The Art of Empathy (32 page)

That's a very helpful suggestion, but how can you perform that kind of thresholding in your most intimate relationships? How can you set boundaries and thresholds around a difficult person who lives with you and sleeps in your bed? How can you protect yourself from an incompatible, emotionally incapable, and possibly toxic person who's in your innermost empathic circle?

The answer is, you can't. In your inner circle, you need emotionally awake and empathically attuned people who completely and utterly have your back. Otherwise, you'll be doing emotion work twenty-four hours a day with no breaks. That's a recipe for empathic burnout, and I have a warning: if you're currently in a relationship that's incompatible and based on swashbuckling love, you may want to avoid De Angelis's book, because she's very blunt about your chances for success. If you're on the verge of burnout, but you're still dedicated to your swashbuckling, her book will probably just annoy and offend you. Bless your heart if you need to work in the heroic land of swashbuckling love right now. For many people, relationships can be a place of deep learning—a place to work out childhood traumas, abuse issues,
addiction issues, issues with parents and family, and issues of basic self-worth. Some swashbucklers cannot yet identify healthy people or feel any kind of attraction to them, because they're on a quest to find a truly unworkable mate who will require unheard-of amounts of love that, this time, will surely fix everything. As I wrote earlier, this full-bodied heroic swashbuckling can be considered an empathic tendency; we've all done it, and you may need to do it for a while longer. But when you're ready to try something different, and when you're ready to be loved as much as you love others, there's a way out. There are therapists and counselors everywhere; there are abuse and addiction groups everywhere; and your local library is groaning under the weight of books about relationships. There's a lot of help waiting for you when your impossible heroic journey finally comes to an end. Until then, I'll bow to you with reverence, and we'll move on to the next topic.

FINDING EMPATHIC FRIENDS AND COMMUNITY

Intimate relationships are important, but if you're not currently in one, or if yours is fraught with trouble, friendships can be a safe and wonderful way to share and deepen your empathy. Friendships are just as important as intimate relationships, and empathically speaking, they can be less troublesome, because they're not surrounded by quite so much heroic fairy-tale baggage. When I asked you to observe the empathic abilities of your friends and loved ones and to gauge the relative importance of your emotional style compatibility, I didn't do this just to give you a snapshot of your current relationships; I did it to help you identify what's important in your future relationships. When you know what's important to you, you can choose friendships that help you deepen your empathy in safe, healthy, and comfortable ways.

Thankfully, it doesn't seem to matter how many relationships you have; what matters is their quality. The
Scientific American Mind
article about frenemies includes studies that found that the sheer number of friends a person has is not as important as the quality of those friendships; the health-building, empathy-increasing value of friendships depends on the quality of your friendships, and not on their quantity. One excellent friend is all you need. If you can gather more, great; but one will do. Whew!

Personally, I'm working on creating quality time with people in my own community in simple, inexpensive ways. I've also been talking to people about how they fit socializing into their busy lives. Many report that they've created ways to do chores and socialize at the same time (my anxiety finds
this idea delightful!). It feels sort of silly to be writing this down, but the loss of social time has affected all of us, and it's important that we address it—not just for our own health, but also for the empathic health of our loved ones and our communities.

Here are some simple ways to increase the face-to-face interactions that will support social, emotional, and empathic health for you and your friends: card and game nights, cooking together, trading chore days at each other's houses, meeting at the local farmer's market, hiking and biking together, taking exercise classes together, washing and vacuuming your cars together, creating arts and crafts parties, singing together, changing the oil in your cars together, trading help on your building projects, cleaning out the gutters at your homes, helping each other organize garages or closets, watching your favorite shows at each other's homes, carpooling to the grocery store, inviting people to create a garden in your yard, and sharing the produce. You get the idea.

In our overly busy modern world, we've become fairly isolated, and we've lost touch with the barn-raising, quilting-bee socializing that kept our hardworking ancestors connected to each other. When I look at our online world—at all the wikis, websites, and blogs that contain all of the knowledge (and wackiness and dysfunction) of humankind—I see that our energetic community-building skills are still very active, but in many cases, they've moved online, where interaction isn't quite as supportive as it might be.

Empathy is developed in interactions, and research is continually suggesting that face-to-face interactions trump online interactions. A great deal of research has been focused on the often unempathic and emotionally explosive behaviors we see online, and of all the possible factors (for instance, anonymity, reaction speed leading to emotional dysregulation, age and maturity levels in the online community, and isolation), it's looking as if one of the most destructive factors is a lack of eye contact.
⁴⁷
When people can't see each other and read each other's signals empathically, many can't regulate their emotional responses, and they tend to fly off the handle. Eye contact and real-world interactions can be grounding, civilizing, emotionally regulating, and empathy building.

Live, real-world interactions can also teach you how to read all of the rich emotions, gestures, subtexts, nuances, expressions, and pauses that help you truly understand yourself and others. Real-life interactions are food for your empathic soul. Sadly, we tend not to have much time to get together these days, and if we do, it's usually around something that costs money, like
dinner, a movie, or a concert. However, since online interactions can actually impede social skills, Emotion Regulation abilities, and empathy in vulnerable people, we must create as many opportunities for real face-to-face interactions as we can. Empathy is a malleable and multifaceted skill that can be increased at any age with healthy interactions—but it can also be decreased at any age if you're not getting the right food for your empathic soul.

In the next chapter, we'll look at some specific communication skills you can use to increase your empathic skills, help make your emotion work more conscious, and revive empathy when your relationships need support.

