The Art of Empathy (50 page)

• Be non-judgmental. Don't debate whether suicide is right or wrong, or whether feelings are good or bad. Don't lecture on the value of life.

• Get involved. Become available. Show interest and support.

• Don't dare him or her to do it.

• Don't act shocked. This will put distance between you.

• Don't be sworn to secrecy. Seek support.

• Offer hope that alternatives are available but do not offer glib reassurance.

• Take action. Remove means, such as guns or stockpiled pills.

• Get help from people or agencies specializing in crisis intervention and suicide prevention.

Thank you for your emotional fluency and your willingness to reach out when others are in need.

A
PPENDIX
B

Your Emotional Styles

THE FOLLOWING THERAPEUTIC suggestions address the six dimensions of emotional style that Dr. Richard Davidson has identified in his research. Full descriptions of these practices and the neurological structures associated with each emotional style, which in some cases include changes in living and working environments, can be found in
The Emotional Life of Your Brain,
by Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley.

Resilience
(from slow to recover to fast to recover): Being slow to recover might keep you engaged with a difficult emotion for a possibly uncomfortable amount of time, whereas being fast to recover might speed you through an emotion so quickly that you won't actually gain much emotional depth or the capacity to empathize with others. Richardson suggests traditional Buddhist mindfulness meditations (especially the empathy-focused form called
tonglen
meditation) if you're a little too fast to recover, and cognitive behavioral therapy if your recovery is slow enough to provoke uncomfortably extended periods of emotional activation.

Outlook
(from negative to positive): Richardson doesn't glorify a positive outlook, because it tends to interfere with people's ability to plan for the future, learn from their mistakes, and delay gratification. However, he does note that staying in a continually low mood isn't an optimum situation either. To bring balance to an overly positive outlook, Richardson suggests learning to plan for the future and think things through more carefully as you learn to delay gratification. (I suggest that you request some assistance from your healthy anxiety and your healthy shame as well.) To bring balance to an overly negative outlook, Richardson suggests intentionally identifying positive things about yourself and others, expressing gratitude regularly, and
complimenting others so you can create healthier social connections based on warm and caring interactions.

Social Intuition
(from socially intuitive to puzzled): People who are socially puzzled also tend to be low in empathic awareness. In order to address people at the puzzled end of this dimension, Richardson suggests a number of different sensitivity-raising and social-interaction exercises to help people become more aware of faces, bodies, nuances, gestures, and social signals. To help people on the opposite end of this dimension relieve their intense social awareness, Richardson suggests reducing social interaction and eye contact, managing overstimulation, and working in the Resilience dimension to move toward the
fast to recover
pole.

Self-awareness
(from self-aware to self-opaque): If you're too self-aware, you might be so attentive to every change in your body, in your thoughts, and in your emotions that you lose track of the external world, or you might become uncomfortably emotionally activated about every change you sense. On the other hand, if you're too self-opaque, you might continually miss important cues about your health, your emotions, your thoughts, and your preferences. Richardson suggests Buddhist mindfulness meditations for both situations, as they may help you become more aware of your inner world in the case of self-opaqueness and more able to calm your reactivity in the case of overactive Self-awareness.

Sensitivity to Context
(from tuned in to tuned out): Being insensitive to context can make people socially inappropriate—they can miss a lot of nuance and become unable to modify their emotional responses in differing situations. There is not a lot of research on this dimension, and Richardson suggests deep breathing and a form of exposure therapy to help people distinguish between different contexts and different levels of emotional activation. For people who are so sensitive to context that they lose track of themselves in social interactions, he suggests that they work in the Self-awareness dimension in order to become more familiar with their own authentic emotions, thoughts, and preferences.

Attention
(from focused to unfocused): Davidson suggests two forms of meditation to address people's capacity for Attention. If people tend to be unfocused, he suggests mindfulness meditations that train them to focus on specific objects for increasing periods of time. However, if people are overly focused and unable to see the big picture or attend to more than one thing at a time, he suggests a meditation practice called
open monitoring,
which helps people open up their focus and become aware of their very awareness itself.

Notes

1
. What is the difference between the words
empathic
and
empathetic?
Right now, they're undergoing a definitional shift, and it is becoming normal in scientific research to use the word
empathic
instead of
empathetic.
However, the two words are interchangeable, as the words
sympathy
and
empathy
tend to be. I prefer the word
empathic
because it relates more specifically to empaths, whereas the word
empathetic
tends to refer to the process of using empathy.

2
. I explore our centuries-long distrust and fear of emotions in my book
The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You.
I track this dysfunction throughout human cultures; in philosophy; in religions and spiritual traditions; in the scientific and industrial revolutions; and into compulsory schooling, modern medicine, psychotherapy, and psychiatry. Our deep troubles with emotions are everywhere you look, but luckily, many multidisciplinary theorists are doing wonderful work to bring emotions out of the shadows once again. This book is a part of my continuing contribution to that work.

3
. Altruism is one concept that is making the study of empathy very contentious, because it is currently being looked at through a contested avenue of Darwinist thought that assumes self-interest at every level, from the selfish genes of Richard Dawkins' (and others) ideology to the self-centered, winner-take-all frame that some political thinkers assert as the natural truth of human behavior. In these ideologies, empathy and altruism are often viewed with deep suspicion, and this suspicion has actually impeded empathy research for many decades. Accordingly, some of the most interesting research on empathy has been done not on humans, but on the great apes, by primatologist Frans de Waal. If you read empathy research done on humans, you'll empathically sense a thread of defensiveness about the altruistic nature of empathy, because when they research empathy, many scientists have to confront the faction of Darwinists who think that empathy and altruism can only exist in relation to what the central actor is getting out of it. For a startling take on the subject, which proposes an empathy-requiring theory of group selection and evolution instead of individual selection, read
Edward O. Wilson's
The Social Conquest of Earth
(Liveright Publishing, 2012). The story of evolution, empathy, and altruism is still being written.

