Chapter 3

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Compassion:
The Lining of the Empath’s Soul

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

mother teresa

By now you are gaining a good understanding of the wide range of extraordinary gifts we all possess that foster connection—both the subtle, psychic empathic gifts and the gifts within our bodies, our physical wiring for empathy. Perhaps the single most important reason to develop and utilize these gifts is that they lead us swiftly and directly to compassion, the call to ease another’s suffering. If there is anything we need in this world right now, it’s compassion. Yet is there anything that is so little rewarded in our fast-paced, success-oriented world?

While all of us are wired for empathy, not all empaths are compassionate, moved to act on their empathic experiences. While the fledgling empath can receive meaningful signals and impressions without being moved to uplift someone else with those energetic messages, mature empathy always results in compassion. As we shall explore in this chapter, an innate empath is someone who can sense what is really happening outside themselves. And the soul of an empath is designed to take the next crucial step: to make a difference based on the empathic information they naturally pick up.

There is a Buddhist story that ends with this moral: “Truth, wholesomeness, and compassion can save the world.”27

A Crisis of Compassion Is at Hand

Think of what the world—or even a small part of it—might look like without compassion, the highest goal of empathy.

A client of mine, Aaron, didn’t have to imagine it; he was living it. Suddenly he’d had a disturbing epiphany: he realized that he had lost touch with the compassionate person he had once been. He had come to me to see if I could help him find that person again.

“When I was younger, I was the most empathic kid around,” he told me. “I was the kid who found the stray cats and wounded birds and nursed them back to health. I could always tell when my mom was upset and needed cheering up. I even knew when the weather was going to change and I’d tell my dad, who was a farmer, so he could prepare. He called me his ‘human almanac.’”

Aaron paused before tearing up. “But somewhere along the line, I decided it was more important to just get ahead. I decided that being myself wasn’t enough. I decided it was safer to be absent, even from myself.”

After another quiet moment, he added, “Do you think I can ever become compassionate again?”

The values underlying empathy, including compassion, kindness, and care, are on the wane. These “feeling muscles,” which give strength to our humanity, are atrophied and aching, something Aaron astutely recognized within his own being. The Western world is experiencing an epidemic of loneliness, depression, and anxiety. A recent survey conducted by the University of Arizona and Duke University and incorporating data from the General Social Survey (GSS) showed that the number of Americans who state that they have no one with whom to discuss important matters tripled between 1985 and 2004. In fact, 25 percent of all Americans believe that they have no one with whom they can share a problem.28 This changing (and some might say sagging) social support is one of the reasons, many researchers believe, stress is taking such a huge toll on our health.

As psychologists Ed Diener and Martin Seligman have shown, social connectedness predicts a longer life, quicker recovery from disease, higher levels of happiness, and the sense of a purposeful life. And according to a large-scale study, people lacking interaction are more vulnerable to disease and death than those who exhibit traditional high-risk behaviors such as smoking, hypertension, obesity, and lack of exercise.29 Despite the fact that we would be healthier and happier if we bonded—if we used our empathic abilities and acted on them—we do not. And we are suffering because of it.

So extreme is the situation that expert Douglas LaBier, a business psychologist and director of the Center for Progressive Development, has coined the term “empathy deficit disorder,” or EDD. While you won’t find this term in the psychiatric diagnostic manuals, LaBier—along with many other socially aware individuals—believes that it is real and that it applies to our entire culture. As he points out, it is possible for an entire culture to share a mental pathology. And because it becomes the norm, it is difficult to spot or define.

According to LaBier, EDD is reflected in our inability to step outside ourselves and tune in to others’ experiences, especially those who differ from us in feeling and belief. This is the primary source of personal conflicts, breakdowns in intimate relationships, and such adversarial attitudes as prejudice and discrimination between groups of people.

LaBier sees EDD mirrored in patterns of selfishness in relationships, such as when a spouse won’t help his mate because he “needs” his “free time.” In America, the epidemic of EDD is apparent in the discrimination against the religion of Islam and the assumption that every Muslim is a potential terrorist. But he also sees EDD playing out globally, visible in warfare between groups, clans, and societies with differing beliefs.

