The Art of Empathy (31 page)

We'll explore emotion work more extensively in
Chapter 10
. In the next chapter, we'll explore a number of empathic communication skills that can bring your emotion work out of the shadows.

IDENTIFYING YOUR INTIMACY ZONES

We're observing emotional styles in your loved ones not to enforce identical approaches to emotions, but to help you understand what conditions and levels of compatibility are important for your unique empathic self. Throughout this book, we've focused on your intrapersonal world so that you can understand yourself more clearly and individuate in healthy ways. In this chapter, we're focusing on your interpersonal world. Who are you in relationship to others? What do you want? What's important to you? What do you need in order to feel loved, safe, respected, and supported? Which kinds of emotion work have you performed, which kinds have you expected from others, and how can you make your emotion work more conscious and intentional?

I'd also like you to put on your anthropologist's hat again and observe the intimacy zones and relationship thresholds you've already built. In terms of your innermost empathic circle, your close friend zone, and the outer boundaries of your intimacy zones, why are people where they are? Who is closest to you, and whom do you hold at arm's length? How do your loved ones' positions relate to their empathic skills and their emotional styles or to the amount of emotion work you do for each other? Why do you bring some of your loved ones close to you, and why do you move others farther away?

As you observe the quality of the love, loyalty, emotional skills, compatibility, and empathic awareness of your loved ones, thank the emotions that help you do this: thank your jealousy and your envy. In their soft, freeflowing states, these two emotions help you focus on what you need from your relationships. They also help you discern the depth of love and care you receive, the loyalty and security you feel, and the quality of your connection to stable sources of love, faithfulness, resources, recognition, and security. If you've created a number of healthy relationships with loving, available, emotionally aware, loyal, and stable people, then your healthy envy and jealousy have been active in your life already—even if you didn't know it until this very second. When these two emotions are free to do their proper work,
they'll help you identify and choose safe friends and healthy mates. Thank you, jealousy and envy!

But if these two essential social emotions haven't been able to do their work for some reason, it can be fascinating to discover that you may push skilled empaths away because they don't seem to need you, while you'll pull deeply unskilled and incompatible people (who need full-time empathic heavy lifting and extensive emotion work) into the innermost circle of your life. There's a multimillion-dollar industry devoted to helping you stop doing this, and it's filled with ideas about love addiction, codependence, abuse, and self-abandonment, but let's take a deeper and more empathic look at this selfabandoning tendency, shall we?

SWASHBUCKLERS OF LOVE

We're surrounded by endless fairy tales about love, and we're continually trained to develop deeply unrealistic expectations about what love is supposed to be. Dramas, songs, novels, and art portray love as an ecstatic and life-changing dream, or as a devastating nightmare full of heartbreak and loss. If you sit back and empathically scan the stories we tell each other about love, you'll see grand heroic narratives that don't merely suggest that love can conquer all; they actually
promise
that it can. These stories tell us over and over again that every problem, every condition, and every imaginable failing can be cured with love or by love—and most empaths I know eat these stories for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

We're all surrounded by these dramatic tales of heroic love. However, for highly empathic people whose central pull is toward relationships and interactions, these stories are especially seductive—and especially toxic. They promise that love contains magical healing powers; therefore, many empaths who are under the spell of these heroic love stories tend to seek out people who are irretrievably incapable of identifying, accepting, or returning love. Instead of taking a healthy jealousy- and envy-supported inventory of the emotional skills, empathic awareness, and interactional abilities of their potential mates, many empaths ingeniously (and usually unconsciously) choose people who have few to none of these capacities.

In their intimate empathic inner circles—in the areas closest to their bodies and their hearts—empaths will often choose mates who cannot get into sync with them, don't have emotional skills, and aren't empathically competent. These empaths then throw themselves at these unworkable relationships,
as if they're in a game of Red Rover or as if they're on a heroic odyssey through the underworld, filled with impossible tasks and mythical beasts. In the therapy community, people like this are called love addicts, codependents, and victims (and they may well be, if they find people who have no Concern for Others)—but I call them swashbucklers. Swashbucklers of love.

If you think about it, there aren't many places in our lives where heroic and mythic journeys can occur or where brave-hearted warriors and valiant strivers for justice can throw themselves headlong at the deepest troubles of the world. Our homes and families aren't heroic training grounds; they're supposed to be safe places (though they're often chaotic). School is too predictable (unless bullying is allowed, and then it's just grueling) to support a heroic quest. Work is long and often meaningless. Thus, the heroic characters inside us often sit on the sidelines and watch sports or soldiers or dramatic characters or impossibly beautiful, famous, or wealthy people live out mythic and heroic stories for us. There are very few places where everyday people can throw themselves body and soul into intensely meaningful heroes' journeys and fight intrepidly against impossible odds. But there is one heroic training ground that's available to nearly all of us (and it's amazingly seductive to empaths in particular): impossible relationships.

If you choose your mate with heroic and unconsciously swashbuckling ingenuity, you can spend years, decades, and even a lifetime swashbuckling your way through an impossibly heroic journey where more love, patience, dedication, and emotion work than anyone has ever seen will be needed—and you'll provide it, but it still won't be enough. If you manage to get out, people will help you view yourself as a victim and your mate as an abuser; your choices and your sanity will be questioned. But no one will talk about your awesome, heroic, mythic, and swashbuckling love skills. Because these
are
skills—to be able to hold on for dear life no matter how bad things get and to love no matter what happens. These are amazing interpersonal skills. Yes, these amazing skills may turn your life into a living hell if you try to use them with people who have no emotional skills of their own. They may even imperil you if you're with people who have no Concern for Others. But if you're with wonderfully empathic people whose emotional styles are compatible with yours, these skills will lead you into the deepest and most delicious areas of love and communion that you could ever imagine. When you're with people who have the emotional and empathic depth to fully engage with you, to honor you, to match your emotion work task for task, and to protect
you from your often self-abandoning and heroic empathic nature, then your swashbuckling love will become magnificent.

