The Art of Empathy (12 page)

When you move toward a bad habit or you're about to say something really insensitive, your
shame program
starts so that you can avoid offending or embarrassing yourself or others (note that this example involves healthy and authentic shame). Shame also brings its own actions—it fills you with heat, flushes your face, and stops you in your tracks, because you're about to do something potentially injurious. Your job is to check in, think about your next move, and hopefully stop yourself from doing it. If you don't, your shame program may intensify or other emotions may arise, depending on your relationship to shame. You might start to feel depression, apathy (“I don't care; I do what I want!”), fear, and so forth. Each emotion has its own action-requiring program, and though there's a tremendous amount of nuance and individual distinctions in how each of our emotions works and interacts, they are reliable and “perfectly identifiable,” as Damasio states.

FOUR IDEAS THAT ENSURE EMOTIONAL CONFUSION

Damasio's groundbreaking reframing of emotions as action-requiring neurological programs is wonderfully helpful, but there's so much trouble in the emotional realm that I want to clear away four ideas that create endless emotional confusion. Before we can empathically explore the specific actions that your emotions require (in
Chapter 4
), we need to take a look at some commonly accepted ideas that actually prevent you from being able to approach emotions intelligently.

THE PROBLEM WITH VALENCING

Valencing is a way to separate things into specific categories. Emotions are valenced in two ways: they're categorized as either positive
or
negative, or they're framed as either prosocial
or
antisocial. So, instead of being viewed as a constellation of important, action-requiring programs that are reliable parts of your cognitive abilities, emotions are often separated into categories that have come to mean good versus bad, wanted versus unwanted, or nice versus mean.

Here's the problem: If you believe that emotions are either positive
or
negative, you'll tend to focus on the allegedly positive ones and avoid the allegedly negative ones. As such, you won't develop a full range of emotional or empathic skills. You might be able to work skillfully with the emotions
you identify as positive, but you might be clueless about the ones you identify as negative. Likewise, if you believe that emotions are either prosocial
or
antisocial, you'll think that only a few emotions are acceptable in your relationships. Therefore, when supposedly antisocial emotions arise, you may become shocked or destabilized, and you may view yourself and others in ways that actually reduce your social and emotional intelligence. You may think, for instance, that people are trustworthy
only
when they display emotions that you approve of, but that people who display emotions you don't like should be shamed, changed, or avoided altogether.

If you valence emotions, you'll also lose awareness of and access to a great number of the skills your emotions bring to you. If you look at the five emotions I described earlier (fear, anger, shame, sadness, and grief), you'll notice that they would all be valenced into negative or antisocial categories. They would be typecast as emotions that cause trouble, don't feel good, and don't look good to others. However, without them, you would have no instincts or intuition
(fear),
no capacity to set boundaries or protect your (or others') standpoint or sense of self
(anger),
no capacity to manage your behavior
(shame),
no capacity to let things go when it's time
(sadness),
and no capacity to mourn when irretrievable loss has occurred
(grief).
When any of these emotions are necessary—when any of these actions are required—then each of these emotions is the most positive emotion possible. When
any
emotion is necessary and appropriate, it's
always
positive (if you really need to use that word).

If you had inserted one of the allegedly positive emotions, such as happiness, into the place of these five emotions, you'd see something very negative indeed, because happiness was not required in the situations I described. Happiness is a very specific emotion that arises to help you look forward to the future with delight and amusement, and it's wonderful! But so are anger, fear, shame, grief, sadness, jealousy, envy, and so forth. All emotions are wonderful and necessary when you need them, and all emotions can be a problem if they arise at the wrong time.

For instance, if you're at a funeral, happiness is completely inappropriate. You need your grief to help you mourn your losses. At a funeral, grief is the positive and prosocial emotion, and happiness is negative and antisocial. Of course, emotions move and change all the time, and they certainly do so during a funeral, so it's normal to cry, and then laugh, and then smile, and then cry again. However, pasting an unchangeably happy smile on your face during a funeral is not prosocial.

Or let's look at fear: if a car is veering directly toward you on the freeway, happiness would probably lead to injury, because you need the lightning-fast instincts and intuitive actions of fear to get yourself to safety. In a situation of immediate physical danger in which fear is required to save your life, happiness is a ridiculous emotion—it's completely inappropriate.

So instead of valencing emotions into simple-minded either/or categories, the empathic approach is to observe all emotions as reliable and evolutionarily evolved responses that are uniquely
appropriate
to specific situations. When you stop valencing, you'll learn to empathically respond to what's actually going on, and you'll learn to observe emotions calmly and perceptively, without demonizing them or glorifying them. This calm and unvalenced approach will make your experience of Emotion Contagion infinitely more comfortable, which means that you'll have an easier time understanding and working with every other aspect of your empathy.

When you can understand emotions as action-requiring neurological programs, you can ask whether each program is
appropriate
for its situation. If it is, you can support the emotion and take suitable action. If it's not, you can help yourself or others take a look at why that program got activated or why that emotion is so prominent that it steps into situations where another emotion would be more appropriate. (We'll explore situations in which emotions are confused or seemingly inappropriate later in this chapter, and in
Chapter 4
.)

In this empathic approach to emotions, you'll learn to welcome all of your emotions—and the emotions of others—as valid and legitimate action-requiring aspects of social skills, empathy, and intelligence, because
all emotions are necessary.
Unvalencing emotions is a crucial first step in addressing Emotion Contagion, increasing your Empathic Accuracy, and gaining extensive Emotion Regulation skills—all of which will help you skillfully perform all six aspects of empathy. Befriending and welcoming your emotions—all of them, valence free—makes becoming a healthy, happy, and intentional empath significantly easier.

