The Art of Empathy (6 page)

In the academic realm, there's a great deal of debate about Emotion Contagion and its relationship to empathy. Some researchers argue that contagion, in and of itself, is
not
empathic—and, in fact, may be counterempathic. This idea was very surprising to me, because for many years, my definition of an empath was someone who felt the emotions of others strongly in his or her own body. And yet, I have to agree with this new approach. Let's look at the distinction.

In research performed by German psychologist Doris Bischof-Köhler,
¹⁹
infants and toddlers were presented with situations in which both the experimenter and the infant played with either teddy bears or spoons. In this study, the experimenter's teddy or spoon was rigged to break, thus causing the experimenter to act distressed and to cry. Bischof-Köhler carefully watched what happened next. If the child noticed the distress and cried alongside the distressed experimenter, Bischof-Köhler did not consider that response to be empathic. Rather, she called this example of contagion
self-centered,
because the child merely became wrapped up in his or her own distress. Only when the child offered some form of consolation (patting the experimenter, trying to fix the teddy or the spoon, or offering his or her own teddy or spoon to the distressed experimenter) did Bischof-Köhler consider the child to have developed true empathy.

This action-based definition of empathy is currently contested in empathy research, and some researchers want to roll back the definition to include
only
Emotion Contagion (in everyday English, the consoling actions that Bischof-Köhler wanted to see in her young subjects would be called
compassion
rather than empathy). I understand these reservations, because it's very helpful to make clear separations between the different aspects of empathy. However, for our uses as working empaths, I find this action component of empathy to be extremely important, and it's something we'll focus on throughout the rest of this book.

Here's why: If your experience of empathy is primarily contagion, such that you act as an emotional sponge and become overwhelmed by the emotions of others, you'll probably be unable to provide much support to them. You'll be like the children in the experiment who dissolved into the emotion of the
experimenter and who could neither soothe themselves nor offer any support. In other words, you'll shut down. It may also be difficult for you to take the perspective of others if they are a continual source of emotional discomfort for you, and your ability to engage perceptively may therefore be reduced. Too much empathy is just as much trouble as too little. In fact, many workers in healthcare, counseling, emergency response, and criminal justice have to learn to reduce their Emotion Contagion in order to do their work.

If you experience strong contagion, hyperempathy, and emotional sponging that is very uncomfortable for you, you can learn to focus on increasing your ability to identify, understand, and work with your own emotional states and emotions in general (specifically, you can develop your skills in Empathic Accuracy and Emotion Regulation).

Emotions are
tools
for empaths, and learning to understand them, welcome them, and work with them skillfully is a central empathic activity. However, this empathic understanding is continually impeded in our everyday emotional training, to the extent that many people are afraid of emotions and actually try to avoid them altogether. We'll look very closely at why people are so afraid of emotions (or so dismissive toward them), because humankind's nearly universal problems with emotions truly impede empathy. Most of us have been trained to view and approach emotions in a way that makes contagion problematic—
not
because emotions are problematic in and of themselves, but because our training is so backward and unhelpful. We are actually trained to be emotionally avoidant and therefore empathically unskilled; accordingly, if our Emotion Contagion skills are naturally strong, we may experience a great deal of discomfort simply because we have no idea how to work with the emotions we feel and perceive.

If your current empathic condition is primarily one of uncomfortable contagion, I'll help you learn to identify and work with emotions
as tools
so that you can become grounded in and comfortable with them and the other five aspects of empathy. With this empathic emotional grounding, you'll be able to have a fuller and healthier experience of empathy, instead of being stuck in an uncomfortable and unworkable level of contagion. Conversely, if your current capacity for Emotion Contagion is very low, I'll teach you a new way to approach emotions and to clearly identify them as reliable responses to very specific situations and stimuli.

Why might your capacity for Emotion Contagion be low? There are many possible reasons, but the ones I've seen most often are (1) sensory
hyperawareness that is overwhelming and leads a person to turn inward and reduce his or her receptivity as a form of protection (this is true for many people on the autism spectrum); (2) early-childhood experiences with depressed and low-affect caretakers who didn't give the child enough experience with a full range of emotions (we'll talk more about this in
Chapter 9
); and (3) early childhood experiences of (or extended periods of contact with) emotionally explosive or abusive people, such that the person learns to turn away from (or distrust) emotions as a survival tactic.

If you experienced any of these situations, this book will support you in retrieving and rebuilding your empathic capacities in a way that is understandable, accessible, and reliable for you. However, you may also benefit from the support of a trusted counselor or therapist. The capacity to experience the full range of emotions (inside yourself and with others) is your birthright, and you can do a great deal to retrieve this empathic capacity, no matter what kind of obstructions you experienced. And, of course, engaging with your artistic, literary, and philosophical Einfühlung capacities will help you explore emotional and empathic skills in intentional and self-expanding ways. We'll explore more about the specific healing effects of artistic expression in
Chapters 5
and
6
.

EMPATHIC ACCURACY

Empathic Accuracy is your empathic capacity to accurately identify emotions, thoughts, and intentions in yourself and others. This is an interior skill, an interactional skill, and an observational skill. The quality of your accuracy depends on your own internal emotional awareness and your capacity for emotional self-regulation.

Emotions are a world unto themselves—I call them a language. In order to learn the language of emotions, it's important to have a rich emotional vocabulary with plenty of words for differing intensities of emotions. In the Appendix, I provide you with an Emotional Vocabulary List so you can become sensitive to and accurate about differing emotional states. If you know which emotions you or others are feeling and if you can gauge the intensity of those emotions, your empathic work will be much more precise and skillful. But if you don't know which emotions are occurring or in what intensity, you'll continually miss important social cues about what people are thinking and feeling and what their intentions are. Emotional awareness and accuracy are crucial to skilled empathy.

