Empathic Friendships, Empathic Love
Relationship as an Empathic Art Form
DEEP INTERACTION IS food for empaths, and no matter where their empathic interests take them, full-bodied interaction is a part of an empath’s basic life functioning, and interaction has a central role in the maintenance of an empath’s health. Although many hyperempaths (such as our autistic friends) may seem antisocial—in that they primarily interact with animals, nature, art, music, movement practices, science, ideas, computers, or other nonhuman entities—intense Einfühlung interaction is one way that you can tell when you’re in the presence of an intensely empathic person.
For those whose intense empathy is focused on human interactions, relationships can be an essential feature of health and well-being or a central contributor to discomfort and empathic exhaustion. As we explore the current condition of your relationships with your friends, your mate, and your family (children are in Chapter 9, and work relationships are in Chapter 10), we’ll focus specifically on my six aspects of empathy. We’ll also revisit Richard Davidson’s six dimensions of emotional style to discover whether you and your loved ones match up well in terms of your current emotional approaches and empathic abilities.
Healthy interactional abilities are essential for healthy relationships and the development of empathy. However, healthy interactions are based on emotional and social awareness and as we’ve seen, many people have not yet developed strong skills in those areas. As such, many empathic people find themselves doing a lot of heavy emotional lifting in their relationships in order to make those relationships function. This is wonderful in one sense, because it gives empathic people a place to deepen their skills, but it’s problematic in another sense because it can lead directly to burnout. If your close relationships ask a lot from you emotionally and empathically—if you’re performing continual emotion translation, emotional regulation, and conflict mediation for your loved ones—you may not be able to carve out any empathic downtime for yourself. You may not have the peace and quiet (or the privacy) you need to nurture yourself if you’re performing basic emotional and empathic functions for your loved ones. We’ll look more deeply at this situation later in this chapter, when we explore the concept of emotion work.
Many empaths ignore their needs, their preferences, and their own comfort in their close relationships. They’re really good at Perspective Taking, Concern for Others, and Perceptive Engagement, but they’re not as good at choosing people who will love, honor, cherish, protect, empathize with, and take good care of them in return. In this chapter, we’ll focus on the current empathic condition of your relationships so you can create a social support system for your unique empathic organism.
HOW EMPATHIC ARE YOUR LOVED ONES?
As you develop your own emotional and empathic skills, it’s vital for you to have empathic support from your loved ones (or from beloved animals, if people aren’t your empathic cup of tea). As we continue to move outward from your intrapersonal awareness to your interpersonal skills, let’s observe your friends, family, and mate through the lens of my six aspects of empathy: How well are your loved ones working with their own emotions? And how capable are they of interacting with you empathically?
As you work with your own empathic skills, it’s tremendously important to find people who already have empathic skills of their own or who are willing to develop them. As you observe the quality of your close relationships, I’d also like you to think about who is closest to you and why. Who is in your private, innermost empathic circle? Who is in your close friend zone? Who is on the outer boundaries of your personal life? Why are your loved ones where they are? Let’s observe your loved ones in regard to my six aspects of empathy.
Emotion Contagion: Can your loved ones read and share your emotions, and can you read and share theirs? If you can’t get into sync with a loved one, you may need to back up a bit and start over. (You may want to use the Learning People Intentionally skill in Chapter 8 to home in on each other.) If your loved one isn’t comfortable with this skill, you may want to do something together that involves emotion displays—a movie, a concert, or a play—to discover if you share a basic emotional understanding of the world. If you don’t, that’s a crucial piece of information: this person may not be an empathic companion for you at this time.
Most of us are somewhere in the middle of the Emotion Contagion scale with our loved ones. However, if your loved one shares all of your emotions intensely, and vice versa, it can be wonderful or awful, depending on your emotional regulation skills. In situations of mutual contagion, it’s really important that both of you get your empathic mindfulness skills under you so that you can begin to individuate, set good boundaries, and develop extensive self-soothing skills. (Please revisit “How to Tell If an Emotion Is Yours or Someone Else’s”) Hyperempaths can easily burn each other out if they don’t have strong emotional hygiene skills, but if they have skills, their relationships can be delightful, deep, and mutually fulfilling.
Empathic Accuracy: Do your loved ones have good emotional vocabularies and emotion recognition abilities? If they do, you’re well on your way to a functional relationship. Relationships are built on honest communication, and that comes directly from emotional awareness. If your loved ones understand emotions—yours and theirs—then you have the foundation for healthy communication and empathy right there. The rest is just paperwork.
