The Art of Empathy (43 page)

Of course, if the bully has power over you or has found a gang (gangs of bullies can goad each other into shocking displays of mindless cruelty), then you'll need support. Just remember that bullying is not a show of strength; it's actually a display of severe boundary impairment, and it's something to be very careful around.

People have a lot of bully-lore about fighting back, but bullies expect a fight, and they're ready for it. They're stuck in a feedback loop with anger, and if you engage clumsily, you'll make things worse. Bullies need to learn how to feel shame properly. As we all know, shame can't come from the outside; it has to be authentic to the individual. Empathy training in a safe space, mediation, and active engagement in reparations (see
NoBully.com
for ideas) can help bullies reenter the community and become truly commendable human beings again. Certainly, their misdeeds and abuses need to be stopped, but bullying is a sign of emotional dysfunction and an empathy deficit; bullies need to be retrained in how to function socially, emotionally, and empathically.

When I look at bullies, I see a hall of mirrors that reaches back to antiquity to show us just how little understanding we have of emotions—especially of anger. Yes, a bully needs to take responsibility for what he or she has done, but considering the emotional training we all receive, I'm not surprised by bullying and social violence at all. It's just one more example of the very poor Emotion Regulation skills most people have. If you can look at it that way—as a skills issue—it's easier to view a bully as a person in need, rather than as a fiend or a monster.

Something that can really help bullies is to engage them in a form of aggression that includes rules, boundaries, and honor. Aikido and other marital arts, fencing, kickboxing—even some video game communities—can help teach people how to channel aggression in safe, rhythmic, and strongly thresholded ways. The problem isn't that anger exists or that bullies express anger; it's that the bully has no respect for boundaries and no honorable practice for anger. If you can address the actual emotional dysfunction that's occurring, you can help bullies restore their shame to its rightful position, learn how to manage their anger honorably, and learn how to feel healthy contentment once again. I speak to you as a severely bullied child who became a bully extraordinaire—there is healing for victims, and there is hope for bullies.

CREATING A SOLID GROUND FOR EMPATHY IN CHILDREN

We know that there are specific things that help children develop healthy empathy: close ties with emotionally and physically responsive central caregivers, intimate interactions with living beings, dramatic and emotive play that helps children cycle into and out of emotions, the development of multiple self-soothing skills, learning lots and lots of stories, and having many opportunities for healthy social interactions. All of these will help children learn intrapersonal and interpersonal empathic skills. But beyond that, you really have to pay attention to who the child is as an individual.

In interviewing empathic people for this book, I've asked: “What made you feel comfortable when you were a kid? What helped you regulate your
arousal? What helped you understand people and emotions? If you could go back and add something supportive to your young life, what would it be?” I got a lot of answers, but only a few were shared among my many interviewees. The only universal needs were having animal friends, having physical freedom, and having numerous outlets for physical activity. Often, these needs for freedom and movement were met at the same time, through a bike, roller skates, stilts, a skateboard, a scooter, or some other form of transportation that enabled the child to travel freely. And some children connected all three of these needs by spending most of their time with a beloved horse.

But the rest of the answers from my interviewees were contradictory. Some empathic children flourished in school, and some (like me) were unrelievedly miserable in the crowded, noisy, stillness-enforcing environment of public school. Some sensitive children loved to be in dance recitals and musical groups, while others absolutely hated being forced to perform in public. Some children loved camping and nature, while others preferred reading books indoors for hours on end. Some delighted in building things (and taking things apart), while others preferred creating intricate drawings or building fictional worlds. Some loved amusement parks and parties, while others were overstimulated and overwhelmed by these exact same things. Some took to water and swimming like otters, while others could take it or leave it. Beyond the need for physical freedom, activity, and animal friends, I didn't find any other shared empathic requirements. Everyone is unique.

