The Art of Empathy (30 page)

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.

INTRODUCING EMOTION WORK

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.

As you look at the emotional styles of your friends and loved ones, I'd also like you to look for trends in all six dimensions. I asked you about your compatibility in these dimensions because I want you to begin thinking about what a lack of compatibility means for your emotion workload. If there's a large discrepancy between your emotional styles and the styles of your loved ones, how does that discrepancy play out in the area of emotion work? In the area of Resilience, do you or your loved ones do a lot of work to help each other recover (instead of developing internal sources of resilience)? In the area of Outlook, do you or your loved ones work to jolly each other or help each other become more serious? In the area of Social Intuition, do you or your loved ones have to constantly translate the emotional and social world for each other? In the area of Self-awareness, do you or your loved ones work to help each other become more aware of emotions, sensations, and internal realities, or do you work to help each other manage overwhelming interior sensitivities? In the area of Sensitivity to Context, do you or your loved ones work to keep each other tuned in, or do you work to help each other relax and tune out when social contexts are confusing or overwhelming? And in terms of Attention, do you or your loved ones work to keep each other focused and task-oriented, or do you help each other lighten up and learn how to relax?

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.