4
. For instance, in the work of German researcher Doris Bischof-Köhler and American researcher Allison Gopnik, among others

5
. McLaren, Karla. “Are Men Less Able to Feel Emotions?” March 24, 2010.
http://karlamclaren.com/are-men-less-able-to-feel-emotions/
.

6
. You'll run smack into this valencing if you observe children's toys and clothing: girls get pink, lacy, movement-inhibiting clothes that openly suggest that their work in life is to become pretty and alluring. Beyond the age of two, it's hard to find building toys, math toys, or intellect-developing toys aimed at girls; it's all princesses, ponies, makeup, jewelry, and playing house. If girls want to run and play hard or learn to fight with a sword, they're going to have to shop in the boys' section, and their wishes will probably be challenged as unfeminine. Boys, on the other hand, get blue, rugged, activity-enhancing clothes that tell them their work is to be active and tough. From early infancy onward, boys are encouraged to use their bodies, build things, and learn to fight with as many different weapons as possible. If boys want to create art, or care for animals and babies, or learn to cook, they're going to have to shop in the girls' section, and their wishes might be challenged as unacceptably feminine, or flat-out refused.

7
. British psychopathologist Simon Baron-Cohen claims that autistics are unempathic due to a malfunction in their mirror neurons. However, in 2007, Swiss neuroscientists Henry and Kamilla Markram and colleague proposed the “intense world theory” of autism, in which the central focus was on autistic
hypersensitivity,
rather than on a lack of awareness or insensitivity. Then, in 2010, Israeli neuroscientist Ilan Dinstein and colleagues studied mirror neuron responses in autistic adults and found them to be normal. Dinstein proposed that autism might not have anything to do with mirror neurons, but might instead involve “noisy brain networks” that scramble incoming sensory data, making the deciphering of social input more difficult (but not due to any lack of empathic capacity). Added to this is the writing of autistic youth and adults themselves, which clearly chronicles their intense emotional and social sensitivities. For some excellent first-person accounts of autism and empathy, see
AutismandEmpathy.com
, a site created by autistic advocate Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg.

These more inclusive inquiries are helping us understand that hypersensitivity and sensory integration issues make social cues harder to read and organize for many autistic people, which is why it can appear that some autistic people lack empathy. They don't; in fact, hyperawareness of others (and of multiple sensory aspects of their surroundings) can cause such overwhelm that many autistic people will shut down in order to self-regulate. This can appear unempathic, but it's usually a function of hypersensitivity and, often, hyperempathy.

8
. When I use the word
autistic
as a descriptor, rather than saying “person with autism,” I am following the lead of the autistic advocates who are framing their struggle as one
of civil rights and fundamental identity (rather than disease). However, if you and I were talking together, and you preferred another way of describing your own autism, then I would certainly defer to your wishes. For a good community discussion of this choice of terminology, see
www.journeyswithautism.com/2012/04/25/theproblem-with-person-first-language/
and
www.thinkingautismguide.com/2011/11/person-first-language-why-it-matters.html
.

9
. “Ableism is a form of discrimination or prejudice against individuals with physical, mental, or developmental disabilities that is characterized by the belief that these individuals need to be fixed or cannot function as full members of society (Castañeda & Peters, 2000). As a result of these assumptions, individuals with disabilities are commonly viewed as being abnormal rather than as members of a distinct minority community (Olkin & Pledger, 2003; Reid & Knight, 2006). Because disability status has been viewed as a defect rather than a dimension of difference, disability has not been widely recognized as a multicultural concern by the general public as well as by counselor educators and practitioners.” Smith, Laura, Pamela F. Foley, and Michael P. Chaney, “Addressing Classism, Ableism, and Heterosexism in Counselor Education,”
Journal of Counseling & Development
86 (2010): 303–309. From
http://disabledfeminists.com/2010/11/19/what-is-ableism-five-things-about-ableism-you-should-know/
, accessed August 10, 2012.

10
. Criminal behavior is socially defined, and identified criminals are even more socially defined by their lack of access to money, influence, and social capital, not to mention their racial characteristics, which determine in large part whether they will be arrested and charged or enter into the criminal justice system at all. I have strong empathic reservations about the whole category of psychopathy, since definitions change based on the source, while researchers and clinicians disagree about antisocial personality disorder, narcissism, and borderline traits. To my eye, the entire subject is rife with problematic interpretations of antisocial behaviors that might also be applicable to, for instance, outsiders, disabled people, minorities, artists, monks, geniuses, and visionaries.

11
. For a grounded and humane discussion of psychopathic personalities and treatment options, Dr. Nancy McWilliams's
Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process
(Guilford Press, 2011) is a wonderful resource. In it, McWilliams notes that two powerful underlying motivations for people with psychopathic tendencies are (1) not to appear weak and (2) not to feel any envy (see my
empathic description of envy
). In terms of impediments to the development of empathy in children, there's a tragic early condition that can arise when babies aren't attended to skillfully or empathically. In some children, poor or unskilled early nurturing (and, of course, abuse) can interfere with secure attachment and create a condition called Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD). RAD children don't develop a sense of trust or reliance on their caretakers and often learn to manipulate them just to get their basic needs met. For a RAD child, love, closeness, and empathy may feel alien, untrustworthy, or even dangerous.
One hypothesis is that RAD children who don't receive early intervention might grow up to be distrustful and manipulative and might develop an almost pathological unwillingness to appear weak, needy, or envious. One hypothesis is that psychopathic people might have been children who learned how to survive without love, caring attention, or empathy.