What causes EDD? LaBier indicates that it’s our individual and collective inability to empathize with others—to get a glimpse of others through their lens, not only our own, and to see and value others as they are rather than who we want them to be.

As you learned in the last chapter, empathy is hardwired in each of us, but we have to choose to develop and use it.30 The fact that being empathic—and compassionate—improves our own health should be enough to sell us on developing these skills. The Dalai Lama coyly asserts, “If we say, oh, the practice of compassion is something holy, nobody will listen. If we say, warm-heartedness really reduces your blood pressure, your anxiety, your stress, and improves your health, people will listen.”31 But I believe that the real reason to develop our empathy and its behavioral result, compassion, shouldn’t be as utilitarian or simplistic as “it’s good for us.” Compassionate empathy should be our goal because of its inherent goodness.

Fundamentally, compassion is a spiritual quality. It is the basis for most religious and spiritual expressions. While it might be good for our health and relationships, the essence of compassion is also the root of our spiritual heritage.

The Spiritual Call to Compassionate
Empathy Across Traditions

Compassion arises when an empath acts altruistically, choosing to alleviate the suffering of another simply because it’s the right thing to do. As it ought to be, compassion is considered one of the greatest of virtues in nearly every religion, one we are called to cultivate and demonstrate.

In Judaism, God is known as the Compassionate Father who constantly exhibits the desire to relieve suffering or show mercy. The Hebrew word for “compassionate” is rahmana, which is also the designation for God’s revealed word. To follow God’s word is to do as God does: to be compassionate and loving. To do the opposite, to be cruel, is deplorable. Shares one of the great rabbis from the first century, Rabbi Hillel the Elder, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah. The rest is the explanation.”32

In Christianity, Jesus embodies the essence of relational compassion, taking the wounds of the world upon himself, even into death, so that they might be healed. His dedication to compassion, to selfless action, is unarguable. Although many Christian sects don’t adhere to the essence of his words or live out his legacy of kindness, Jesus was clear that compassionate empathy should cross secular and religious lines.

An example of Jesus’s intense belief in compassion is clearly demonstrated in his telling of the parable of the Good Samaritan, offered in Luke 10:25–37. According to Jesus’s story, a Samaritan is traveling. This non-Jewish man is a member of a sect the Jews despise and degrade. Despite the fact that they consider him dirty and filthy, the Samaritan assists a traveler—who might himself be Jewish—who has been beaten, robbed, and left for dead. A priest and a Levite, holy men who “should” do the right thing, have already ignored this injured journeyer. As Jesus points out, the “way to heaven” is to act as did the Samaritan, who took it upon himself to show mercy to another even though he would reap no reward for it.

Among Muslims, compassion is one of the most important qualities a person can strive for. Muslim scripture urges not only that we care, but that we act in caring ways toward captives, widows, orphans, and the poor. Looking within ourselves, we can see that these people exist inside us in personal ways; each of us has felt trapped, lost, and bereft at times in our lives. Looking outwardly, one of the reasons Muslims fast during the month of Ramadan is to increase their ability to empathize with the hunger pangs of the less fortunate, to become more sensitive to others’ plights, and to develop compassion for those trapped in poverty.33

Compassion is also one of the central tenets of Buddhism. It was Buddha who said the following: “Compassion is that which makes the heart of the good move at the pain of others. It crushes and destroys the pain of others; thus, it is called compassion.”34

And as the Dalai Lama has said, “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

In Buddhism, this desire for loving-kindness in action is extended to all living beings, not only people. What is the key to achieving the highest level of all, compassion? As American monk Bhikkhu Bodhi describes it, it involves entering the subjective state of others to share their feelings and their interior space in every way.35 In other words, it is to be empathetic to such a level that you become the other.

This Buddhist ideal reminds me of Jesus’s Golden Rule. We are to love another as we love ourselves. How can we not love another if we are the other?

In Hinduism, compassion has its own name—daya—and is one of three central virtues. We’ve only to read the most ancient of Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, to find that it was considered deplorable to cause suffering to others and that it is important to refrain from causing harm.

We could search the world over and be hard pressed to find a religion that doesn’t underscore the necessity and beauty of compassion.