However, if your loved one is confused by emotions, doesn’t want to talk about them, and can’t identify them or support them in others (you may not want to hear this, so get ready), he or she probably doesn’t belong in an intimate relationship just yet. If your empathically inaccurate and emotionally unaware loved one is a casual friend or distant family member, that’s fine. Just be careful that his or her insensitivity doesn’t affect you too much, and be sure to use boundary setting and thresholding to reduce your contact time with this person if you need to. With care, you can learn how to gracefully interact with this emotionally unaware person (the communication skills in the next chapter will help).
But if this empathically and emotionally illiterate person is closer to you—or if he or she is your mate—I’m going to raise a red flag. We’ll revisit this situation later in this chapter (because choosing emotionally illiterate mates can be an empathic tendency), but emotional awareness and a working emotional vocabulary are prerequisites for intimate relationships. There really isn’t a way around this. Certainly your mate can read this book or get counseling and get up to speed emotionally, but until that happens, he or she won’t be empathically capable of having a deep and intimate relationship with you. Empathy is first and foremost an emotional skill, and if your loved ones can’t (or won’t) identify emotions, they won’t be able to empathize skillfully.
Emotion Regulation: Are your loved ones able to work with their emotions and regulate their emotional responses? These aren’t prevalent skills, so if your loved ones don’t have them yet, it’s not a big deal. They can work with the skills in this book, or see a counselor, or read Richard Davidson’s book and discover their emotional styles so that they can develop vital emotional and cognitive skills. Deficits in emotional regulation skills are not a big deal if your loved ones are willing to work on them. However, it is a big deal if your loved ones refuse to regulate their emotions or to learn basic emotional management skills. If these emotionally unregulated people are in your outer circle, you can probably find ways to manage (and restrict) your interactions with them. But if they’re in your home or in your bed, then your life as a sensitive and emotionally aware person is going to be pretty rough. You may become a hyperempath simply for survival’s sake; you may need to perform extensive Emotion Regulation duties for your loved one. This may involve being hyperaware of his or her emotions, moods, physical condition, body language, and so forth, just so you can stay ahead of the storm. We’ll look more closely at difficult relationships like this in a few pages, because they’re pretty common for empathic people—and they’re clearly an inclination for hyperempaths.
Perspective Taking: Can your loved ones take your perspective or the perspectives of others? Do they have the meta-cognitive and meta-empathic abilities they need to be able to feel their way into and out of the lives and attitudes of others? If so, they’ll be able to connect with you and understand you. If not, your relationships might be one-sided.
When we explored Doris Bischof-Köhler’s work on the development of Perspective Taking in young children, we saw that self-awareness and self-recognition were actually prerequisites for this skill. If your loved ones cannot take the perspective of others, remember that they may actually need to become more aware of themselves first. Our empathic mindfulness skills will help your loved ones develop better intrapersonal skills, and learning to define their boundaries may be especially supportive in helping them make clearer distinctions between themselves and others. In Chapter 9, I explore the development of empathy in babies, and it might help your loved one to work with the skill of Perspective Taking in the way babies do—through literature, drama, and emotive play. Empathic skills are malleable, and they can be increased at any age if you know which aspects of empathy are underdeveloped.
Concern for Others: Concern for Others is a basic prerequisite for healthy relationships, and its absence is a deal breaker. If your loved one does not have caring concern for you or for others, then this is not a relationship; it’s an empathic liability. Remember that this aspect is the trouble spot for antisocial people and people with psychopathic tendencies, which means that people who have problems with Concern for Others can actually endanger your well-being. The only situations in which this deficit is acceptable are in babies, who have not yet developed Concern for Others (remember that babies develop empathy in stages), or in people and animals who are neurologically or physically incapable of empathic interactions. In everyone else, Concern for Others is a requirement. If people don’t have it, they’ll need counseling and social skills training before they can become safe and empathically functional partners.
Perceptive Engagement: Can your loved ones read people empathically and act in a way that truly meets the needs of others? Can they read your signals and support you in a way that makes sense to you? If so, these people will nurture you and help you develop and deepen your empathic abilities.
If your loved ones can’t quite get this one right (but they want to), then you can help them learn you empathically (see the next chapter), and they can use all of the skills and communication practices in this book to develop their Perceptive Engagement skills. Just make sure that they also develop strong self-care skills so that they don’t burn out.