It's also important that you know how to work with each emotion in yourself. If you don't, your accuracy could be compromised. For instance, you might accurately pick up the emotions or intentions of another through Emotion Contagion, but due to a preexisting problem with your own emotional regulation skills, you might get the entirely wrong idea about what's going on. For instance, let's imagine that you have sensed fear in another; however, due to an issue inside yourself, you might intensify that fear into anxiety or panic, and then imagine that you have picked up those emotions instead. Without realizing it, you may incorrectly attribute emotions, thoughts, intentions, and reactions to another based on your own difficulties with and reactions to that emotion (or that intensity of emotion).

The way to gauge your Empathic Accuracy is both very simple and infinitely hard: you ask people if what you're sensing from them is true. This is simple, because it's a very easy thing to ask, “Are you feeling (afraid, anxious, angry, sad, happy, ashamed) right now?” Yet it can be infinitely hard because people can be unaware of their own emotional states, embarrassed or confused by emotions, or unwilling to admit to what they're feeling (worry not—
Chapter 8
illustrates a number of ways around this). For empaths, this lack of emotional transparency is a very sticky problem, because even though we're surrounded by emotions, we tend to grow up without any clear or workable understanding of them. In fact, many of the things we learn about emotions are so backward that it's amazing we can function at all.

For instance, the idea that there are negative or positive emotions is a completely unempathic and unhelpful fallacy. Our deeply unfortunate tendency to divide emotions into positive and negative categories has dreadful consequences in our everyday lives—many of us focus most of our attention on the supposedly positive emotions of happiness and joy, while ignoring, suppressing, trying to change, or running from the supposedly negative emotions (anger, hatred, fear, anxiety, sadness, grief, envy, jealousy, rage, depression, etc.). This misguided pathologizing of normal emotions actually makes us less able to work with emotions in intelligent ways and creates an empathic capacity that is stilted and incomplete. We'll look at this and three other serious impediments to emotional awareness in the next chapter.

Luckily, despite the problems in our emotional and empathic training, it's fairly easy to become more empathically accurate internally, because it's a simple process of tuning in to your interior life and learning to articulate your different emotional states. This can take a bit of practice if you've had
bad training in one or more emotional categories (sadly, most of us have bad training in pretty much every emotion except happiness!), but it's actually fairly easy to become more accurate about your own emotions once you have an empathic understanding of what emotions are and what emotions do.

However, the relationship others have with their own emotions can make accuracy in interactions with them more difficult. In addition, many empathic people grow up without much confidence in their skills, because they've been told repeatedly, “I'm
not
mad! You're projecting!” Or “We don't talk about grief in this family.” Or “Why would I be afraid? There's nothing to be afraid of.” Or “I'm not laughing
at
you; I'm laughing
with
you.” Emotional subterfuge, emotional bait-and-switch, emotional squelching, and straight-up emotional dishonesty are common everyday behaviors that can make Empathic Accuracy very hard to master.
²⁰

Another impediment to this accuracy is the unfortunate focus that's been placed on reading facial expressions and body language, as if they provide precise or reliable cues. Simply put, they don't. Frowns don't always signal anger, yawns don't always signal boredom (or fatigue), looking up and away doesn't always signal lying, looking down doesn't always signal insecurity, smiles don't always signal happiness, tears don't always signal sadness, fidgeting doesn't always signal nervousness, and crossed arms don't always signal anger. Faces and bodies are as individual as fingerprints, and though you can generalize about some things in regard to the bodies and faces of others, you can't really know what a gesture or expression means until you know another person for a while—or unless you ask.

Body language and facial expressions
can
provide a wonderful entrée into the empathic space of others, and we'll focus on ways to use these signals in our communication. However, our focus won't be on discovering secrets people think they're hiding or on becoming all-powerful body-language experts. Instead, we'll learn to use body language in a nonthreatening way to open conversations about emotions and empathy. And I mean that literally: “When you curve your body downward and sigh out loud, it seems to me that you're feeling discouraged, or maybe really tired, or both. Is that what's going on?” “When you use very short sentences and don't look at me when you speak, it seems that you're feeling impatient and frustrated with me. Is that true?” Body language and facial expressions are extremely important, but Empathic Accuracy is built, moment by moment, in empathic
interactions
. What others mean and what they're signaling are individual, and the key to
understanding those signals cannot be found in a book. Instead, you have to get out and interact, make mistakes, be vulnerable and curious, and be deeply interested in the individual ways that others signal their emotional states.

Empathic Accuracy is developed in interactions
—in honest, vulnerable, and curious empathic interactions inside yourself, as you learn to identify your own emotional states, and with others, as you learn the myriad ways that individuals signal their emotions and intentions. In this book, we'll look at many ways to develop and nurture those kinds of honest, vulnerable interactions.

EMOTION REGULATION

Emotion Regulation is a vitally important aspect of empathy. If you're good with contagion and you can accurately pick up on, identify, and feel the emotions of others, yet you have no internal capacity to
regulate
those emotions in yourself (to understand them, work with them, and get some perspective on them so that you can focus on the other person), you won't be able to empathize perceptively. You'll just be engulfed in emotional contagion, and you won't be able to engage or empathize with much skill (or possibly at all).

We'll explore numerous emotional regulation skills in this book. As an intrinsic aspect of those skills, we'll explore emotions empathically, so that you'll be able to approach each emotion as a tool that contains specific gifts and skills. Admittedly, this is a startling approach, because there are extensive problems in our understanding of the emotional realm, such that many people are deeply suspicious of—or even outright afraid of or offended by—actual emotions. But this is not a situation that can go unaddressed.