What Does a Compassionate
Empathic Experience Look Like?

If both empathy and compassion are so important, we might wonder what each of these qualities looks like, especially when joined together. How can we recognize them when they are present? Said in the shortest way possible, the equation for compassionate empathy is this: empathy moves us toward compassion.

Empathy, the first step involved in doing the “right thing,” involves simply sensing what is occurring in something or someone else or relating to a situation that is outside ourselves. At other times, the entire experience is internal: we are compelled to empathize with ourselves or a part of ourselves. For example, when working with our inner child in the process of recovering from abuse or dealing with a personality or behavioral challenge, self-empathy gracefully opens the door to understanding, healing, and change.

To relate to someone is to sense what they are really going through. It involves entering their subjective experience and leaving behind the ideas and beliefs we might project on them or their situation.

For instance, you are empathizing with another person when you stop caring about your reactions to their pain and fully care about their pain instead. You are compassionately empathizing when you feel their joy at success instead of worrying about why you don’t seem as successful. Likewise, empathy would include sharing in a friend’s satisfaction in a job well done or pride in a decision well made. Your ability to do this tells the other person they can trust you to honor their needs, not simply project your own beliefs upon them. When you are able to fully sense another person or being, you can then sense what they need, not what you think they need. (In Part Ii we will more fully discuss how this works in practice, and we will add the need to bring the Divine into the equation.)

It’s easy to think that we are acting compassionately when we are simply acting out our own beliefs. One example of this is a man I’ll call Max, one of my clients.

Max is the father of three sons. He came to see me because he was upset with his middle son, whom I will call Jimmy. Max’s wife—the boys’ mother—had died a few years earlier. While Max had never had a good relationship with Jimmy, the little that bonded them had deteriorated since the mother had died. In fact, Max was ready to kick fifteen-year-old Jimmy out of the house.

“All he does is defy me,” the troubled father ranted. “He never does his homework, he is out until all hours of the night, and he is consistently rude to me.”

I asked Max if he had ever tried to sense what was going on inside his son, not only observe from afar. Max had no idea what I was talking about.

“It’s his job to figure out how to listen to me,” Max bellowed. “After all, I know what’s best.”

Max truly thought he was doing what was best for his son by shouting at him and trying to discipline him with curfews, punishments, and restrictions. The problem was that he had failed to completely empathize with his son; he was only empathizing with his own hardship with his son.

As the middle child, Jimmy had been easily overlooked when his mother died. Max had been able to talk with his older son and cuddle with his youngest, but he didn’t know how to get close to Jimmy. And so, conveniently, Max had assumed that Jimmy could figure how to deal with his mother’s death on his own.

Complicating the scenario was the fact that Jimmy had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). His busy and impulsive behavior had always annoyed his staid and steady father, who believed that Jimmy was defying him when Jimmy was simply acting out his ADHD. Not only had Max failed to relate to his son with empathy, he hadn’t spent the time he needed to truly observe his son and figure out his special needs.

It took several sessions for me to explain Jimmy to Max. At one point, Max even asked, “Why should I see things from my son’s point of view? What makes him as important as me?” Max’s empathic ability was obviously quite low, but it was evident that he did love his son. Eventually Max came to understand that Jimmy, given his special learning needs, was ill-prepared to deal with life. He was able to see that his son was lost and bereft rather than ill-behaved.

Gradually Max started to empathize with his son. He learned to use phrases like “I see what you mean” or “Can you help me understand why this is important to you?” As Max felt Jimmy’s loss of a mother as Jimmy felt it, he was shocked to discover that one of the reasons Jimmy and he were so disconnected was that he had always left the parenting of Jimmy to his wife. Max vowed to spend more time alone with Jimmy, and he began to do so.

Max then took the next step and engaged a therapist, who worked with Jimmy to address his unresolved grief as well as his ADHD. Finally, Max got his son the scholastic help he needed, hiring a special coach to assist him with his learning challenges.

When Max first came to see me, he would have insisted that he was a compassionate man. He believed he was taking appropriate action to help his son. The problem was that he hadn’t first empathized with Jimmy; he had never left his own world so he could enter that of his son. After learning how to sense Jimmy’s real needs, Max broke through the compassion barrier and took actions that were truly for Jimmy’s well-being.