If your loved ones refuse to learn Perceptive Engagement, look back at the five previous aspects of empathy to figure out where their empathic capacities might have broken down. Could they be hyperempathic and burnt out? Do they need help developing Empathic Accuracy? Do they need help with basic Emotion Regulation? Do they need practice with Perspective Taking? All of these situations can be addressed. However, if the problem stems from a basic disregard and lack of Concern for Others, then you simply need to protect yourself; this person is not relationally capable at this time.
YOUR EMOTIONAL STYLE COMPATIBILITY
Richard Davidson’s six dimensions of emotional style give you another framework with which to gauge the quality and compatibility levels of your current relationships. Although all of your loved ones will have their own combinations of strengths and challenges in these dimensions, it’s important to know where you stand in relation to each one. Does it matter to you if you and your loved ones are very far apart in one or more of these dimensions? Do these differences add to the richness of your relationships, or do they create discord? Your answers will likely be different depending on the closeness of each relationship you examine.
Resilience (from slow to recover to fast to recover): Resilience relates to the speed at which you can move through emotions, situations, and difficulties. Some people can work through difficult emotions and issues in minutes, while others might take weeks or months. Do you have the emotional and empathic room you need to work with a person whose progression through difficulties is different from yours, or do you need someone whose recovery speed is similar? Self-soothing skills, resourcing (from the previous chapter), and Emotion Regulation skills are crucial to resilience and recovery time. Working in these areas may help you and your loved ones increase your skills and your compatibility in this dimension.
Outlook (from negative to positive): We already know about the serious problems that can arise when emotions get valenced into simpleminded categories; similar problems can arise when people get valenced. Think about it: When we refer to supposedly positive people, we’re generally referring to people who primarily express happiness and joy or who are emotionally calm and relatively unexpressive. When we talk about allegedly negative people, we’re often talking about people who simply feel and express a full range of emotions.
Think about people you identify as negative. Usually, it’s because they express emotions other than happiness or because they’re caught in a feedback loop with emotions like anger, anxiety, or depression. Or perhaps they don’t have strong empathic skills, and they trip over your signals and make you feel unimportant or disregarded. When you valence people negatively, you do so, in many cases, because their honest emotional situations and reactions make you uncomfortable. This is not an empathic approach.
People can certainly get themselves into a rut and approach every situation with one or two emotions. As I pointed out in Chapter 4, any emotion can be too much. But this problem doesn’t reside in the emotions themselves; it resides in the way they’re being used and misused. Even happiness can be out of place and too much; it can make you gloss over important problems that other emotions would have alerted you to. So being all the way over to the allegedly positive side of this dimension isn’t the go-to position (as Richard Davidson clearly points out in his book).
As you look at the dimension of Outlook, make sure that you’re not mistakenly valencing deep and emotional people into the negative category. If you do, you’ll disqualify a lot of empaths. Certainly, you want to surround yourself with people who have emotional skills, the capacity to soothe and ground themselves, and the ability to share kindness, laughter, and delight with you. But you may also want to be around people who can understand your deepest emotions and support you when you’re feeling them, because they know the territory. Be careful in this emotional style category, and make sure that you’re not valencing people.
Social Intuition (from socially intuitive to puzzled): Social Intuition is basically Emotion Contagion combined with Empathic Accuracy and Perspective Taking. It’s the crux of emotional and empathic awareness (though without the action component). The question is, How socially intuitive do you need your loved ones to be? Do you prefer to be with people who can read you effortlessly, or is it okay to be with people who need things spelled out? Your answer may change depending on how close your loved ones are to you, and it may change as you begin to develop your own empathic skills. If your loved ones tend to be socially puzzled, you may want to check in and ask yourself if you’re doing a lot of emotion work for them (see the next section). If you are doing a lot of emotion work, it’s important to scale back, because it’s healthier in the long run for people to develop their own emotional skills rather than borrowing yours.
If your loved ones have very strong Social Intuition, they may be hyperempaths. If so, make sure that you set good boundaries, and be sure to keep yourself grounded and focused around them. They may need a safe and emotionally hygienic relationship where they can just relax!
Self-awareness (from self-aware to self-opaque): Balanced self-awareness is the foundation for empathic awareness, and this book is focused on helping you develop many different skills in this dimension. However, selfawareness isn’t something that most people are encouraged to develop—or if they are, sometimes they can become so self-aware that their inner lives become uncomfortably noisy (the self-soothing skills of grounding and resourcing can really help with this). If your loved ones have been able to develop balance in their inner lives and their intrapersonal skills, consider yourself lucky; you’ve found a treasure. If they haven’t, and you want to invite them into your empathic inner circle, you can share this book or Richard Davidson’s book with them, or perhaps find enjoyable Self-awareness activities to share (like art, poetry, tai chi, mindfulness meditations, aikido, yoga, or other inward-focusing practices).
