The Art of Empathy (24 page)

The full answer to the question of how to tell whether an emotion is yours or someone else's is a long one, but it comes down to this: if you know how to work with emotions, then it doesn't matter where they came from. Certainly, you don't want to spend your life around emotionally repressive or emotionally explosive people (that's exhausting for anyone, but it's especially problematic for people who want to become healthy, happy empaths), but Emotion Contagion is a normal and healthy part of being human.

Saying that, however, I now want to focus on an emotion that can be problematic to share—not because the emotion is inherently troublesome, but because of the unusual and future-focused actions this particular emotion requires.

THE EMPATHIC DILEMMA OF ANXIETY

Being an author is pretty awesome, but one of the less awesome things about writing a book is that it sort of freezes you in time. It stands as a testament to what you knew the year you wrote it, even though you keep learning and growing long after it's published. Luckily, I've been able to use my website to update my work in
The Language of Emotions
(which I wrote in 2009) and share the new things I've learned about emotions and empathy. The following information on anxiety first appeared on my website.
⁴¹

I continually study emotions and empathy in social science, neurology, and related fields to stay updated. In January 2011, on the San Francisco–based
radio show
Forum
with Michael Krasny, I heard an interview with Dr. Mary Lamia, who is a psychoanalyst and psychologist. She wrote a book called
Understanding Myself: A Kid's Guide to Intense Emotions and Strong Feelings.
It's a great book for kids, and Lamia has some very surprising things to say.

In the latter part of the interview, Lamia spoke about anxiety in a way I hadn't heard before, and I mulled it over a great deal. She sees anxiety as the emotion that helps us take action and get things done. I knew that about fear (the question for fear is,
What action must be taken?
), and in my work, I focus on the action-based and intuitive aspects of fear. However, in my previous book, I sort of pushed anxiety off to the side because, honestly, it bothered me when people ran around being anxious. I just wanted them to calm down and focus themselves already.
Sheesh!
When I wrote my book, I didn't see anxiety as a purposeful emotion (I valenced it!); therefore, I completely overlooked its function. What I began to understand after hearing Lamia is that I wasn't able to maintain my grounding or my boundaries around anxiety and that the normal process of Emotion Contagion suddenly became troublesome when anxiety was in the room. This is a problem I share with many, many people, so let's look at it.

PUTTING IT OFF VERSUS DOING IT AHEAD OF TIME

Lamia contrasts
procrastinators,
who put things off until their anxiety kicks in and makes them do their work, with
do-it-aheaders,
who do their work ahead of time. I'm a do-it-aheader. We actually have a joke in our family about thanking Karla from the past—we'll find some job I finished weeks ago or unearth finished pieces to a project that's crucial, or we'll find important papers in my filing system, and we'll say, “Thanks, Karla from the past, for making things easy!” Clearly, this thankfulness is a great motivator, because in each day, I think of all kinds of cool projects and jobs to do for the future happiness of my friends, my family, and myself. It's a total win-win. It's time travel that works!

Before I heard Lamia, I would have said that I didn't
have
anxiety, but I realized with a thud that, “Ooohhhh, I have plenty of anxiety, but I somehow learned to respond to it at very early points in its appearance, so that it almost never gets to the level of a mood.” I realized that I've always paid close attention to soft and subtle levels of anxiety and responded at very early points in its life cycle, which meant that I rarely experienced an identifiable mood-state form of anxiety. Consequently, I developed a valenced and unnuanced empathic blind spot about anxiety.

Because I almost never moved into the mood state of anxiety, and because I usually responded to it in its soft, free-flowing state, I mistakenly identified my subtle level of do-it-ahead anxiety as
foresight, conscientiousness,
or perhaps just
being organized.
I didn't realize that I was working with an emotion that was trying to prepare me for the future. Whoops! We live and learn. So I finally learned to identify the nuances of anxiety, and I've since welcomed anxiety fully into my emotional toolkit. It is now easy to maintain my grounding, my focus, and my boundaries when I'm near an anxious person.

When I lifted my veil of ignorance about anxiety, I realized that my behavior only
appeared
to be anxiety-free, because I wasn't in an anxious mood. However, I was using my anxiety about
not
having completed things as a way to help myself out of future troubles. Does that make sense?

We've all experienced what it's like to look for a specific shirt that turns out to need washing (disappointment, frustration), or how it feels to lose important papers (anxiety, fear, disappointment), or how it feels to be late (embarrassment, shame, anxiety). As a do-it-aheader, I work to avoid those unpleasant outcomes by confronting them before they have a chance to happen. I'm time traveling in a way that's different from a procrastinator (who's trying to avoid an unpleasant future by not confronting it), but we're both attempting to achieve the same goals—we're both trying to avoid an unpleasant future.

During the
Forum
interview, a self-avowed procrastinator called in and explained that he could easily finish things that were pleasant, but that he really had to force himself to do things that felt like work or to finish chores that he didn't feel he was good at. He needed his anxiety to get to a fever pitch before he could power his way through his procrastination and into unpleasant tasks. Even as a do-it-aheader, I
totally
get that. When I have a miserable task to accomplish, my entertainment-and-online-game habit takes over, and I hide from the misery and discomfort and doubt. However, I've learned to pay myself with procrastination; for example, I'll tell myself, “Okay, you can play three games of (insert current favorite game here) or watch a show, but then you need to write that difficult letter or clean out the crisper drawer in the fridge.” That may sound silly, but I think it helps me remain emotionally honest.

Honestly, I don't
want
to write that letter or clean out the wretched crisper drawer. It's miserable work. Besides, what if I say the wrong thing in the rotten letter and make things worse? We can all stand outside the situation and know that I'll feel better once these miserable tasks are completed, but it's
a long slog through foul terrain before that can happen. So if I have to do those odious things, then I need a reward. And though I didn't know which emotion I was working with, I somehow learned to play with and work with my procrastination and my anxiety, rather than being worked over or overwhelmed by them. Score one for the unintentional empath!