As this story reveals, compassionate empathy requires more than loving intentions toward another person. It starts and ends with empathy. We must understand what another is going through within their frame of reference, not only our own. Only after we accomplish this initial goal can we broaden our minds and hearts and start to problem-solve.

Compassionate Empathy Toward the Self

As I suggested earlier, there are times when we must offer the same olive branch to ourselves. Most of us have unhealed “inner children” or even wounded “inner adults,” parts of us that have been injured and left to suffer. Intertwined within the webbing of past events, these aspects of ourselves are essentially held hostage by pain. As we’ll explore in this book, we might also be affected by past-life selves who are still traumatized by tragedy. We might even need to empathize with a current part of ourselves who is undergoing a relationship, work, or health challenge. As we all know, past or current dramatic experiences can lead to addictions, self-abuse, low self-esteem, financial difficulties, anxiety disorders, and countless other problems.

Most of us have learned to conceal our pain and trudge forward, acting as if we aren’t hurt or suffering. We hide our injured selves and feelings inside a shell. Stuck within these nearly impenetrable walls, the wounded self only feels more scared, angry, hurt, or shameful as time goes on. Meanwhile, the remainder of our personality continues evolving until we forget about the part of ourselves that has been left bleeding and alone.

I have worked with numerous clients who have spent years in therapy trying to break down the barriers around the wounded parts of themselves. Many wonder why their everyday lives seldom improve, why patterns of abuse continue, and why they still don’t believe themselves worthy of love, good health, or prosperity. One simple answer is that they are only working on their “today” self and not empathizing with their “yesterday” or “today” wounded self. They might also be forgetting that they could reach toward a future self who could empathically care for yesterday’s and today’s wounded selves.

Is a scared inner child going to leave her hiding place just because the adult self wants her to? Is an angry inner boy going to start trusting people just because his adult self insists he should? The key to healing ourselves is to empathize with the parts of us that are stuck in pain and drama.

By first identifying with our lost and lonely inner selves, we gain their trust. We let them know that we feel and care about their pain. We enter their world. By empathizing with them, we show them that they are not alone and that someone—our very self—understands why they feel the way that they do. Only after empathizing with these locked-away selves can we coax them out of their prisons.

Of course, we don’t accomplish empathy by letting the wounded self take control of our lives. You wouldn’t let an enraged three-year-old run around the house with a dangerous weapon, would you? Unfortunately, this is what often occurs, and it is likely one of the causes of narcissistic, borderline, abusive, and other challenging behaviors. Empathy might begin the process of self-healing, but compassionate action must complete it. It is compassionate to teach the inner three-year-old how to behave, not put them in charge of our lives. It is compassionate to provide discipline, comfort, and structure to the emerging wounded children within us, not give them permission to rule the roost and hurt other people simply because they are hurt. Compassionate behavior is, above all, responsible.

What Compassionate Empathy Isn’t

Sometimes, in order to know what something is, you need to examine what it is not. We will further explore compassion, the lack of it, and other ways of being throughout this book, but I believe an early discussion about what empathy is not will be useful overall.

Compassionate empathy is many things. It is feeling, sensing, and caring. It is bonding, linking, and understanding. It includes acting, witnessing, and striving to make a difference. But it is not any of the following:

Sympathy/Enmeshment

I think the most critical of these differentiations is that empathy is different from sympathy, and for people who want to delve further into this topic, I have included a lengthier discussion of this in Appendix 1. There you will also find more discussion of the other things on the list that can masquerade as empathy.

When we empathize, we experience the thoughts, emotions, and direct experiences of another, an object, or a part of ourselves. We enter the other’s subjective reality instead of simply observing their experience through our own so-called objective lens. Simultaneously, we are able to continue feeling our own reality. We don’t lose ourself or forget our own senses, emotions, or needs simply because we are relating to someone else. In contrast, when we are sympathizing, we are so deeply experiencing the other’s reality that we actually assume it. The result is that we lose contact with ourselves. The other’s reality transplants our own. We become a secondary figure while the person, situation, or being we are sympathizing with becomes primary. We can even take on someone else’s illnesses or conditions.