C
HAPTER
8

Empathic Communication

Getting into Sync with Others

EMPATHY IS DEVELOPED in interactions—in infancy, in childhood, during your teen years, and right now. The quality of your interactions has a large impact on your empathic capacities. If you have shallow relationships or inattentive friends and family members, if your relationships are not fulfilling or deep enough, or if you can't find empathic people to interact with, then your empathic abilities may languish. On the other hand, if your relationships are deep and satisfying, if you have family members and friends who can meet you where you are and understand you, if your emotional styles are compatible, if your emotion workloads are equal, and if you have other healthy empaths in your life, then your empathic abilities will most likely flourish. Empathy is developed in interactions, and you can increase and deepen your empathic abilities at any point in your life.

As we move outward in support of your empathic skills, from your inner life to your home and now into your relationships, we'll add specific empathic communication skills that you can use right now to change the quality and tenor of your existing relationships. But first, let's look at one idea of an empathic conversation between a couple who've been together for a while:

Rosalie
(frustrated and dejected): It happened
again.
My boss is a jerk, and everything I do is wrong. I'm so tired of this. I'm afraid that I'm gonna get fired, but I'm even more afraid that I'll stay and get sucked into the vortex.

David
(understanding): I hear you saying that you're sad because your boss is being hard on you, and that you're tired and worried
that you might lose your job. But I also hear you saying that staying put is frightening.

Rosalie
(sarcastic): Is there an echo in here?

David is engaging in a kind of pseudoempathy that is currently called mirroring but that was once called reflective listening. My mother told me that she tried reflective listening more than forty years ago on my little sister and me when we were fighting (we were three and four at the time), and that we both got very quiet and rolled our eyes at each other, as if to say, “Our poor mother has developed a brain-wasting disease.” Mom said that it stopped our fight very effectively, however, and that we ran outside to play (because she had freaked us out!).

My problem with reflective listening and other allegedly empathy-raising techniques is that they're very obvious
techniques,
and I could see through them even as a toddler. I still can, though I have more patience today than I did then. I realize that people who use mirroring are trying very hard to get into sync with me, and I have empathy for that. But when I talk to you, and especially when I talk to you about trouble, I don't want you to rephrase what I said. I
know
what I said, and I know how I feel. I'm talking to you because I want support or input or help or humor or love or commiseration or a crankfest or a complaining partner. If I'm talking to you when I'm in trouble, it means that I already trust you and believe in you. I already know that you can hear me. You don't need to parrot me to empathize with me. You need to
interact
—honestly, authentically, and as yourself. When I talk to you, I don't want to talk to a mirror; I don't want to see myself. I want to see
you.

Mirroring and reflective listening can be helpful if you're working with people who aren't very self-aware, because your skillful mirroring may help them become more precise about their own emotions. If you say to someone, “I hear that you're feeling a little bit angry and cheated by that,” but the person thought she was being funny, it could really help her begin to become more accurate about her actual emotions, or about the way her emotions are coming across to others. Or if your Empathic Accuracy skills are currently low, learning how to mirror and reflect other people's emotions will help you begin to develop better emotion recognition skills. If you can rephrase what you heard and mirror back the gist of what people say (that is, you don't repeat their words verbatim; instead, you tell them what you think they're feeling, without placing value judgments on their emotions), then
you can become more receptive to and precise about the emotional signals people send.

Reflective listening can also be helpful if your relationships suddenly get tangled up and conflicted. It's great to be able to say, “Wait, I heard you say that you felt uncomfortable at my dad's house, so I made other plans!” And then your partner might answer, “Oh, heck, I meant that I didn't want to go there
last Labor Day,
because I don't like watching the game. But now I miss your dad!” And then your communication can move forward because you now understand each other. But using reflective listening for everything? Yeesh, it's exhausting! So let's look at David and Rosalie again, in a situation where David can be a real person with his own opinions, emotions, and truly empathic interactional style:

Rosalie
(frustrated and dejected): It happened
again.
My boss is a jerk, and everything I do is wrong. I'm so tired of this. I'm afraid that I'm gonna get fired, but I'm even more afraid that I'll stay and get sucked into the vortex.

David
(understanding): Oh, man, I want to listen to you, but I'm really angry with your boss right now.

Rosalie
: Thanks. (sighing) I'm angry with myself, for letting this happen.

David
: What the … ? You don't make him act like a jerk.

Rosalie
: I just keep going over things in my mind: How can I do better? How can I make things work?

David
: (softly): Why is it up to you?

Rosalie
(angry, explosive): Because! (realizing how ridiculous that sounds, and laughing a bit, and then becoming sad, silent) Because . . . he's just like my dad.

David
: Ouch.

Rosalie
(quieter): Yeah.

David
: (silent, leaving space)

Rosalie
(breathing heavily, like a sigh): Yeah.

David
(quiet, working with the rhythm of her breathing): What do you need?

Rosalie
(final, clear, but very low energy): I need to quit.

David
(silent, but very watchful because he doesn't want her to think he's disapproving; he leans in toward her and says softly): Yeah.

Rosalie
(crying now): I can't fix it, and I never could.

David
(softly): No.

Rosalie
(angry): But why do I have to leave and lose my job, and why did I have to lose my childhood—when it's other people's damn problem? Why am I the one who gets hurt but still keeps coming back?

David
(smiling gently): Yeah, why?

Rosalie
(sighing, more focused, lifting her head): Okay, dusting off the résumé. Do I give notice first or wait? (deciding) I wait. Screw'em—I can always give notice, but I'm not gonna hurt myself just to make a point. They can pay me until I'm good and ready to leave.