If you're a swashbuckler of love, bless your heart. Thank you for bringing your wild, boundless, heroic love into this world. You know by now that I'm going to call you out, so I won't even inch my hand toward the red flags you know I'll raise. But let me just say—before I send you back a few pages to observe your impossible relationship(s) in terms of my six aspects of empathy and the six dimensions of emotional style—that I bow to your zany heroism and your majestically out-of-place relationship skills.

Many elements in the dramatic fairy tales you've been told about love are true. Love and healthy relationships are crucial to your survival. You need to love, and you need to be loved. Children need long years of warm, loving, intimate contact or their brains won't develop properly, and the social and emotional well-being of people of all ages is predicated on access to healthy, loving relationships. Love is necessary and vital, and it can change your life for the better—
if
you choose people who can love you back. That's the solution to this dilemma—you have to find people who can hold up their end of the relationship and do their own emotion work. Empathy flourishes in healthy, intimate interactions; therefore, to experience deep and healing empathy in your most intimate relationships, you must be with someone who can love you back.

If you're a swashbuckling runaway love healer, it might take some serious reframing and retraining for you to become able to turn away from emotionally unskilled and empathically unavailable people and focus yourself on people who can love as deeply and as well as you can. You may need to burn contracts continually for a while—with your current relationships, with love as a concept, with your past relationships, with your parents' relationship, with any childhood traumas you may have had, with all of the emotion-work slackers you've known, and with your vision of yourself as a love partner. This is a deep situation, and it's a powerful empathic tendency to offer immense love to people who can't truly receive it, so you'll need to work in a deep, imaginal, empathic, and transformative way to heal this tendency. But as often happens in heroic and mythical journeys, one essential key to this magical transformative process can be found in a very strange and offbeat place.

ARE YOU THE ONE FOR ME?

Yes, my friend, I am suggesting a relationship book (thankfully, you can find it online, so no one will be able to see you buy it). But it's not just any
relationship book—this one focuses specifically on your choice of mate, and it's called
Are You the One for Me?
by relationship guru Barbara De Angelis. In this book, De Angelis (who was once a wildly unsafe love swashbuckler herself) writes frankly about the kinds of impediments that will make relationships unworkable, and she teaches you how to identify and avoid them. Four huge impediments in a potential mate—that I never even
considered
before I read her book (twenty years ago)—are (1) a lack of emotional skills, (2) an active addiction, (3) unhealed childhood trauma, and (4) the presence of a toxic ex-mate. I mean, those were practically my mate-selection
imperatives
before I read her book.

De Angelis also puts forth the surprising (to me) idea that it's vital to find a mate who's highly compatible in areas that are crucial to your way of life—for instance, in your approach to finances, child-rearing, politics, spirituality, sexuality, and health care. Basically, she's saying that in your most intimate empathic inner circle, you need to find someone who has relationship skills, is available for the relationship, doesn't require extensive emotion work, understands you completely, supports your decisions, and respects your choices. Otherwise, you may waste your energy fighting over things that aren't going to change, which means you'll probably feel more (rather than less) lonely. For me, this concept of compatibility was life changing, and I had never heard it before, ever. I thought that love was the only thing that mattered, that opposites attract, and that anything could be fixed with increasingly heroic amounts of emotion work and swashbuckling love. But as we all learn sooner or later, incompatibility and emotional incapacity do not lead to healthy relationships.

This book teaches you how to choose relationships wisely, and though De Angelis doesn't frame her work this way at all, she's discovered how to apply the gifts of healthy jealousy and healthy envy
before you commit,
so that your relationship will have the best possible chance for success. She teaches you how to find mates who are secure, emotionally healthy, able to love you, functional, loyal, and as compatible as possible. This compatibility is the key to healthy relationships, but for people who grew up hearing that opposites attract, it can seem frightfully choosy.

So let's move out a bit from your innermost empathic circle and look at friendships that aren't compatible to see what happens there.

In the June 2011 issue of
Scientific American Mind,
science writer Kirsten Weir looked at a number of studies on ambivalent friends, or
frenemies
⁴⁶
(friends who let you down, clash with you continually, and just can't get into sync with you). To be clear, frenemies aren't your enemies, and you don't hate them—they're just disappointing and difficult to be around. In numerous studies, frenemies were found to raise blood pressure and increase stress responses and the risk of depression. In addition, frenemies were actually found to be more deleterious to psychological health than actual enemies were.

If you think about this empathically, it makes sense. Frenemies can get close to you, and they can access your personal space and your intimate life, where they can land some pretty solid emotional punches. Enemies, on the other hand, are usually not allowed near you, because when you identify someone as dangerous, you usually keep them the hell away from your inner life. Enemies may throw emotional punches, but you expect them to, and you've created some distance from them; therefore, you can dodge their punches more easily.

The article suggests using behavioral thresholding (the researchers didn't call it that, of course) to contain the amount of damage frenemies can inflict—for instance, don't rely on them to show up on time, don't expect their support, don't be surprised if they make trouble, and so forth. Frenemies are toxic to your emotional and physical health, but if you know that, you can set boundaries around your frenemies and avoid being hit by their emotional shrapnel.