For instance, when I was a child, I had a dozen or so allergies. After I entered therapy as a client in my early twenties, my therapist suggested that I was carrying these allergies for my family members. She conducted a guided meditation in which I “returned” the allergies to their rightful owners. Within a few weeks, my family members started to complain of newly emerged allergies. Myself? I’ve only been afflicted with hay fever in the fall since then.

Yet another common example involves the sudden disappearance of your own reality and the just as immediate appearance of someone else’s. How often have you experienced one of these events?

Sympathy is reactionary. Rather than sensing another’s reality and creating a bond, we go the extra step. We take on or even “fix” their discomfort by acting it out ourselves. This results in a smothering of ourselves and is actually not in integrity to the other person either, who must eventually help themselves if they are to address the problem.

As you can imagine, the fact that we can absorb others’ energies poses some difficult questions. What are we supposed to do when we are ill? Should we treat the disease or “give it back” to someone else, much as I did with my familial allergies? If we sense another person in distress, do we even want to help them or are we going to end up with their issues as they end up without them? These are some of the concerns visited upon the sympathetic person, which can be encapsulated in the word “enmeshment,” the state of being entangled so completely that it’s hard to tell where you end and someone or something else begins.

Personalizing

When we are personalizing a situation, a process that therapists often call personal distress or personalizing instead of empathizing, we aren’t experiencing the other’s issues at all. Rather than sensing their direct experience, we are feeling only our own feelings, needs, issues, and reactions. However, we believe we are relating to the others’ reality, although in fact we are using their pain as an excuse to dredge up our own or are using their situation as an excuse to talk about a similar one we have gone through. Of course, empathy often involves sharing our own experiences as a way to calm or soothe another. Personalization is a problem when the main reason we are “empathizing” is to put the focus on ourself, thus ignoring the other.

We might still hug the other person. We might still conjure up feelings of care or understanding for others or a situation. But we cannot truly understand what the other person is going through, nor will the other person believe that we really “get” them.

I have frequently experienced this situation. I have watched a narcissist sob as I talked about the death of a loved one, but I never had the sense that the person felt or “got” me. Rather, I felt like they were using my personal pain as a way to hook into their own reservoir of distress. I also sensed that they were acting in such a way as to either impress me or grab all the attention for themselves.

Sometimes we find ourselves personalizing another’s pain and get overwhelmed by our own similar experience. I remember once listening to a friend’s sorrow; she had just miscarried. I started crying, but not really out of concern for her. My friend’s miscarriage stimulated my grief at having miscarried months before. I consciously pretended that my concern was for her but spend time later dealing with my own previously hidden grief. Next time I saw her, I was able to be present for my friend’s pain. I didn’t “use” it for my own emotional processing. Looking back, I wish I had simply told her that her story struck close to home and that I could be a better friend if I called her later, after I cleared my own undealt-with emotions.

Imagination

Some people confuse imagination with compassionate empathy, usually because they want to care but simply cannot. While we can perform make-believe empathic behaviors such as crying with someone, sighing at their pain, or laughing along in celebration, there is a hollow tone to conceptualized empathy. Of course, imagining what someone else is going through can help us eventually relate to them. If we cannot get to a point of truly relating, however, we risk our integrity. We lead the other on. They might start to think we understand and expect that our actions will be supportive, and then wonder why we continue on as if nothing had ever happened.

I once worked with a couple who were on the brink of divorce. She insisted that he wasn’t empathic, even though he appeared to be kind and considerate. He nodded his head when she was sharing, and he leaned forward, holding her hand, when she was upset. The wife insisted, however, that his care wasn’t genuine.

Finally the husband admitted that he had no idea about his wife’s emotions. “I grew up in a house where feelings weren’t allowed,” he shared. “I guess I’ve learned how to play the part.”

The husband’s behavior worked for him in shallow relationships, such as at work or the health club. In his everyday world, everyone believed him to be compassionate and caring. But his wife could feel that he wasn’t able to bond with her. The husband needed to do deep work in therapy if he was to unlock his own emotions, for without these, he wouldn’t be able to relate empathically.