Sensitivity to Context (from tuned in to tuned out): Sensitivity to Context is a key aspect of empathic awareness; it’s related to the capacity for Empathic Accuracy, Perspective Taking, and Perceptive Engagement. Joseph and Iris in Chapter 1 (and David and Rosalie in the next chapter) are examples of people who are very tuned into social contexts. Do your loved ones have this capacity to understand different people and situations and to respond empathically? Or are they socially unaware? Do they tend to interact gracefully and engage perceptively, or do they miss obvious changes in social contexts?
If your loved ones are very sensitive to context, are they also sensitive to their own needs, or are they at risk of losing themselves in the needs of others? If they’ve tuned out, is it because they don’t understand social signals, because they’re burnt out, or because they can’t switch contexts easily? Sensitivity to Context is developed in interactions, and troubles in this dimension can come from many different directions. Empathically speaking, you can help people develop (or calm down) this dimension by engaging with them empathically and respectfully, as well as by supporting them in their development of Empathic Accuracy and Perspective Taking.
Attention (from focused to unfocused): This dimension relates to the capacity to focus and orient yourself to your internal and external surroundings. In our empathic framework, this skill comes from the gifts of fear (and anxiety). Notice that the masking state for fear, confusion, helps you take time out from attention; it helps you become unfocused and distracted when you need to be.
How much compatibility do you need in this dimension? Is it okay with you if your loved ones are more or less focused than you are, or does it make you very uncomfortable if you’re out of sync with each other? If you’re very thrown by differences in focus between you, you may want to check your boundaries, your grounding, and your Emotion Contagion and Emotion Regulation skills. Attention and focus live in the realm of fear, anxiety, and confusion, and if you’re not comfortable with these emotions, you might not be able to tolerate differing levels of focus in your loved ones. If this is a regular problem in your relationships, please revisit the Conscious Questioning practice for anxiety.
As you examine the empathic and emotional capacities of your loved ones, you may find that you’ve surrounded yourself with people who need help in one or more areas of emotional functioning, emotional style, or empathic awareness. This is such a common occurrence that there’s actually a term for it: emotion work.
In her excellent 1983 book, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, sociologist Arlie Hochschild describes what she termed emotion work, or the way in which our emotions and emotional states are a part of what we offer (and what is expected from us) in the workplace. In the book, Hochschild gives examples of flight attendants who must not only understand the intricacies of their physical work on airplanes, but must also display an open, welcoming demeanor to passengers. Even when passengers are bad-tempered or overly needy, part of the work of a flight attendant is to continually offer a calm, helpful, accepting face to the public. This is an example of a flight attendant’s emotion work.
We’ll revisit emotion work in Chapter 10 when we look at the workplace, but I want to speak of it here in terms of the emotion work that some of us do in our relationships. I notice that some empathic people tend to act as external Empathic Accuracy and Emotion Regulation devices for their friends and loved ones. They might be the people others go to for advice, for explanations of the intricacies of the social world, or for help in understanding, managing, and accepting emotions. Some empathic people also help others with Perspective Taking, and they use their own abilities to help people figure out how to empathize with and understand others. If you’re the go-to empathy tour guide in your relationships, you’re doing a lot of emotion work. Or if you rely heavily on someone to help you figure out the social and emotional world, they’re doing emotion work for you.
As you look at the empathic awareness levels in your friends and loved ones, I’d like you to look for trends specifically in the areas of Empathic Accuracy, Emotion Regulation, and Perspective Taking. Do your loved ones tend to be strong in these areas, such that you don’t have to help them? Or do they require a lot of emotion work from you in these areas? Or do you rely on them to help you? Do you sense any emotion work discrepancies between you and your loved ones? It’s normal to pitch in to help people when they need it—and it’s normal to ask for help when you need it—but in the usually hidden world of empathy, emotions, and social interactions, sometimes your emotion-work duties will be deeply unequal.
