The Art of Empathy (8 page)

In Perceptive Engagement, you listen and watch carefully for what another wants and needs; then, to the extent that you are able, you interact based upon those wants and needs (or, sometimes, you don't interact at all, if that's what would work best for the other). Perceptive Engagement is the culmination of the previous five aspects of the empathic process. To engage perceptively, you have to be able to share emotions, accurately identify them, regulate them in yourself, take the perspective of others, be concerned enough to want to engage helpfully, and, finally, engage from an unselfish position of empathic knowledge of the other.

That sounds like an incredibly complicated process, but we've all done it since early childhood, and we continue to do it every day—at home, at work, with animals, in e-mails, at the store, when we drive, when we walk down the street, and when we interact with art, literature, and music. We're in constant empathic contact with each other and with the nonhuman world, and it's important to remember this. We humans are an actively empathic species, and though our empathy is often problematic, hyperactive, or seemingly absent, empathy is the nonverbal language we all speak fluently.

EMPATHY FOR YOURSELF

Did you notice something missing in my six aspects of empathy? There's an important factor I didn't include. You may find this omission rather startling, but hear me out. This missing aspect might be called self-care, self-love, selfempathy, or something along those lines. To be a happy, healthy, and effective empath, you have to take care of yourself first—in essence, you have to be able to put on your own oxygen mask before you help other passengers with theirs. And obviously, developing and nurturing empathy for yourself is what this entire book is about. I want to help you develop self-awareness, self-care, and self-love as central features of your life. These are absolutely vital things.

Yet I have to be honest with you. You can perform effectively as an empath even if you're self-abandoning and even if you're filled with self-loathing. Some of the most amazing and hugely empathic social justice workers the world has ever known have been self-abandoning people who were running from the deep trouble in their own souls. Their homes, their love lives, and their family lives were often chaotic or nonexistent (and many of them
burned out). The process of empathizing skillfully does not require that you take good care of yourself. Of course, you'll burn out if you don't take care of yourself, and your empathic work won't be social activism as much as it will be martyrdom. But you
can
empathize pretty effectively, even if you have very little empathy for yourself. In fact, most of us have performed skillful empathy from a self-abandoning position, and many burnt-out empaths have turned away from empathy precisely because it can lead to martyrdom.

This is a central reason that empathy is such a difficult subject—and why it can be in such short supply. To be good with empathy, especially in Perspective Taking, Concern for Others, and Perceptive Engagement, you must have empathy for
the other.
Empathy is not about you. If you have a healthy inner life, healthy relationships, and clear-eyed emotional awareness, empathy can be fun, engaging, and delightful—
especially
when it's not about you. You can learn so much when you empathize, particularly when you empathize with people who are nothing like you. However, if your inner life is unstable, if your childhood was chaotic or traumatic, if your caregivers were inconsistent or neglectful and didn't support your empathy development, if your personal life isn't supportive, if your self-care and emotional awareness are negligible, or if your human social interactions are unsatisfying, empathy can drain the lifeblood out of you. But even so, you'll still be able to empathize, because it's an innate skill that tends to operate whether or not you ask it to, and it's a skill we all possess to a greater or lesser degree.

So as you move forward to build skills, awareness, support, and multiple foundations under and around you, know that all of these will make your experience of empathy more rewarding and more fun. But even on your worst day, or even in the worst of circumstances, know that you're already an empath, and that these six aspects are already a part of your life. What we're doing in this book is making sure that your innate empathy is a beneficial and workable part of your whole life.

With the foundation of these six aspects of empathy, you can move forward into a deeper engagement with the process of becoming an accurate, emotionally well-regulated, self-aware, self-respecting, perceptive, happy, and healthy empath. And I'm telling you that it's not only possible to do this but also actually achievable. If you have difficulty getting into sync with others, I'll teach you simple ways to empathize more gracefully. If you overidentify with others, I'll show you many different emotional and social awareness
tools that will help you create effective boundaries to regulate your own emotions. If your empathy has been more like uncontrolled martyrdom than intentional activism, and even if you developed empathic burnout a long time ago, empathy is an innate feature of human nature and human intelligence, which means you can retrieve it. But this time, you'll be able to engage with your empathy in a way that will work for you.

Throughout this book, I'll refer to these six aspects of empathy as we delve into your emotional life, your home life, your communication skills, your work life, and so forth. These six aspects will help you gain a tangible understanding of your empathic abilities so that you can address your specific empathic strengths and challenges.

WHEN ALL SIX ASPECTS ARE CHALLENGED

In
Chapter 1
, I shared my empathic observation of Joseph and Iris so that you could experience a felt sense of empathy and see the world through a kind of empath-cam. I chose that situation carefully, and most important, I chose the time period carefully, so that you could feel how empathy works for me
now
. As I wrote in that chapter, it hasn't always been like this for me. In my childhood, the world of emotions, empathy, and interactions was a very painful place indeed.

When I was a little hyperempathic child, I felt every emotion in every room. I compare myself to a malfunctioning radio, because I picked up all emotional frequencies from every direction—yet I couldn't home in on specific ones, and it all felt like static. I experienced a constant sense of emotional overload (unless I was alone with one calm human or in the presence of animals), and I felt fundamentally unsafe in the human social world. Being in a crowd, at school, or at a party was excruciating. There was even a joke in my family that parties didn't really start until little Karla dashed around the house, threw up in response to all the commotion, and had to be put to bed. Yeah, that's awful! I wish things had been different, but an empath wasn't even a
thing
when I was little, so my family gets some leeway for their ignorance and insensitivity. At least they used humor; they could have punished me instead. I'm glad I grew up in a funny ignorant family instead of a cruel ignorant one.