However, I did ask specifically about artistic expression and soon realized how strange my own upbringing had been, because I got a lot of blank looks. Most people didn't grow up with music in their homes, with art supplies in more than one room, and with a backyard where extensive fort building and moat digging regularly occurred. This is a problem, because artistic expression and physical expression are specific healing activities for highly receptive hyperempaths. They are also specific emotional-awareness activities for people whose empathic skills are currently low. In
Chapter 6
, when we observed your home, I asked you to look for your own artistic expression, and I referred to the often sad and neglected art supplies in the back of the closet. If you're not doing your art because you don't have the time, that's different from not doing your art because you've never been shown how to
make
the time. This is something you can learn with the help of children.

IF YOU CAN WALK, YOU CAN DANCE, IF YOU CAN TALK, YOU CAN SING, AND IF YOU CAN CLAP, YOU CAN DRUM

You may have seen some form of this Zimbabwean saying. I heard it on the first day of an African drumming class, and it really helped relax all of us students; it took the specter of perfectionism out of the experience so that we could all have fun. And we did. Art is fun, it's natural, and it's a part of being human. Art is also an important part of empathy development, because it helps people develop stronger Emotion Contagion, Empathic Accuracy, Emotion Regulation, and Perspective Taking skills in safe, consequence-free zones of discovery. Art can help you try on emotions and attitudes, feel things intensely, and work through deep emotions and difficult situations with the help of whichever medium calls to you. Art is an empathic skill-building tool for people of all ages.

Art is also available everywhere to everyone; it doesn't have to be professionalized or taught by experts. Art can be anything that helps you express yourself emotively in safe and tangible ways. With children, you can create simple art stations at home or outdoors—water tables, sand tables, paint easels, or clay areas—where you and your children can do art together in such a way that both of you get your quiet time while still being together. If you can sit quietly with a child and draw in coloring books or build free-form structures or paint—whatever calls to you—you can model yet another selfsoothing behavior for your child. Art, drama, literature, music, and creating things are specific empathy-building activities that you can provide for children and for yourself.

SUPPORTING EMPATHIC DEVELOPMENT FOR EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE

Your capacity for empathy develops throughout your lifetime. As such, there isn't an age when—
boom
—you either have empathy or you don't. Empathy is a malleable and fluid set of skills that you can share with babies and children, with teens and adults, and with elders. In this chapter, I provided lots of ideas for working with emotions and empathy with kids, but games and stories, art and fun, dramatic play and emotive interactions are not confined to childhood. In fact, they shouldn't be. Empathy belongs to all of us, and these deceptively simple games can support empathic awareness at any age. The development of empathy is a lifetime adventure.

C
HAPTER
10

Empathy at Work

Excelling in the Art of Emotion Work

I'M JUST GOING to say this outright: the workplace is problematic empathically. I notice that of all the places where empathy is developed or impeded, the workplace is one of the most obvious culprits in the reduction of emotional awareness and empathy. People focus a lot of energy on schools in terms of providing an empathy-building and antibullying curriculum. But I'd like to focus a great deal more energy on the workplace, since it is by far the most time-intensive aspect of our lives. School obviously occurs during a crucial and formative span in our lives, but unlike work, school ends after twelve years (unless we go on to college, though even then it might only go on for another two to eight years). We might spend twenty years in school, but we'll probably spend forty years or more in the workplace.

Work is where we are: if we work a normal forty-hour week, we spend more time at work than we do with our families or at home. In essence, we
live
at work. As adults, the only thing that we spend more time on than work is sleeping. And yet the world of work has not found ways to create a healthy emotional, empathic, or aesthetic environment for us. If you think about it, the difference between how we approach work and how we approach sleep in terms of the relative importance of each in our lives is kind of bizarre. For instance, in almost any-sized town, you'll find a number of home and bedding stores where you can buy hundreds of different mattresses and choose bedding in nearly any style, from contemporary to sensual to wildly artistic. The bed and bedding industries continually send messages about how vital and important your sleep life is; they've created a competitive sleep luxury market with increasingly expensive beds and sheets with thread counts that
reach absurd numbers. The constant message is that your sleep comfort and luxury are crucial to the quality of your life.