All of this emotion work is normal and natural, because, empathically speaking, we all work to help each other function (and become more skilled) in the social world. Emotion work is what makes relationships flow smoothly; it’s what helps us relate to and support each other; and it’s what helps us mature as emotional, social, and empathic beings. However, emotion work is work, and if you’re not aware of how much emotion work you do (or how much you expect others to do for you), then empathic burnout is a very real possibility—for everyone.
As you empathically observe your relationships, your loved ones, and yourself, take an emotion work inventory and ask yourself: Is this emotion work being acknowledged by anyone? Is it appreciated? Is it even mentioned? Can it become more intentional and conscious? Does it work for everyone? If it doesn’t, you can burn your contracts with emotion work tasks that destabilize you, and you can burn your contracts with the emotion work you unconsciously expect from others. Emotion work is an intrinsic aspect of empathic skills and relationship skills, but it tends to be entirely unconscious; it tends to live in the hidden world of nuance, undercurrent, gesture, and unspoken expectations. Burning your contracts with emotion work will help you bring these often-veiled tasks into your conscious awareness, where you can make clear decisions about how you want to approach them now.
We’ll explore emotion work more extensively in Chapter 10. In the next chapter, we’ll explore a number of empathic communication skills that can bring your emotion work out of the shadows.
IDENTIFYING YOUR INTIMACY ZONES
We’re observing emotional styles in your loved ones not to enforce identical approaches to emotions, but to help you understand what conditions and levels of compatibility are important for your unique empathic self. Throughout this book, we’ve focused on your intrapersonal world so that you can understand yourself more clearly and individuate in healthy ways. In this chapter, we’re focusing on your interpersonal world. Who are you in relationship to others? What do you want? What’s important to you? What do you need in order to feel loved, safe, respected, and supported? Which kinds of emotion work have you performed, which kinds have you expected from others, and how can you make your emotion work more conscious and intentional?
I’d also like you to put on your anthropologist’s hat again and observe the intimacy zones and relationship thresholds you’ve already built. In terms of your innermost empathic circle, your close friend zone, and the outer boundaries of your intimacy zones, why are people where they are? Who is closest to you, and whom do you hold at arm’s length? How do your loved ones’ positions relate to their empathic skills and their emotional styles or to the amount of emotion work you do for each other? Why do you bring some of your loved ones close to you, and why do you move others farther away?
As you observe the quality of the love, loyalty, emotional skills, compatibility, and empathic awareness of your loved ones, thank the emotions that help you do this: thank your jealousy and your envy. In their soft, freeflowing states, these two emotions help you focus on what you need from your relationships. They also help you discern the depth of love and care you receive, the loyalty and security you feel, and the quality of your connection to stable sources of love, faithfulness, resources, recognition, and security. If you’ve created a number of healthy relationships with loving, available, emotionally aware, loyal, and stable people, then your healthy envy and jealousy have been active in your life already—even if you didn’t know it until this very second. When these two emotions are free to do their proper work, they’ll help you identify and choose safe friends and healthy mates. Thank you, jealousy and envy!
But if these two essential social emotions haven’t been able to do their work for some reason, it can be fascinating to discover that you may push skilled empaths away because they don’t seem to need you, while you’ll pull deeply unskilled and incompatible people (who need full-time empathic heavy lifting and extensive emotion work) into the innermost circle of your life. There’s a multimillion-dollar industry devoted to helping you stop doing this, and it’s filled with ideas about love addiction, codependence, abuse, and self-abandonment, but let’s take a deeper and more empathic look at this selfabandoning tendency, shall we?
SWASHBUCKLERS OF LOVE
We’re surrounded by endless fairy tales about love, and we’re continually trained to develop deeply unrealistic expectations about what love is supposed to be. Dramas, songs, novels, and art portray love as an ecstatic and life-changing dream, or as a devastating nightmare full of heartbreak and loss. If you sit back and empathically scan the stories we tell each other about love, you’ll see grand heroic narratives that don’t merely suggest that love can conquer all; they actually promise that it can. These stories tell us over and over again that every problem, every condition, and every imaginable failing can be cured with love or by love—and most empaths I know eat these stories for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
We’re all surrounded by these dramatic tales of heroic love. However, for highly empathic people whose central pull is toward relationships and interactions, these stories are especially seductive—and especially toxic. They promise that love contains magical healing powers; therefore, many empaths who are under the spell of these heroic love stories tend to seek out people who are irretrievably incapable of identifying, accepting, or returning love. Instead of taking a healthy jealousy- and envy-supported inventory of the emotional skills, empathic awareness, and interactional abilities of their potential mates, many empaths ingeniously (and usually unconsciously) choose people who have few to none of these capacities.