I grew up the fourth of five children in what is a fairly normally dysfunctional family. My mother was a brilliant woman who was not able to go to college; she was also a brilliant painter with five children and an unfortunate
perfectionist streak that prevented her from being able to fully live her artistic life. She was a childhood trauma survivor and had trouble with a number of emotions (though she could be an absolute champion in the face of abuse). Mom could be emotionally erratic, but she was not emotionally loud or obvious; her emotions were deeply felt, but they were usually only expressed in undertones. For instance, when she was angry, she never swore or expressed it outright; instead, her body would heat up, and she'd avoid eye contact, or she'd move more quickly and avoid talking about what bothered her. My father was also a brilliant man who wasn't able to complete college and a wonderful writer who published two children's books but primarily worked as an insurance adjustor. Dad was emotionally very steady and rather unaffected. He didn't display most emotions openly, but unlike Mom, he didn't actually feel them very strongly either. If I had an extreme emotion to deal with, I simply didn't go to Dad; Mom could help to a certain extent, but Dad seemed entirely perplexed by extreme emotions.

Extreme emotions were a central feature of my childhood, because we lived across the street from a child molester (
Empath alert:
I will not go into detail; I respect your sensitivity). From the age of about thirty months until I was four years old, I was molested by the dad across the street, who also molested many of the little girls in my neighborhood. Although my childhood was filled with normal kid stuff, it was also filled with extreme fear and anxiety about what would happen next. I learned to rely heavily upon rage and intense (often violent) physical activity to help me deal with what was happening to me, to my little sister (who is sixteen months younger than I am), and to the other little girls in our neighborhood. This ongoing abuse was discovered and stopped when our elder sister (who was twelve at the time) found out and told our parents. The police interviewed us, and we eventually went to the district attorney. But the other girls were too ashamed to talk about what had happened (and their parents were unwilling to believe us), so the case was dropped. After the case was dropped, no one ever spoke openly of the situation again, and we continued to live in a neighborhood filled with toxic secrets for another seven years. The molestation stopped, but things didn't get much better.

I was an
intense
kid—fiercely angry, wildly active (I liked to run fast and throw myself off of high things)—and I was filled with a sense of terror that I tried to cover in any way I could. I had a stutter and multiple learning disabilities, and I had so many nightmares that a family friend
created a monster catcher for me out of an old radio that he painted and decorated. (I could turn the dial to whatever level of monster I wanted to be protected from, and I always turned it all the way up to eleven!) At that time, my hyperempathy was both a survival tool and a burden. I had learned to ramp up my empathic skills and read my molester's moods carefully so that I could give him what he wanted and avoid excessive harm (though what he wanted was directly harmful, so my relationship with my own empathy became deeply conflicted and entwined with hazardous levels of self-abandonment). But I couldn't turn off my intense empathic skills, because I didn't know how I had turned them on. My hyperempathic skills became involuntary, unmanageable survival mechanisms in a human emotional world that was pretty much incomprehensible to me.

Here's why: Even when you put aside actual instances of abuse, the following are normal everyday behaviors among humans—lying about our feelings; avoiding sensitive subjects that are glaringly obvious; leaving important words unsaid; pretending to like things we don't like; pretending we're not feeling an emotion that we're
clearly
feeling; using language to hide, obscure, and skirt crucial issues; attacking people who frighten us without ever realizing we are full of fear (most people think they're angry when they do this; they're not); stopping all movement toward change without ever realizing we're full of anger and grief (most people think they're being careful when they do this; they are, but they don't often know why); and claiming that we're being rational when huge, steamy clouds of emotion are pouring out of us. My experience of human interaction was one of noise, static, emotional absurdity, and continual bewilderment. Humans were emotionally
exhausting,
and they made me feel confused, afraid, unsafe, angry, and desperately lonely.

Thank goodness, my home and my neighborhood were filled with cats and dogs. They gathered around me and provided safe, emotionally honest relationships in which I could hone my empathy in understandable interactions. My wonderful dog and cat friends never lied about their emotions, and they never confused me about what they were feeling. If they were crabby, they'd growl. If they were afraid, they'd become hyperalert or they'd cower or snap. If they were happy, they'd smile and waggle. If they trusted me, they'd cuddle and give lots of affection. If they were tired, they'd nap. If they were in pain, they'd whine and ask for help or withdraw and get very quiet. There was no lying, no subterfuge, no pretense, no blaming, and no projecting. No animal
ever told me that it wasn't polite to point out an emotion. No animal ever laughed at me for feeling fear or sadness or anger or anything else. No animal ever tried to victimize me. And no animal ever blamed me for things they did to hurt me. Animals were my sanctuary, and they made it possible for me to survive the overwhelming emotional realities of my childhood. When people ask me jokingly, “Were you raised by wolves?” I proudly say,
“Yes,
house wolves and housecats.”

As I look back at my situation in regard to my six aspects of empathy, I can see that my hyperempathy in childhood consisted of extreme Emotion Contagion and an adult's level of Empathic Accuracy (about the darkness inside the human soul), combined with no Emotion Regulation to speak of. I used perpetual activity to moderate my intense emotional receptivity, and I used anger and anxiety to create emergency boundaries—either I'd lash out with anger if I felt too emotionally vulnerable, or I'd dash around or fidget anxiously if too much input came at me. Although all of these emergency tactics worked to get me away from people, none of them was very effective in helping me regulate my emotions. As a result, my ability to perform skilled Perspective Taking with humans wasn't great, unless I was in imminent danger, and my Concern for Others (and myself) was often negligible. People were overwhelming for me, and I really didn't have the internal resources or the interest to offer any sort of Perceptive Engagement. I often just raged or ran—or both.