Pity

Pity is another substitute for empathy. When we pity someone, we feel sorry for them (and this can apply to ourselves as well). This stance automatically places us in a hierarchical, top-down position and disempowers the other person (or the part of ourselves that is in need of empathy). It can also cost us real energy.

Think about the last time someone pitied you, sending you cringe-
worthy “poor you” vibes. Rather than feeling cared about, you probably felt even worse about the problem you were experiencing, as well as inadequate to address it. While we aren’t responsible for everything that happens to us, we’ll never recover from a trauma if we remain lost in the shadows of “poor me.” We’ll act like a victim and, at the same time, establish a cycle of entitlement in which we believe that because we are being victimized, others owe us.

I once worked with a woman who had been sexually abused while growing up. This is a horrifying situation, and I felt deep compassion for her. A few months into our work, however, I started to notice that her stories of abuse got wilder and wilder. In fact, outside of a Hollywood screenplay, they simply weren’t physically possible. While I could empathize with the events that had a ring of truth, I couldn’t connect with those that seemed so far out.

Finally she yelled at me, incensed that I wasn’t providing her with enough pity. “You and the rest of the world owe me for what I’ve gone through!” she screamed.

Years later, she admitted that she embellished her memories with all her therapists and friends in order to get attention. She cared more about having people feel sorry for her than revealing her real problems. Basing their interactions on false information, her surrounding caregivers couldn’t give her what she really needed. In fact, she was treated like a little girl instead of a functioning adult who could improve her own life. After trying for so many years, her life conditions went downward, not upward. Pity obscures the true needs and prevents the healing effects of empathy.

The other potential disaster area involved in pity is that when pitying another, we can easily end up carrying their energy. While we’re sending care to someone who is in a pitiful state, it’s easy for them to take advantage of our “poor you” attitude. They will simply agree to our unspoken offer and send us their problems.

Energy is energy. When we send another person compassion, we are sending pure love. The other can choose to accept or reject it, but the compassion doesn’t return to us. It is an energy that keeps on giving at no cost to us unless we also choose to follow up with action. Pity, on the other hand, has a hook. Think of it as a beam of light with a hook at the end holding a bucket. This light strand plunges through another’s energy field and body, and if the person really doesn’t want to deal with their issues, they fill the bucket with themselves. When the light beam retracts, can you guess where that sludge gets dumped? (Feel it inside you yet?) It’s important to ask ourselves if we really want to be potentially “gifted” with another’s problems, as we can’t fix a problem that is not our own. While we can support others as they care for themselves, we can’t do it for them.

Emotional Contagion

Empathy is not sympathy, imagination, or pity. Neither is it emotional contagion. Sometimes we find ourselves getting caught up in an emotional frenzy. Everyone in a crowd is crying or laughing or having an out-of-body religious experience, and so are we.

These enflamed emotions only go so deep and are part of what I call group consciousness. A group of people can share emotions. Recently I worked with a young girl who attended a school that had lost three young people in a car accident. This girl, who hadn’t known her three peers, felt the grief so deeply that she hadn’t been able to eat or sleep for weeks. Her mother was puzzled when she learned this behavior was occurring throughout the school. While the mom empathized with her daughter’s emotional struggles, as well as those the other kids were experiencing, she sensed they had gone too far.

The daughter was literally enmeshed in a group energy that promoted grief and misery. After I helped her unhook from this using some of the tools I offer in part II, I encouraged her to sense her actual feelings. The girl felt sad but not miserable. She went home that night and began to eat and sleep again.

Hyperoptimism

Another area I want to address is optimism, especially being hyper- or overoptimistic, the state that promotes mania or a seemingly blissed-out disassociation. Many people expect that empaths are more optimistic or happy than the less empathic, but this is not true. According to studies, emotional empathy does not necessarily lead to agreeableness, tranquility, or optimism. It is, plain and simple, the ability to relate to others when examined only from a human-to-human perspective.36 To confuse empathy with the more ecstatic emotional states can create a distorted point of view about the true nature of empathy and of what we are supposed to act like when we are being empathic.