In their intimate empathic inner circles—in the areas closest to their bodies and their hearts—empaths will often choose mates who cannot get into sync with them, don’t have emotional skills, and aren’t empathically competent. These empaths then throw themselves at these unworkable relationships, as if they’re in a game of Red Rover or as if they’re on a heroic odyssey through the underworld, filled with impossible tasks and mythical beasts. In the therapy community, people like this are called love addicts, codependents, and victims (and they may well be, if they find people who have no Concern for Others)—but I call them swashbucklers. Swashbucklers of love.
If you think about it, there aren’t many places in our lives where heroic and mythic journeys can occur or where brave-hearted warriors and valiant strivers for justice can throw themselves headlong at the deepest troubles of the world. Our homes and families aren’t heroic training grounds; they’re supposed to be safe places (though they’re often chaotic). School is too predictable (unless bullying is allowed, and then it’s just grueling) to support a heroic quest. Work is long and often meaningless. Thus, the heroic characters inside us often sit on the sidelines and watch sports or soldiers or dramatic characters or impossibly beautiful, famous, or wealthy people live out mythic and heroic stories for us. There are very few places where everyday people can throw themselves body and soul into intensely meaningful heroes’ journeys and fight intrepidly against impossible odds. But there is one heroic training ground that’s available to nearly all of us (and it’s amazingly seductive to empaths in particular): impossible relationships.
If you choose your mate with heroic and unconsciously swashbuckling ingenuity, you can spend years, decades, and even a lifetime swashbuckling your way through an impossibly heroic journey where more love, patience, dedication, and emotion work than anyone has ever seen will be needed—and you’ll provide it, but it still won’t be enough. If you manage to get out, people will help you view yourself as a victim and your mate as an abuser; your choices and your sanity will be questioned. But no one will talk about your awesome, heroic, mythic, and swashbuckling love skills. Because these are skills—to be able to hold on for dear life no matter how bad things get and to love no matter what happens. These are amazing interpersonal skills. Yes, these amazing skills may turn your life into a living hell if you try to use them with people who have no emotional skills of their own. They may even imperil you if you’re with people who have no Concern for Others. But if you’re with wonderfully empathic people whose emotional styles are compatible with yours, these skills will lead you into the deepest and most delicious areas of love and communion that you could ever imagine. When you’re with people who have the emotional and empathic depth to fully engage with you, to honor you, to match your emotion work task for task, and to protect you from your often self-abandoning and heroic empathic nature, then your swashbuckling love will become magnificent.
If you’re a swashbuckler of love, bless your heart. Thank you for bringing your wild, boundless, heroic love into this world. You know by now that I’m going to call you out, so I won’t even inch my hand toward the red flags you know I’ll raise. But let me just say—before I send you back a few pages to observe your impossible relationship(s) in terms of my six aspects of empathy and the six dimensions of emotional style—that I bow to your zany heroism and your majestically out-of-place relationship skills.
Many elements in the dramatic fairy tales you’ve been told about love are true. Love and healthy relationships are crucial to your survival. You need to love, and you need to be loved. Children need long years of warm, loving, intimate contact or their brains won’t develop properly, and the social and emotional well-being of people of all ages is predicated on access to healthy, loving relationships. Love is necessary and vital, and it can change your life for the better—if you choose people who can love you back. That’s the solution to this dilemma—you have to find people who can hold up their end of the relationship and do their own emotion work. Empathy flourishes in healthy, intimate interactions; therefore, to experience deep and healing empathy in your most intimate relationships, you must be with someone who can love you back.
If you’re a swashbuckling runaway love healer, it might take some serious reframing and retraining for you to become able to turn away from emotionally unskilled and empathically unavailable people and focus yourself on people who can love as deeply and as well as you can. You may need to burn contracts continually for a while—with your current relationships, with love as a concept, with your past relationships, with your parents’ relationship, with any childhood traumas you may have had, with all of the emotion-work slackers you’ve known, and with your vision of yourself as a love partner. This is a deep situation, and it’s a powerful empathic tendency to offer immense love to people who can’t truly receive it, so you’ll need to work in a deep, imaginal, empathic, and transformative way to heal this tendency. But as often happens in heroic and mythical journeys, one essential key to this magical transformative process can be found in a very strange and offbeat place.
ARE YOU THE ONE FOR ME?