THE PROBLEM WITH EXPRESSION AND REPRESSION

When an emotion arises and requires an action, many of us fall into a simple binary world in which we can only
express
the emotion outwardly or
repress
it inwardly. It's as if we have an on/off switch with no middle ground. This situation is almost a form of valencing in itself, in that we're given two
simpleminded choices that actually obscure our intelligence and reduce our options when emotions arise. And of course, this, in turn, reduces our emotional regulation skills and our empathic awareness.

In many instances, expression and repression are fine. If you're happy, sometimes it's awesome to express it—
Yay!
And other times, it's a really good idea to repress your happiness if it's not shared (say, when you're happy that you didn't get picked for a team at work, but you don't want to offend everyone). Expression and repression aren't problems in and of themselves. They're fine in many instances. They're only problems when they're the
only
choices you have.

For instance, when an intense or socially unacceptable emotion arises and requires an action from you, both expression
and
repression can be deeply problematic. Let's say that you're at a party, and a friend does something deeply offensive in public. Let's say that he makes a sarcastic joke about your clothing that's funny but also really cruel. Now, because your self and your standpoint have been offended (and shockingly so), your anger will need to arise, and it will probably be accompanied by some shame and maybe even fear. This is an intensely embarrassing attack that came out of nowhere! If you
express
your intense anger, you might score some points against your friend, but you might also injure him and come off looking like a jerk yourself—like you're so uncool that you can't even take a joke. Also, you might not know how your friend will respond to a counterattack (your shame and fear might have arisen specifically to alert you to this). Your friend could become even meaner, and then the whole evening would be ruined for everyone.

So, if you know that expression can be dangerous, you might take the other option in our restricted either/or scenario. Let's say you
repress
your anger and your shame and your fear. You might laugh and pretend not to be offended, or you might make an even uglier joke about your own clothing. Ha-ha, you're a good sport—you can take a joke! But when you repress an emotion, you interfere with the basic operation of your emotional and neurological functioning. In this instance, your anger arose for a specific reason. It required that you perform a specific action to restore your
voice
(your capacity to express yourself, your opinions, your ideas, and your morals), your standpoint, and your sense of self. You chose not to, which was probably a good idea, socially speaking, because exploding at your friend might have ruined the party for everyone. But by merely repressing your appropriate anger, you've interfered with its natural progression, and because
you didn't perform any appropriate action, your anger will remain activated. You might paste a smile on your face and go get a drink and a snack, but for the rest of the night, you'll repeat the situation in your head, and you'll think of what you
should
have said. Your anger won't relieve itself; in fact, it might become more intense, your fear might increase, your shame might become hyperactivated, and
yow!
Repressing your emotions when they're intense and immediate can really cause trouble inside you.

Luckily, there is another option. There's a middle path between expression and repression. I call it
channeling your emotions
—by that, I mean completing the actions your emotions require so that they can recede naturally and gracefully. In the situation above, expression and repression were both problematic. Your anger was very intense, and it was accompanied by two other strong emotions. As we all know, that can be a powder-keg situation. But if you have access to an empathic view of the gifts your emotions contain (these gifts are listed in the next chapter)—if you know anger as the
Honorable Sentry
and fear as
Intuition and Action,
and if you know that shame is about
Restoring Integrity
—then you can take actions with all three of these emotions that are respectful toward yourself, toward your mouthy friend, toward onlookers, and toward your own emotions.

I don't have a simple, step-by-step process for dealing with the situation above, and I am really suspicious of people who do. Interaction is so incredibly situation specific, and your responses usually need to shift in each second. However, I do have a simple approach, which is this: listen to your emotions and work with each of them empathically, interact with others honestly, and then you'll know what to do.

If you make a mistake, you can apologize, and then you can try something different. The trick to this isn't any kind of trick at all: you simply listen to your emotions and pay attention to others and to their responses. This empathic and interactive approach will actually give you untold resources, because your emotions have evolved over millions of years to help you become a socially successful member of an intensely social species. Emotions are millions of years older than spoken language, and simply put, they're smarter than words, they're deeper than any technique, and they can help you in ways you cannot imagine (especially if all you've ever done with emotions is express or repress them).

So let me put myself into the situation above. Let's say that my friend said something cruel about my clothing in front of other people. I feel the
power of anger filling me, and there is some fear activating me as well—this tells me that, sure, my boundaries have been crossed, but there could also be some hazard here. My shame also arises, and I know that its function is to help me moderate my behavior. I'm pretty good friends with shame, so I listen carefully to its warning. With the power that anger gives me, I stand up a little straighter, I ground myself (we'll learn this practice in
Chapter 5
), and I make eye contact with my mouthy friend. I know that I could attack him if I need to, but my fear and shame are warning me: Don't. There's further danger here.

I also know that if I
don't
say something (if I repress my anger), I'll be telling all of the people surrounding us that I can be attacked without any repercussions. My shame and fear tell me that this is not a good approach to my social survival, so I ask myself the questions for anger (which are from the list in the next chapter):
What must be protected, and what must be restored?
Certainly, my fashion sense isn't that important, but this direct attack cannot go unaddressed. Ignoring this situation would leave me vulnerable, but equally important, it would train my friend to be obnoxious and verbally abusive without consequence, which would severely reduce his social viability. Anger is the
Honorable Sentry
, and if you channel it honorably, it will protect everyone—not just you.