Can't We All Be Empaths?

Translating ideas into words can be a frustrating task, especially if you grew up bilingual like I did. Sometimes I daydream about recreating language from the ground up, defining every new word explicitly without any past baggage. I don’t think miscommunications are the only thing that has been keeping us from Eutopia, but they sure have played a big part. 

When it comes to ideas that have been distorted by our imprecise language, empathy is near the top. For example, there has been a growing trend of identifying oneself as an “empath” and, I have to be honest, it’s not my favorite. As far as I understand, being “an empath” means you’re naturally equipped with greater empathetic abilities than the rest of the population, making you emotionally perceptive in a super special way (picture me giving you a thumbs up.)

No shade if you identify as an empath (well, maybe a little shade), but I find this idea to be quite unhelpful. It suggests that empathy is a trait that only a small group of people are good at, like being a speed reader or having a photographic memory. Apparently, if you’re not born with the empath chromosome, you’re out of luck (insert shrug emoji here). In reality, empathy is accessible to everyone, regardless of personality or aptitude. Even sociopaths.

Our “being an empath” language covertly and wrongly suggests that we shouldn’t ever have to try to have empathy. Despite its universal accessibility, authentic empathy can be absolutely counter-intuitive sometimes. If we’re thinking of empathy as an instinctual, automatic experience, we’re likely to give up on it the moment it doesn’t feel right. This is why intentional empathy, the kind that goes beyond our narrow comfort zones, requires a solid foundation of two things: non-judgment and curiosity. 

Since, as I mentioned earlier, miscommunications are the bane of my existence, it’s time to define these two terms. I know definitions may not be the juicy content you came here for, but it’s my blog, so...

Non-Judgment

When we make a judgment, we’re making a subjective determination of the validity or value of someone or something. It’s pretty egotistical if you think about it. Fortunately, judgments can be identified fairly easily by their broad categorical labels like “right”, “wrong”, “good”, “bad”, etc. They also tend to come with a false sense of certainty that has us constantly finding validation and getting more and more closed-minded to other perspectives.

Here’s an example of how judgment can work against empathy. As a card-carrying cat person who is allergic to dogs, I might find myself tempted to make the following judgment: “Anyone who likes dogs is stupid.” In addition to being insensitive, adopting this bias would mean that every time I meet a dog person I’ll automatically be looking for evidence that proves my judgment of them is correct.

False certainty, the closed-minded commitment to the correctness of our own judgments, robs us of neutrality. While it may be comfortable, insulated in our self-assurance, the confidence it offers is a delusion. The world is infinitely complex and each human has their own unique experience of it, so nearly all “certainty” is either premature or altogether false. #SorryReligion

If we want to use intentional empathy, the critical first step is adopting a stance of neutral non-judgment. When we encounter someone new, instead of slapping our judgmental labels on them, we need to consciously call out our biases and guard against them. Why bother? Non-judgment allows us to gather data for empathy without arriving at a foregone conclusion. Now let’s talk about how we gather that data. 

Curiosity

Just like judgment undermines empathy, false confidence in the accuracy and comprehensiveness of our data can sabotage it. Whenever a therapy client of mine tells me about a frustration they're having with someone, they hear this simple mantra: “What questions do we need to ask?” Before forming any opinions, we try to ask as many relevant questions as we can to understand the situation from all angles. This requires curiosity.

If you’re a scientist and your goal is to determine if being a dog person is indeed “stupid” or not, your first step will be to gather data without making premature judgments. That’s no guarantee of an accurate result though. The way you gather your data makes a major difference. If the only people you survey are cat people, no matter how non-judgmental you are, you’ll still come to the false conclusion that dog people are stupid.

The purpose of curiosity is to remind ourselves that there is always information that we don’t know. By approaching empathy with an attitude of curiosity, we can fill in the blind spots that we didn’t even know we had, learning what we didn’t know we didn’t know. Recognizing the limits of our knowledge makes it much easier to reserve judgment. It also hopefully keeps us from acting like arrogant know-it-alls.

TLDR; Time for a recap.

Intentional empathy sounds like this: “Even if empathy feels counter-intuitive, I can still get there with a stance of non-judgment and curiosity.”

A stance of non-judgment sounds like this: “Since I know that I have biases, I’m going to be on the lookout for any automatic judgments that may not be accurate or relevant.”

A stance of curiosity sounds like this: “Since I know that I don’t know everything, I’m going to ask as many questions as I can so that I can see the bigger picture.”

Once we settle into this stance, we’re ready to move on to actually doing the empathy. For now, I’ll leave you with the wise words of Adam Grant from his book, Think Again, “Thinking like a scientist involves more than just reacting with an open mind. It means being actively open-minded. It requires searching for reasons why we might be wrong—not for reasons why we must be right—and revising our views based on what we learn.”

Othering The Enemy

When beginning my internship hours to become a counselor, I took a job as a crisis interventionist in Dallas. I wasn't sure how I wanted to use my counseling license, and since regular therapy sounded boring, I made the most of my adrenaline-fueled skill of being “good in a crisis”. I had no idea how much vicarious trauma I was about to incorporate into my nightmares and future therapy sessions. You live, you learn, I guess.

