The Art of Empathy (51 page)

12
. American psychologist Robert Titchener coined the word
empathy
in 1909 (source:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empathy/
).

13
. Vischer, Robert, et al. (reprint and translation from the original German). “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics.”
Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893
(Texts and Documents Series), pp. 89–123. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art, 1993.

14
. See my two-part essay “Empaths on the Autism Spectrum.” October 2011.
http://karlamclaren.com/empaths-on-the-autism-spectrum-part-1
/.

15
. “Empathic accuracy is the measure of one's skill in empathic inference [your ability to read the emotions, thoughts, and intentions of others].” From Ickes, W. (ed) (1997).
Empathic Accuracy.
New York, NY: Guildford Press, 1992 (p. 2).

16
. The term
display rules
is from P. Ekman and W. V. Friesen. “The Repertoire of Nonverbal Behavior: Categories, Origins, Usage, and Coding.”
Semiotica
1 (1969): 49–98.

17
. Seubert, J. and C. Reganbogen. “I Know How You Feel: Good Social Skills Depend on Picking Up Other People's Moods—A Feat the Brain Performs by Combining Numerous Sensory Cues.”
Scientific American Mind,
March/April 2012.

18
. It also may have much to do with language acquisition, as research on deaf and blind children in Australia in 2004 suggested that emotion-recognition and emotion-understanding abilities were impaired in both populations, but that deaf and hearing-impaired children raised
without
a natural language (sign language) had the most trouble with both tasks, whereas children raised in a signing-rich environment had an easier time with them. For blind and visually impaired children, the ability to hear vocal tone and rhythm supported both emotional awareness tasks (and both abilities tended to be higher in visually impaired children than in hearing-impaired children); however, being unable to visually receive information about changes in gestures, positioning, and facial expressions impeded both emotion tasks. In general, these emotional impediments lessened over time (and with specific emotion-recognition and emotion-understanding training) in both populations. From Dyck, M. J., C. Farrugia, I. M. Shochet, and M. Holmes-Brown. “Emotion Recognition/Understanding Ability in Hearing or Vision-Impaired Children: Do Sounds, Sights, or Words Make the Difference?”
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
45, no. 4 (2044): 789–800.

19
. Bischof-Köhler, D. “Empathy and Self-Recognition in Phylogenetic and Ontogenetic Perspective.”
Emotion Review
4, no. 1 (January 2012): 40–48.

20
. Being a fiercely stubborn and scathing social critic helps cut through this endless emotional subterfuge, though I have no idea how I would know this, since my own childhood was one of delicate good manners and rainbow fairy tales—
snort.

21
. I have deep concerns about the way this distinction is being used to sort people into greater or lesser levels of humanity. For instance, in his book
Zero Degrees of Empathy
(Allen Lane, 2011), British psychopathologist Simon Baron-Cohen categorizes autistics as being affectively empathic yet cognitively impaired in empathy, and he places psychopaths on the opposite end of this continuum (where psychopaths allegedly have no capacity to empathize affectively but can do so cognitively). This theorizing is very alarming in its willingness both to brand people as psychopaths (which is a rare condition and not completely understood) and to continually exclude autistics from the realm of normal humanity. As a disability rights advocate and friend of many autistic youth and adults, I can't state strongly enough how dangerous this theory is to the lives of autistic people, who are often wildly empathic rather than less so—both cognitively
and
affectively. As an empath, it is very easy to see that autistics are absolutely empaths (and often hyperempaths), though their sensory-processing differences can make their ability to decipher social cues problematic.

My problem with the categories of affective and cognitive empathy is certainly based on social justice (in that they are used to classify people as less than human), but it is also based on empathic awareness of the actual processes of empathy. In my experience, affective and cognitive empathy are not separate or separable states; rather, I see cognitive empathy as a function of affective empathy, in that you can't effectively perform the process that some people identify as cognitive empathy unless you already have the capacity to
feel
what's going on. In my view, the capacity to separate oneself from the direct feeling and to stand away from the direct experience (and to view it from a kind of emotional eagle's-eye view) is a function of Emotion Regulation and Perspective Taking
added to
a preexisting capacity for Emotion Contagion. Simply put: if you can “cognitively” appreciate the emotional perspective of another, I propose that you already have the “affective” capacity to recognize, share, and understand emotions.

22
. I've worked one-on-one with men in maximum-security prisons, including murderers and lifers—I actually looked for psychopathy—yet I didn't find a lack of empathy there. I understand how vital it is to isolate cruel and brutal people from the rest of humanity, and to place them decidedly in a specific category of evil or irretrievable brokenness, but empathically speaking, I am not able to do so in ways that are intellectually and empathically grounded. I'm still studying this, as I have done since toddlerhood, when I endured years of extended physical contact with a person whose clear intention was to dehumanize, control, and harm me. I have strong empathic reservations about identifying seemingly unempathic people as nonhuman—especially since, through the everyday act of “othering” people, you and I can easily make ourselves scathingly unempathic about the plight of people we've identified as our enemies (or, hello, as psychopaths).

23
. de Waal, F.
The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society.
New York: Harmony, 2009.

24
. “Studies examining children's concern for others had previously focused on babies' sensitivities to people in distress. At the University of California, Berkeley, researcher Alison Gopnik wanted to find out when children discover that other people feel differently than they do—a prerequisite for empathy. . . . This ability to acknowledge other people's feelings—even when they differ from your own—is essential to understanding when (and how) people want to be comforted. ‘To become truly empathic,' Gopnik says, ‘you have to say not just “I feel your pain,” but “I feel your pain, and I know it's not my own. I should be helping you, not myself.”'” From Whyte, J. E. “The Emergence of Empathy in Babies,”
https://family.go.com/parenting/pkg-toddler/article-825641-the-emergence-of-empathy-in-babies-t/
.

