic cognition and social functioning. If you can learn to identify the subtle presentations of your emotions, these skills will be available to you in every waking moment; you won’t have to wait until a mood overtakes you. It’s important to develop an awareness of emotions at many different and subtle levels so that you can become more skilled with these basic tools of social intelligence and empathic awareness.
To help you develop a larger, more nuanced range of emotional awareness, I include the “Emotional Vocabulary List” in Appendix A to give you many vocabulary words for specific emotions at three different levels of intensity. In the list, I refer to the subtle, gift-level presentation of emotions as their soft states. I call their more obvious presentations mood states. When they’re highly activated, I call that their intense states.
To help you understand what I mean, let me put anxiety into the mix and run it through the three states. In its soft state, anxiety simply helps you be aware of what you need to bring for an upcoming trip, for instance. You don’t feel obviously anxious; you’re just connected to anxiety’s capacity to help you prepare yourself for the future and to complete your tasks intelligently.
In its mood state, your anxiety is more insistent. You feel more of a sense of a time crunch, and you might experience intense focus and energy. You might orient toward the future and bring a great deal of laser focus to what you need to do; you might even ignore things in the room that are not related to the tasks you need to complete. You feel more activated in this state, and you might be a bit snappy if anyone gets in your way. This is a very task-oriented emotion, and it has things to do! In this state, you feel a little bit riled up, but not uncomfortably so, and you’re able to identify that you’re working with the gifts of anxiety. In their mood states, your emotions are usually obvious to you and others.
In its intense state, your anxiety is in a kind of feedback loop, which can be initiated by many things. Internally, it could be generated by an increase in adrenaline, cortisol, heart rate, or other physical conditions unrelated to task completion. When you feel those ramped-up intensities, you might think, “Oh, I have a ton of work to do on a tight deadline!!” Externally, this intense level of anxiety could be initiated by a sudden, overwhelmingly close deadline or by a flurry of things that need to be handled but are actually impossible for one person to do. In situations like this, your anxiety might set itself into a tizzy of activation. It might spin out and take you from room to room, completing three tasks badly and four not at all. You might orient so strongly to one thing that you miss other things in the room, and you might trip or walk into a wall. Or your focus might get so overwhelmed that you can’t see or find that check you just put down on the table, dagnabbit!! At this point, Conscious Questioning (in Chapter 5) will be invaluable.
Notice that all three levels of activation involve the exact same emotion—anxiety. But also notice that when we talk about anxiety, we usually only talk about its intense state, and we usually categorize anxiety as a thoroughly negative emotion. That’s understandable, because if you only know anxiety in its intense form, then the act of valencing is actually sort of logical: An emotion that walks you into walls and makes you lose checks is not helpful! It’s negative! But that’s not all that anxiety does, and it’s important to remember that all emotions exist at many different levels of activation and nuance, and all emotions are necessary.
Increasing your emotional vocabulary and extending your emotional awareness to include nuance will help you become more articulate, more knowledgeable, and more empathic about emotions—in yourself and in others. It will also help you increase your Emotion Contagion, Empathic Accuracy, Emotion Regulation, and Perspective Taking skills. Increasing your emotional awareness increases your empathic awareness.
THE PROBLEM OF QUANTITY
Emotions don’t arise one at a time in a kind of military precision. Instead, they usually arise in pairs, groups, or clusters. In many cases, such as the party situation I described earlier, we saw that fear and shame arose alongside anger when our mouthy friend insulted our clothing. These three emotions arose together because we needed all three of them. We needed anger to address the direct affront to our sense of self, we needed fear so that we could be awake and intuitive about possible hazards, and we needed shame to help us moderate our behavior so that the situation wouldn’t spiral out of control. All three of these emotions were necessary in that situation.
Emotions arise because they’re necessary, and in many situations, multiple emotions are needed. Emotions are action-requiring programs, and you can easily have more than one program running at any given time. Emotions are a collection of interrelated skills, abilities, and aptitudes, so it’s natural for them to arise in pairs or groups. It’s also natural for them to follow one another swiftly after you complete the distinct actions required by each one.
Vocabulary may be a problem here: In the English language, we have almost no words that meld emotions in the way they actually work in real life. Some friends and I were talking recently about finding a word for the kind of happiness that makes you cry, perhaps when something is so beautiful and also so touching that you become overtaken by joy and sadness and happiness (and sometimes grief) all at once. The closest we could come was bittersweet, but that’s not an emotion—it’s a flavor!
To find emotion-melding words, we actually had to go outside the English language. In the German language, for instance, a wonderful melded-emotion word is schadenfreude, which means “feeling joy about the misfortune of another.” In schadenfreude, which I sometimes call savage glee, there’s anger, happiness, joy, a distinct lack of shame, envy, jealousy, and a sense of righteous exultation when you see someone receive what you deem to be a much-deserved comeuppance. Usually, there’s a lot of history behind those combined emotions—the person who is suddenly brought so low may have been lording over you for quite some time or may have received many undeserved accolades while your own work went unacknowledged. When that many emotions arise in a cluster, there’s a tremendous amount of social information that can be gleaned empathically. It’s a continual source of fascination for me that the English language doesn’t identify clustered emotions. Besides the word nostalgia (which is present-day sadness or longing for past happiness) the only other word I could think of is gloating, which is a little bit like schadenfreude. In schadenfreude, the other person has lost, but you haven’t necessarily won. But when you gloat, you win or prevail over someone, and you gloatingly express your savage glee, apply shame to your opponent, and kick her when she’s down. Ouch!
