The Art of Empathy (29 page)

As you consider the physical forms of thresholding you already use (we all create thresholds in some way), go outside of your home and look
empathically and aesthetically at the threshold you've created at your real front door. Does the threshold to your home say everything you want it to say to others? Is it orderly, inviting, and attractive? And most important, does it help people make a clear distinction, as they cross your threshold, between the bustle of the outside world and the empathy-supporting sanctuary of your home? If not, why not?

EVALUATING YOUR EMPATHIC SANCTUARY

Your home can be a getaway and a sanctuary for you—a place where you can live openly as your real self and be surrounded by the uniquely healing influences and practices that refresh, delight, and rejuvenate you. Your home can be the recharging and resourcing station you need if you're going to develop and maintain your emotional awareness and your empathic skills in what can be an emotionally confusing world. Your home can be a specifically nurturing habitat for the specific needs of your unique organism; it can be a threshold between the outside world and your inner sanctuary.

Notice that I qualified each of the sentences in the preceding paragraph with the word
can.
Yes, your home
can
be these things, but if you've never seen yourself as an empathic healing presence in a world that needs you—and if you've never considered that you have the right to be a happy and
healthy
empath—then your home might be kind of a drag right now. It might be yet another thing that's always clamoring for your attention. It might be a place that doesn't honor your unique needs or your unique sensitivities.

If that's true, congratulations. You've discovered trouble in an environment where you actually have control and where you have the right and the power to make changes. When we look at your workplace in
Chapter 10
, you won't often have that power; so at work, we'll have to make whatever changes we can in an imperfect situation. But in your home? We're golden. In your home, even if you share it with parents, children, or roommates, you can carve out a private space for yourself and start to create a specific terrarium that will meet the needs of your unique empathic self.

If you can't—if your home environment is currently unsupportive and there's not much that you can do—you can still use your empathic mindfulness skills, resourcing skills, and thresholding abilities to create a portable empathic sanctuary inside your own body. You can also reach out for the support of sensitive and empathic relationships—through artistic expression, intellectual pursuits, movement, nature, animals, and other empathic people.
Empathic and social support can be lifelines that will help you transition out of a currently unsupportive environment and into a place where you can live and breathe as your authentic self.

As we move outward from your body, into your home, and into the social world, we'll focus on the quality of your relationships. When they're healthy and supportive, your relationships can facilitate your emotional and empathic development in marvelous ways.

C
HAPTER
7

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.