Yes, my friend, I am suggesting a relationship book (thankfully, you can find it online, so no one will be able to see you buy it). But it’s not just any relationship book—this one focuses specifically on your choice of mate, and it’s called Are You the One for Me? by relationship guru Barbara De Angelis. In this book, De Angelis (who was once a wildly unsafe love swashbuckler herself) writes frankly about the kinds of impediments that will make relationships unworkable, and she teaches you how to identify and avoid them. Four huge impediments in a potential mate—that I never even considered before I read her book (twenty years ago)—are (1) a lack of emotional skills, (2) an active addiction, (3) unhealed childhood trauma, and (4) the presence of a toxic ex-mate. I mean, those were practically my mate-selection imperatives before I read her book.
De Angelis also puts forth the surprising (to me) idea that it’s vital to find a mate who’s highly compatible in areas that are crucial to your way of life—for instance, in your approach to finances, child-rearing, politics, spirituality, sexuality, and health care. Basically, she’s saying that in your most intimate empathic inner circle, you need to find someone who has relationship skills, is available for the relationship, doesn’t require extensive emotion work, understands you completely, supports your decisions, and respects your choices. Otherwise, you may waste your energy fighting over things that aren’t going to change, which means you’ll probably feel more (rather than less) lonely. For me, this concept of compatibility was life changing, and I had never heard it before, ever. I thought that love was the only thing that mattered, that opposites attract, and that anything could be fixed with increasingly heroic amounts of emotion work and swashbuckling love. But as we all learn sooner or later, incompatibility and emotional incapacity do not lead to healthy relationships.
This book teaches you how to choose relationships wisely, and though De Angelis doesn’t frame her work this way at all, she’s discovered how to apply the gifts of healthy jealousy and healthy envy before you commit, so that your relationship will have the best possible chance for success. She teaches you how to find mates who are secure, emotionally healthy, able to love you, functional, loyal, and as compatible as possible. This compatibility is the key to healthy relationships, but for people who grew up hearing that opposites attract, it can seem frightfully choosy.
So let’s move out a bit from your innermost empathic circle and look at friendships that aren’t compatible to see what happens there.
In the June 2011 issue of Scientific American Mind, science writer Kirsten Weir looked at a number of studies on ambivalent friends, or frenemies46 (friends who let you down, clash with you continually, and just can’t get into sync with you). To be clear, frenemies aren’t your enemies, and you don’t hate them—they’re just disappointing and difficult to be around. In numerous studies, frenemies were found to raise blood pressure and increase stress responses and the risk of depression. In addition, frenemies were actually found to be more deleterious to psychological health than actual enemies were.
If you think about this empathically, it makes sense. Frenemies can get close to you, and they can access your personal space and your intimate life, where they can land some pretty solid emotional punches. Enemies, on the other hand, are usually not allowed near you, because when you identify someone as dangerous, you usually keep them the hell away from your inner life. Enemies may throw emotional punches, but you expect them to, and you’ve created some distance from them; therefore, you can dodge their punches more easily.
The article suggests using behavioral thresholding (the researchers didn’t call it that, of course) to contain the amount of damage frenemies can inflict—for instance, don’t rely on them to show up on time, don’t expect their support, don’t be surprised if they make trouble, and so forth. Frenemies are toxic to your emotional and physical health, but if you know that, you can set boundaries around your frenemies and avoid being hit by their emotional shrapnel.
That’s a very helpful suggestion, but how can you perform that kind of thresholding in your most intimate relationships? How can you set boundaries and thresholds around a difficult person who lives with you and sleeps in your bed? How can you protect yourself from an incompatible, emotionally incapable, and possibly toxic person who’s in your innermost empathic circle?
The answer is, you can’t. In your inner circle, you need emotionally awake and empathically attuned people who completely and utterly have your back. Otherwise, you’ll be doing emotion work twenty-four hours a day with no breaks. That’s a recipe for empathic burnout, and I have a warning: if you’re currently in a relationship that’s incompatible and based on swashbuckling love, you may want to avoid De Angelis’s book, because she’s very blunt about your chances for success. If you’re on the verge of burnout, but you’re still dedicated to your swashbuckling, her book will probably just annoy and offend you. Bless your heart if you need to work in the heroic land of swashbuckling love right now. For many people, relationships can be a place of deep learning—a place to work out childhood traumas, abuse issues, addiction issues, issues with parents and family, and issues of basic self-worth. Some swashbucklers cannot yet identify healthy people or feel any kind of attraction to them, because they’re on a quest to find a truly unworkable mate who will require unheard-of amounts of love that, this time, will surely fix everything. As I wrote earlier, this full-bodied heroic swashbuckling can be considered an empathic tendency; we’ve all done it, and you may need to do it for a while longer. But when you’re ready to try something different, and when you’re ready to be loved as much as you love others, there’s a way out. There are therapists and counselors everywhere; there are abuse and addiction groups everywhere; and your local library is groaning under the weight of books about relationships. There’s a lot of help waiting for you when your impossible heroic journey finally comes to an end. Until then, I’ll bow to you with reverence, and we’ll move on to the next topic.