Contrast this to your local office supply store—where in most places, small mom-and-pop shops have been replaced by large, impersonal chains. Use your Einfühlung capacity to feel your way into and around a typical office supply store. If you want to organize your office or cubicle, you have only a few choices—usually there are items in black, smoke, or silver mesh, though some designers have created color-coordinated office supplies for what's being called the
home office
(which annoyingly includes canning, sewing, and scrapbook supplies—
sigh).
But in the more serious office supply section, nothing is truly original or even particularly attractive. Look at the mouse pads, which is one place where many people can personalize their workstations. Depending on the store, you'll find some flowers, some pictures of space, some kittens or puppies, or perhaps a print of some painting you've seen before. Even the art is pedestrian, and all of it says, “These are nonthreatening deviations from total conformity.” Even though you're using your own money to set up a space where you'll spend the lion's share of your life, your choices are few.

If you're lucky enough to be able to choose your own chair and desk, you might be able to find something fairly comfortable, but it won't be beautiful or artistic, really. The concept of comfort exists in high-end chairs and ergonomic workstations, but the comfort is not about you and your empathic, aesthetic, unique needs as much as it is about making you a better working machine. Of course, in defense of the workplace as an entity, your purpose
is
to be a cog in the machine of the workplace, and you
are
being paid to perform. However, the workplace as an entity has not yet become aware that we are spending the greater portion of our days, our weeks, and our lives away from home, away from our families, and away from an aesthetically pleasing, emotionally supportive, and empathically welcoming environment.

Please put your anthropologist's hat back on and empathically observe your workplace and your office or workstation in the way you observed your home in
Chapter 6
. Ask yourself whether this place supports you as a unique human being? Is your workplace an extension of your home environment in that it supports your sensory, social, and emotional needs? Or does your workstation create problems for you? Is your workplace a healthy terrarium for you? If not, why not?

As you study your workplace, look at it specifically in terms of the thresholds I mentioned in
Chapter 6
: Do you have the privacy you need to do your work? Do you have the room you need? Is your sensory environment supportive, or do sounds, scents, lights, or commotion impede your ability to focus? Is your workstation organized and functional? Are there separate areas for you to take breaks or rest or eat? If not, why not?

If you have the power to do so, see if you can make changes to your workstation so that you can feel more physically and aesthetically comfortable. If your workplace is filled with open-minded and caring people, you may want to include everyone in the process, so that all of your colleagues can become more comfortable—that's an ideal situation. But even in a deeply imperfect workplace, you can use thresholding to create privacy and protection for yourself—even in a noisy room where a cloth-covered cubicle divider is your only wall.

I do have a small warning about thresholding at work: some research suggests that the act of walking through doorways or thresholds has a kind of memory-erasing effect. In an experimental study done at the University of Notre Dame,
⁵³
psychology researchers discovered that the act of entering new rooms has a strange cognitive-boundary effect, such that people often forget what they were thinking or doing before they crossed the threshold. The hypothesis is that crossing a threshold or walking through a doorway creates the appearance of a new cognitive event or environment that requires quick orienting behaviors and the clearing of items in short-term memory. This reorienting process may also relate to the problems people have with multitasking. As you probably know, recent research is showing that most people can't multitask at all, even (and often
especially)
if they think they're good at it—their performance actually decreases on every task each time they switch tasks. It could be that multitaskers are continually crossing cognitive event boundaries and losing their train of thought. As I think back to the thresholds I used in my writing cubicles, they did have that event boundary effect, which is why they were so great: people often came in to chatter about something meaningless, but as they crossed into my little cubicle space, their faces would often go blank for an instant, which gave me the chance to refocus them on work. Thresholds are awesome!