25
. The episode, which was called “The Empath,” focused on a young mute woman who could physically pull the pain and disease out of others and into her own body. Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy were abducted and put through a series of tortures by alien scientists who wanted to see if the empath, Gem, would sacrifice her own health for the life of another. In the later series
Star Trek: The Next Generation,
a female officer named Deanna Troi was the ship's counselor from an empathic and telepathic race called Betazoids. Like Spock before her, Troi was half-human, and much of her story revolved around trying to fit into both cultures—with the fully empathic and telepathic Betazoids, who didn't require spoken language, and with the unempathic and nontelepathic humans, who regularly used language to avoid, hide, or lie about their emotions.

26
. This section about Howard Gardner's work first appeared on pages 39–41 in my book
The Language of Emotions.
There is some controversy about Gardner's work because his categories of intelligence are not quantifiable, and many researchers feel that these categories can therefore only be looked upon as a kind of philosophical musing about how we define intelligence. That's certainly the way I'm using Gardner's work, but I'm also revisiting it here because it's still the only approach to intelligence that includes emotional and social intelligences as valid and equal parts of cognition.

27
. This reminds me of something I overheard in 2002 at a table full of yoga instructors at the famous Kripalu yoga retreat. I perked up immediately, because they were talking about how doing a very common pose absolutely correctly (the “downward dog” pose) could cause shoulder injuries in women. I was flabbergasted, because I had always heard yoga touted as a magical curative for every possible physical problem. As it turns out, yoga (and meditation) is just like everything else; you need to make sure that the process fits you and that you're not being forced to fit into the process. If you get injured or you're uncomfortable, but people blame you because you're not doing it right, this is almost always a warning: you may be in the presence of true believers but not in the presence of a truly appropriate (for you) practice or technique.

28
. Damasio, A.
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.
New York: Picador, 1994 (pp. 192–194).

29
. Damasio, A.
Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain.
New York: Harcourt, 2003 (pp. 152–155).

30
. Damasio, A.
The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness.
New York: Harvest, 1999 (pp. 61–67).

31
. McLaren, Karla. “Emotions: Action-Requiring Neurological Programs.” April 16, 2011.
http://karlamclaren.com/emotions-action-requiring-neurological-programs
/.

32
. The full quiz (which focuses on anger, fear, sadness, shame, jealousy, envy, contentment, and anxiety) is in my interactive online course, “Emotional Flow: Becoming Fluent in the Language of Emotions” (Sounds True, 2012).

33
. From my book
The Language of Emotions:

The Difference between Guilt and Shame: In my early teens, I read a popular self-help book that branded guilt and shame as “useless” emotions. The book presented the idea that we're all perfect, and therefore shouldn't ever be guilt-ridden or ashamed of anything we do. That idea seemed very strange to me, so I went to the dictionary and looked up “guiltless” and “shameless” and found that neither state was anything to celebrate. To be
guiltless
means to be free of mark or experience, as if you're a blank slate. It's not a sign of intelligence or growth, because guiltlessness exists only in people who have not yet lived. To be
shameless
means to be senseless, uncouth, and impudent. It's a very marked state of being out of control, out of touch, and exceedingly self-absorbed; therefore, shamelessness lives only in people who don't have any relational skills. Both states—guiltlessness and shamelessness—helped me understand the intrinsic value of guilt and shame.

Fascinatingly, in a dictionary definition, guilt isn't even an emotional state at all—it's simply the knowledge and acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Guilt is a state of circumstance: you're either guilty or not guilty in relation to the legal or moral code you value. You cannot
feel
guilty, because guilt is a concrete state—not an emotional one! Your feelings are almost irrelevant; if you did something wrong, you're guilty, and it doesn't matter if you're happy, angry, fearful, or depressed about it. When you don't do something wrong, you're not guilty. Feelings don't enter into the equation at all. The only way you could possibly ever
feel
guilty is if you don't quite remember committing an offense (“I feel like I might be guilty, but I'm not sure.”). No, what you feel is
shame.
Guilt is a factual state, while shame is an emotion.

Shame is the natural emotional consequence of guilt and wrongdoing. When your healthy shame is welcomed into your psyche, its powerful heat and intensity will restore your boundaries when you've broken them yourself. However, most of us don't welcome shame into our lives; we obscure it by saying “I feel guilty” instead of “I feel ashamed,” which speaks volumes about our current inability to identify and acknowledge our guilt, channel our appropriate shame, and make amends. This is the real shame, because when we don't welcome and honor our free-flowing and
appropriate shame, we cannot moderate our own behavior. We'll continually do things we know are wrong—and we won't have the strength to stop ourselves. In our never-ending shamelessness, we'll offend and offend and offend without pause—we'll
always
be guilty—because nothing will wake us to our effect on the world.

If we continue to use the incorrect statement “I feel guilty,” we'll be unable to right our wrongs, amend our behaviors, or discover where our shame originated—which means we'll be unable to experience true happiness or contentment (both of which arise when we skillfully navigate through any difficult emotion). If we don't come out and correctly state “I'm ashamed of myself,” we'll never improve. I'll say it again before we go deeper: Guilt is a factual state, not an emotional one. You're either guilty or not guilty. If you're not guilty, there's nothing to be ashamed of. However, if you
are
guilty, and you want to know what to do about the
fact
of your guilt, then you've got to embrace the information shame brings to you. (pp. 198–200)

34
. However, there are seventeen emotional categories in
The Language of Emotions.
I'm omitting the suicidal urge from this list due to the amount of time it would take to explain it responsibly. I've included the suicidal urge and depression in the “Emotional Vocabulary List” in the Appendix, so that you'll be able to identify suicidal ideation in others and know how to provide (or steer people to) support.