The English word ambivalence describes the state of feeling more than one emotion—and if you’re a wordsmith, you’ll notice the word valence right inside ambivalence. Ambivalence means that you’re feeling an allegedly negative emotion and an allegedly positive emotion together, and you’re confused because you can’t possibly decide which of the two emotions is true (hint: they’re both true!). We actually do have a word in our language that tells us that two emotions are way too many and that confusion is the correct response. Wow, English language, wow!
I’m interested in our limited emotional vocabulary in another way—I notice that people use the word emotional to mean just about anything. “You’re so emotional” can mean that you’re angry, anxious, sad, or fearful, or perhaps that your emotions change a lot (as they should). “Let’s not get emotional” can mean almost anything, but it’s usually a way to shame you out of a behavior or a position that doesn’t work for the other person. “Emotions ran high” can mean that people fought in anger, that they cried, or that they responded in many different ways, such as laughing, shouting, booing, or walking out in disgust. The word emotional can mean everything and nothing, mainly because many people don’t have strong emotional vocabularies. Sadly, this also means they don’t have strong emotional awareness, which also means their empathic skills are likely very limited. Luckily, the work we’re doing now will help with all of these problems.
Understanding emotions individually is a great first step in increasing your empathic skills. But out in the real world, emotions don’t always arise individually. For instance, I wrote earlier about the connection between anger, shame, and contentment. If you want to feel more contentment, you actually need to make sure that you’re working well with the gifts of anger and the gifts of shame. If you don’t know that emotions are strongly interrelated, you might waste your time trying to evoke an individual emotion, such as contentment (which can’t arise healthfully until you actually do something commendable), without understanding that other emotions need to be involved.
Another problem that arises when you don’t know that emotions work together is one that happens regularly with anger, which many people misidentify as an allegedly secondhand emotion. Anger is sort of the whipping boy of the emotional realm (okay, all emotions, except possibly happiness, are the whipping boy at some point), and I notice that people hold a great deal of entrenched misconceptions about anger. The secondhand mistake is a case in point, and it’s a very easy mistake to make if you don’t understand how emotions work together and how anger, in particular, will arise to protect you and your other emotions (especially sadness and fear).
Think about this in terms of the self-protective gifts that anger brings you: In many cases, honestly expressing your sadness or fear is actually socially dangerous. Openly displaying sadness (and tears) can cause you to lose face; likewise, openly displaying fear can make others think you’re a coward. Neither of these displays is good for your standpoint or your self-image. In these instances, your anger will be activated, not because it’s a dishonest or secondhand emotion, but because it’s necessary.
We’ve all had the experience of feeling sadness—of feeling as if we’re going to cry—and then suddenly getting angry and cranky at someone instead. Or with fear, we’ve all had someone jump out and scare the wits out of us, and right after we jump back, we snap angrily, “Cut it out!” In these situations, the “real” emotions are being protected by expressive outbursts of anger. That’s anger’s job; it’s a protective emotion. It’s not a secondhand emotion when it jumps in front of the supposedly real emotions you’re feeling. Anger is real, too. Anger is doing its job. It’s protecting your voice, your sense of self, and your standpoint.
You can clearly observe the ignorance-producing effects of emotional valencing when you look at another secondhand emotion that might arise in these two situations. In both situations, happiness can also jump out in front of your “real” emotions: If you’re about to cry but it’s not safe, you might smile or laugh instead. And if someone jumps out and scares the heck out of you, you might laugh after you jump back. In both instances, the smiling and laughing will cover your sadness and your fear, and yet no one calls happiness a secondhand emotion. In fact, if you laugh when someone scares you, you’ll be seen as a good sport. Yet it’s the exact same mechanism, with one emotion jumping out to protect you when displaying the so-called real emotions might be socially unwise. However, when anger is involved, it’s suddenly a big problem. Valencing makes us blind to the actual functions of individual emotions, so thank goodness we don’t have to rely on valencing in our empathic work!
Problems can arise when emotions step out in front of the seemingly real ones. Empathically speaking, when I see someone who uses anger (or happiness, sadness, fear, or any other emotion) in front of pretty much every other emotion they have, then yes, I want to ask about what’s going on. You don’t want to see the same emotion arising in every possible situation, because that’s not how emotions work in an emotionally flexible person. But having just one emotion is a pretty rare situation. For most of us, emotions arise in pairs, groups, and clusters. Your job as an empathically aware person is to understand which actions are required and then complete those actions to the best of your ability.
When you can successfully complete the actions that your emotions require, new and different emotions will arise—some in the subtle form of gifts and skills, some as identifiable moods, and some as intensely activated calls to immediate action. In many cases, more than one emotion will be active at any given time. That’s natural; that’s how emotions work. And knowing how emotions work will help you develop all aspects of your emotional and empathic skills.
As we move forward in emotional awareness, we’ll unvalance emotions, learn how to channel them, understand them at many different levels of activation, and know that it is perfectly normal for them to arise in pairs, groups, or clusters. In the next chapter, we’ll look at emotions in terms of the gifts they bring you and the actions they require. We’ll also explore a group of emotionally supportive and pertinent questions to ask when each of your emotions is activated.