FINDING EMPATHIC FRIENDS AND COMMUNITY
Intimate relationships are important, but if you’re not currently in one, or if yours is fraught with trouble, friendships can be a safe and wonderful way to share and deepen your empathy. Friendships are just as important as intimate relationships, and empathically speaking, they can be less troublesome, because they’re not surrounded by quite so much heroic fairy-tale baggage. When I asked you to observe the empathic abilities of your friends and loved ones and to gauge the relative importance of your emotional style compatibility, I didn’t do this just to give you a snapshot of your current relationships; I did it to help you identify what’s important in your future relationships. When you know what’s important to you, you can choose friendships that help you deepen your empathy in safe, healthy, and comfortable ways.
Thankfully, it doesn’t seem to matter how many relationships you have; what matters is their quality. The Scientific American Mind article about frenemies includes studies that found that the sheer number of friends a person has is not as important as the quality of those friendships; the health-building, empathy-increasing value of friendships depends on the quality of your friendships, and not on their quantity. One excellent friend is all you need. If you can gather more, great; but one will do. Whew!
Personally, I’m working on creating quality time with people in my own community in simple, inexpensive ways. I’ve also been talking to people about how they fit socializing into their busy lives. Many report that they’ve created ways to do chores and socialize at the same time (my anxiety finds this idea delightful!). It feels sort of silly to be writing this down, but the loss of social time has affected all of us, and it’s important that we address it—not just for our own health, but also for the empathic health of our loved ones and our communities.
Here are some simple ways to increase the face-to-face interactions that will support social, emotional, and empathic health for you and your friends: card and game nights, cooking together, trading chore days at each other’s houses, meeting at the local farmer’s market, hiking and biking together, taking exercise classes together, washing and vacuuming your cars together, creating arts and crafts parties, singing together, changing the oil in your cars together, trading help on your building projects, cleaning out the gutters at your homes, helping each other organize garages or closets, watching your favorite shows at each other’s homes, carpooling to the grocery store, inviting people to create a garden in your yard, and sharing the produce. You get the idea.
In our overly busy modern world, we’ve become fairly isolated, and we’ve lost touch with the barn-raising, quilting-bee socializing that kept our hardworking ancestors connected to each other. When I look at our online world—at all the wikis, websites, and blogs that contain all of the knowledge (and wackiness and dysfunction) of humankind—I see that our energetic community-building skills are still very active, but in many cases, they’ve moved online, where interaction isn’t quite as supportive as it might be.
Empathy is developed in interactions, and research is continually suggesting that face-to-face interactions trump online interactions. A great deal of research has been focused on the often unempathic and emotionally explosive behaviors we see online, and of all the possible factors (for instance, anonymity, reaction speed leading to emotional dysregulation, age and maturity levels in the online community, and isolation), it’s looking as if one of the most destructive factors is a lack of eye contact.47 When people can’t see each other and read each other’s signals empathically, many can’t regulate their emotional responses, and they tend to fly off the handle. Eye contact and real-world interactions can be grounding, civilizing, emotionally regulating, and empathy building.
Live, real-world interactions can also teach you how to read all of the rich emotions, gestures, subtexts, nuances, expressions, and pauses that help you truly understand yourself and others. Real-life interactions are food for your empathic soul. Sadly, we tend not to have much time to get together these days, and if we do, it’s usually around something that costs money, like dinner, a movie, or a concert. However, since online interactions can actually impede social skills, Emotion Regulation abilities, and empathy in vulnerable people, we must create as many opportunities for real face-to-face interactions as we can. Empathy is a malleable and multifaceted skill that can be increased at any age with healthy interactions—but it can also be decreased at any age if you’re not getting the right food for your empathic soul.
In the next chapter, we’ll look at some specific communication skills you can use to increase your empathic skills, help make your emotion work more conscious, and revive empathy when your relationships need support.