For instance, we might meet a highly energetic or gregarious individual and assume that they are empathic, only to discover that they lack a shred of understanding or compassion. While they may be relentlessly upbeat and hence seem capable of the kind of support a genuinely empathetic person can offer, they may, in fact, have great difficulty making meaningful contact; the outgoing personality can serve as a protective shield that actually precludes the ability to feel what another feels.

There are a variety of reasons for the shielding often involved in hyperoptimism. The over-optimistic/low empath might actually be overly sensitive. That armor might be the only way they think (unconsciously) they can separate from others and not dissolve into an emotional puddle. As well, their parents might have been very appearance oriented, modeling the belief that emotional safety or personal preservation is dependent on maintaining a sense of separation. No matter the reason, this cut-off coping mechanism leads to loneliness and isolation.

Sometimes people really think that if they act happy they can make a sad person feel better. They might feel uncomfortable with another’s pain and try to alleviate it—for themselves. Or they might actually be empathizing but not know what to do; in their nervousness, they act a little goofy. Yet other hyperoptimistic individuals might be manipulating in order to be liked or to get what they want. They also may be in the manic state of a syndrome such as bipolar disorder, and this brings us to our last category.

Mental Maladjustment

Like the topic of sympathy, this last item on our list is important enough to discuss in depth, so I have added a section on mental maladjustment in the form of Appendix 2. For now, it is sufficient to consider that certain people are incapable of empathy, while others use the empathic process in a maladjusted or manipulative way in order to meet their own needs.

For instance, I once had a friend who was enormously emotional and seemingly caring. He encouraged me to call him anytime I had a problem, and for quite some time, I did. It took me a couple of years (I’m slow), but eventually I noticed that the conversations that started with him emotionally “getting” me ended with him pouring his heart out to me and me agreeing to do him a favor. Once alerted, I started to watch his behavior with our mutual friends. Sure enough, this man’s genuine empathic gift had warped into a disturbing ability to get others to hear his problems and deliver favors for him.

empathic exploration 3 What Isn’t Empathy?

While reading through this chapter, you may have related to certain qualities that seemed like empathy but were not. As you answer the following questions, reflect upon any that you respond to with a yes, then see if you can figure out which of the seven types of empathic disguises they might be. Note that some of the questions relate to experiences within you. Other questions describe what you might have gone through with others. The correct labels for these experiences are listed after the exploration.

1. Have you ever felt like you couldn’t tell the difference between your own feelings and someone else’s?

2. Have you ever felt like you were drained of your own emotions or needs—like someone else had literally taken them on?

3. Have you ever had an emotional reaction to someone else’s tragedy but felt like you were relating to your own trauma, not the other’s situation?

4. Did you ever sense that someone’s empathic reaction to you was hollow—like they were using your hardship or joyous expression to relive their own circumstances?

5. Did you ever walk away from an interaction with someone feeling like you had just faked your response?

6. Have you shared a success or challenge with someone and had the sense that though their empathic reaction appeared correct, it left you empty and disconnected from them?

7. Have you felt so sorry for someone going through a hard time that you felt compelled to fix everything for them?

8. Have you ever sensed that someone was so over-the-top in their desire to help you cope with an issue that they “took over”?

9. Have you had the experience of being so swept away in someone else’s enthusiasm that you couldn’t sense your own inner reality?

10. Were you ever part of a large group of people who were so devoted to a cause that you couldn’t separate from their intensity and analyze what was really going on?

11. Are you aware of any times you’ve forced yourself to be “up” just to keep others afloat?

12. Have you ever spent time with someone who is so gregarious you can’t help but wonder if they are being real or not? (You suspect they are not.)

13. Did you ever sense that you only related to someone else’s life situation to get attention for your own?

14. Have you ever had a crazy-making feeling when someone else has appeared to be empathetic, caring, and giving only to make you do something for them?

Debriefing Your Empathic Exploration

Following are the types of empathy disguises that correspond to the questions you have just considered:

Truth be told, the empathic gifts are plentiful among the intuitive abilities. In order to safely and wisely develop your own gifts, assure that you don’t misuse them, and respond intelligently to people who might be misusing their own, you must know what types of empathic gifts you have, which is the focus of the next chapter.

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