I adjusted to a stressful but rewarding routine of driving to crisis situations each day, often working late into the night. My partner and I would be dispatched to meet people all over the Dallas-Fort Worth area who were struggling with things like suicidal ideation, acute trauma, psychosis, self-harm, substance use, domestic violence, and pretty much any other mental health crisis you can imagine. We worked closely with the police on many of these cases.

After two years of community crisis work, I transferred to the Dallas County Jail where I met with recently arrested inmates who had been flagged for suicide risk or other mental health concerns. My job was to assess their risk, connect them with resources, and most importantly, offer them empathy and emotional support. In many cases, I was meeting these clients on the worst day of their life and they were not always happy to see me.

My typical approach to therapy is to offer every client what Carl Rogers calls “unconditional positive regard”, no matter who they are or what they’ve done. This approach proved insufficient, however, the day I was assigned to counsel an inmate who had been arrested for raping a child. Having personally been the victim of sexual assault in my childhood, he was in the one category of humans that I had absolutely no positive regard for. I knew immediately that I needed a strategy that didn’t rely on my instincts.

The inmate (let’s call him “Joe”) was a registered sex offender who had already been convicted of sexual assault of a minor twice before but had been released on parole. The evidence indicated he was likely guilty of the new charges and would spend the rest of his life in prison. As I reviewed the jail records I had on him, I numbly noticed myself shutting down emotionally. I felt a familiar detachment from my body, a trauma response designed to help me ignore my racing heart and shortness of breath.

Taking some deep breaths, I thought about the challenge ahead of me. I could have referred this client to a colleague, but I knew this wouldn’t be the last time I encountered a trauma trigger at work. For better or worse, I wanted to confront it. The first step was to stop ignoring my intense reactions. I chose to consciously confront my obvious bias toward Joe.

Immediately, I realized that I saw all child molesters as monsters who were categorically undeserving of compassion. Recognizing this hatred in me made me more uncomfortable than I’d anticipated. If I genuinely wanted to help Joe rather than harm him, I couldn’t continue hating him. I needed to find a way to push past my instinctual disgust and stop seeing him as a monster. To do that, I needed to get to know his origin story.

As I sat at my desk in the courthouse preparing to meet Joe, I organized my thoughts. Crisis training had taught me empathy is essential for helping someone de-escalate from a crisis. This rapid-form of empathy requires the clinician to think about the person in crisis in the context of their identity and life experiences. Only with that perspective can the clinical can offer meaningful understanding.

I jotted down a list of questions to ask Joe that I hoped would help me understand him better. Who was he? What parts of his identity needed consideration? What had he been through? How did he see the world? What circumstances were contributing to his distress right now?

Feeling determined but sick to my stomach, I sat down outside his solitary confinement cell. Internally, I was repeating a mantra of “don’t judge, just listen” over and over. I bent over awkwardly to speak to him through the small feeding door to his cell. With as much gentleness as I could muster, I started asking him questions, taking notes as we went.

Joe was a Black man in his mid-thirties who had been raised in Texas by a drug-addicted single mother. He had been born into extreme poverty with a family history of mental illness and minimal education. All of this was saturated in the racial inequity that Black Americans face in the south. With these basic facts about his identity, I knew that Joe had been born into a life of adversity.

Next, I asked about his life experiences. He told me he had been the victim of multiple forms of abuse, including sexual assault, starting when he was still a toddler. Survivors of early childhood sexual assault often have a skewed understanding of consent and body autonomy if they don’t get the chance to really address it in therapy. Additionally, studies have found that perpetrators of sexual assault are extremely likely to have first experienced sexual trauma in their own childhood. 

Jail records informed me that in addition to his trauma history, Joe had untreated mental illness and had sustained multiple brain injuries that impaired his cognitive reasoning and impulse control. Sadly, he had never gotten the treatment he needed for these issues or even been educated on healthy sexuality and consent. Like most sex offenders, Joe didn’t spontaneously decide to abuse others without a catalyst; he was a victim first. He had already continued the cycle of abuse before anyone had told him that the violations that were done to him were tragic and wrong.

Lastly, I asked Joe what he was feeling that day, crouched in his cold, solitary cell. Due to his suicide risk, he was wearing nothing but a thin paper gown. He was humiliated and terrified of the inevitable violence that awaited him in the general population. He said it was like living a nightmare that was never going to be over. I imagined Joe as a small vulnerable child, afraid and desperate for understanding.

As we spoke, I was surprised at how quickly my empathy bloomed. I found myself genuinely moved by his story. He wept as he told me that I was the first person who had ever cried about the things he had been through. He hadn’t expected anyone in the world to show him kindness. I no longer saw a sociopath or a monster in him, I simply saw a human who was hurting.

When I left work that day, I felt like I’d been through a battle but I knew something life-changing had happened. Setting aside my anger and disgust to find out who Joe really was had been a healing experience I wasn't expecting. Since then, I’ve seen this kind of intentional empathy play out in astonishing ways over and over, affirming that my interaction with Joe was not a fluke.