REFRAMING YOUR APPROACH TO ANXIETY

Contagion in the area of anxiety can be troublesome, not simply because anxiety is usually negatively valenced but also because anxiety requires actions that are based on the future. If you pick up anxiety from others, you may become overwhelmed with a dozen future plans that you can't act upon in the present moment, or your adrenaline might kick in and make you feel jangled and unfocused. Both of these fairly normal responses to anxiety can cause you to shut down your empathy. It's important, therefore, to understand procrastination, anxiety, and anxiety-prone people more empathically so that this emotion isn't quite so destabilizing.

What I see in career procrastinators and anxiety-prone people (that is, in mood-state anxiety) is that their uncomfortable relationship to procrastination and anxiety becomes a kind of lifestyle and very much a part of their self-image. Procrastinators and anxiety-ridden people may feel some shame about their behavior, but because they're in a feedback loop with the powerful state of anxiety (which affects hormones, stress reactions, eating behaviors, sleep patterns, and more), they may feel as if they have no control over it. As a result, their mood-state anxiety may become an unwanted but persistent houseguest, which they eventually just learn to live with. Some people even begin to champion their anxiety/procrastination cycles (think of those signs that flaunt a messy desk as a mark of genius).

My suggestion for interrupting this feedback loop (in yourself, certainly, but you can also share this practice with the anxiety-prone people in your life) is to turn toward the anxiety and procrastination and ask the question for anxiety: “What
really
needs to get done?” I think the word
really
is key, because if you simply ask your procrastination what needs to get done, it might answer: “Eat chocolate, go blog hopping, play Angry Birds, watch movies,” and then it's four hours later and where are you? Did those things
really
need to get done? But if you ask your mood-state or intense anxiety what needs to get done, it might answer: “Make sure you turned off the stove, now polish the doorknobs, now wash your hands. But where are the
nail clippers? What about reorganizing the closet or changing the oil in the car? Oh, did you check the stove?” And again, it's four hours later, and you've been sent on any number of fool's errands. If you can slow yourself down and ask yourself what
really
needs to get done, you can bring your full awareness to the situation.

When any of your emotions (or the emotions of others) are caught in a feedback loop, it's very tempting to turn away (or run away) and ignore them, but you can make significant improvements in your Empathic Accuracy if you can clearly identify emotions and engage with them empathically. When you can understand the reasons that emotions arise, you can help them do their proper work so that they can recede naturally and you can ground and focus yourself again. This process of identifying, listening to, and responding to emotions so that they can move onward is how you develop Emotion Regulation skills. This next skill is a specific healing practice for anxiety, which can be a very problematic emotion if you don't understand how it works or how to regulate it.

CONSCIOUS QUESTIONING FOR YOUR ANXIETY

Anxiety has an important purpose and function—it's your task-completion emotion, and it's your procrastination alert system. Anxiety can be an intensely action-focused emotion, and expressing it when it's intense or when it's in a feedback loop can be pretty problematic. It can run you in five different directions at once. However, repressing anxiety isn't a good choice, because anxiety will keep bubbling up—it has tasks to complete! But here's the rub with intense anxiety: even
channeling
it can be problematic if you're highly activated—it might overwhelm or confuse you, especially if it's in a feedback loop. So we have an empathic mindfulness practice for anxiety that's similar to Conscious Complaining.

In Conscious Questioning, you turn toward your anxiety and identify each issue that your anxiety is responding to so you can organize all of your activation. This practice will help you ground and focus yourself again. You can do this verbally, by asking yourself (out loud) about each thing that
really
needs to get done. But I find that it's helpful to write things down as well. Writing is a way to physically express your anxieties, become aware of them, and organize them intentionally. And here's the interesting part: speaking or writing out your anxieties
is
an action. It counts as an emotion-specific action that helps your anxiety calm down a bit so that you can ground and focus yourself. Many
of us try to repress or run away from anxiety, but that doesn't work; turning toward anxiety empathically
does
work. Simply voicing or writing down your anxieties will help your anxieties recede. With this quick, focused practice, you can access the gifts of anxiety, identify any upcoming tasks, organize everything you need to do to complete those tasks, and gently confront your procrastination tendencies. When you use Conscious Questioning, it doesn't matter whether or not the anxiety you feel belongs to you, because no matter where it came from, you can turn toward it, question it consciously, complete its specific actions, and move onward.

Empathic mindfulness skills help you make real changes in your behavior, in your approach to emotions, in your outlook, in your tension levels, and in your empathic skills. No matter where an emotion came from, which emotion it is, or how activated the emotion has become, you can use your empathic skills to engage with each emotion and figure out what it's trying to do. Remember, though, that if you do what you can to empathically address an emotion and it's still too much, please reach out for help from a trusted friend, counselor, or health-care provider. Sometimes, especially with a very intense emotion like anxiety, we can all use a little support to bring an emotion back into balance.

FROM YOUR INNER WORLD TO YOUR OUTER WORLD

Your empathic mindfulness skills are a set of intrapersonal skills that you can use no matter where you are or what's going on around you. In our emotionally confused and empathically noisy world, these skills will help you stay focused, grounded, self-aware, emotionally flexible, empathically aware, intuitively attentive, and rejuvenated. In Part Two of this book, we'll explore ways to safely and comfortably bring your empathy into the world. In the next chapter, we'll create a home environment that can support you and your loved ones in these ways and more.

P
ART
T
WO

Bringing Your Empathy into the World

C
HAPTER
6

Empaths at Home