Anxiety and The Apocalypse

The end of the world sure has come with a lot of new anxieties. Global catastrophes used to just be the theme of the fiction books I enjoyed reading. Now they’re the theme of my regular news feed (and nightmares). This is probably why the number of people getting diagnosed with anxiety disorders, depression, and OCD has skyrocketed in recent years. Then again, every generation before mine insists they had things just as bad, if not worse.

Generational gaslighting aside, one of our most collectively debilitating anxieties in this post-apocalyptic landscape is our fear of conflict. As existential problems have multiplied, so have strong, polarizing opinions. This has set us up to dread discussing anything of substance with friends and family. In the good old days, one only had to conform to cisgender/heterosexual norms and Judeo-Christian morality in order to remain safe from societal rejection. Not anymore. We’re tiptoeing through a minefield of delicate issues, hoping to avoid all of the topics that could set off a relationship bomb.

Whether I’m meeting someone new, posting on social media, or having a family dinner, there’s a sick feeling in my stomach that comes up when the conversation turns to politics, religion, social issues, or anything in between. If I express an opinion, the best-case scenario is I’ll get unfollowed on social media. Worst case scenario is having a miserable confrontation that causes a permanent rift in a relationship. Many of us, myself included, have already experienced both of these outcomes.

The internet, both a blessing and a curse, has polarized us even more. While our access to diverse ideas and perspectives has increased exponentially, we also now have unlimited access to misinformation and unchecked prejudice. It’s disturbingly easy to get sucked into an extremist rabbit hole online that regurgitates and amplifies any belief, factual or not. These self-fulfilling forums are echo chambers that do nothing but reinforce the reader’s pre-existing biases.

Moderation, once a virtue, has taken on a connotation of cowardice or apathy. If you aren’t dealing with high blood pressure and regular panic attacks, do you even care about “what’s going on in the world”?? I can’t help but wonder what this growing minefield of outrage means. Have we collectively chosen to discard empathy in favor of intolerance and nuance in favor of false dichotomies? I recently read an unnerving article that said Americans are exhibiting the early signs of an approaching civil war. How the hell did we get here?

Numerous psychologists, philosophers, and religious leaders have been speculating. I think the culprit is our tribalistic “us versus them” thinking; in other words, our lack of empathy. As humanity faces complex new challenges, we've gotten comfortable in our echo chambers that reinforce that anyone who hasn’t come to our exact same conclusion is an enemy. "They" aren't reasonable human beings but a faceless, evil opponent. Our othering has pushed us double down right when compromise is essential.

Meanwhile, progress on our most pressing issues has slowed to a crawl because no one is willing to listen, compromise, admit fault, or change. The death toll of the COVD-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine are two sobering examples of how many lives can be lost when we refuse to keep communicating beyond a disagreement.

I suspect that poor conflict management skills are a big contributor, but on an even deeper level, our resistance to evolving into a more empathetic human race is what’s blocking our progress. In the midst of bitter rivalries, reason would push us to take a look at our own contribution to the problem and empathy would help us recognize the understandable motives of those with whom we're in a stalemate. Unfortunately, the hip thing to do is to dig in our heels deeper and wait for the “other side” to come to their senses.

We face a pivotal fork in the road right now. Empathy isn't a luxury anymore, it’s a necessity to our survival as a species. If we want peace and hate war as much as we claim, all of us will have to intentionally choose to evolve. Stretching our capacity for empathy means learning how to actually listen to and tolerate other perspectives. We desperately need some common ground. Our only alternative is continuing to alienate everyone we disagree with, mutually ensuring our own destruction through endless stalemates.

You might be thinking, “Obviously! Everyone needs to get with the program!” You're right, but there’s one major problem: Nobody is personally willing to admit that we are bad at empathy. We all feel intuitively wise and can't imagine that we might be contributing to intolerance. It’s easy to preach the gospel of empathy when looking at other people’s stubbornness, but when our own values are questioned, a blind spot becomes quickly apparent.

As a therapist, I've witnessed first-hand the denial that most of us are in about our prejudice and biases. We automatically exempt ourselves whenever sober self-examination is called for. And it's understandable. We all need to be the protagonist of our life stories so when the evidence contradicts that, we opt for denial instead of willingness to change.

I've got good news, though. Empathy isn't a trait that you either have or don't have. It's a teachable skill that can melt our rage and cultivate true compassion for people who see the world differently. 

If you’re a natural skeptic like me, this may sound like a lofty goal. Despite my chronic nihilism, though, I believe in humanity’s capacity to continue growing as an ever-evolving species. If we're intentional, we can push our evolution in a more adaptive direction that could spare us (and hopefully our descendants) a whole lot of pain. 

In future blog posts I'll share my personal story of learning how to empathize, offer a fool-proof formula for empathy, and address the major barriers that tend to block our way. Stay tuned.

Sources:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02143-7/fulltext 

https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2021/02/11/rise-of-intolerance-are-we-moving-backwards/ 

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/27/1043161/why-being-online-felt-bad-2021-political-polarization-social-media/