The Art of Empathy (10 page)

Gardner's multiple intelligences give us an excellent foundation for focusing on the intelligence that's inherent in emotional awareness and social skills, but I also want to add another model, which I discovered more recently.
In neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson's work on emotional styles, I found something wonderful—Davidson's assertion that even if your emotional or social training has been poor, many aspects of your emotional and social functioning remain malleable and flexible throughout your lifetime. With proper support, awareness, and retraining, you can modify your social and emotional skills, become more empathically aware, and actually change the way your brain responds to the world.

YOUR EMOTIONAL STYLE

In his book,
The Emotional Life of Your Brain,
neuroscientist and professor of psychology and psychiatry Richard Davidson (with science writer Sharon Begley) identified six dimensions of personality and behavior that can be linked to specific neurological processes. Davidson's work is captivating to me because he moves away from the old psychological and pop-psych personality models (which I find very limiting and dubious) and instead describes human temperament in terms of six dimensions that exist in each of us at differing levels and that can be observed in the brain.

These six dimensions are very useful, not only because they're based on actual neurological processes, but also because, in most cases, there's something you can
do
about them. In many personality typing models, you're just one kind of person, and that's where you stay. You're an introvert or an extrovert; you're rational or intuitive; you're a 9 or a 2 on the enneagram; you're a Scorpio or a Taurus; you're a highly sensitive person, or you're not. I realize that the entire point of personality typing is to separate people into categories, and in some stages of personal growth and awareness, these categories can be very helpful ways to identify yourself and others. They can even be avenues to understanding and empathizing with people. However, I eventually tired of them, and I now find them to be restrictive rather than liberating. I speak to you as a person whose mother was an astrologer, who was once interested in Myers Briggs personality types, who once thought of herself as a highly sensitive person, and who spent a great many years looking at all sorts of ways to categorize and separate people into types, elements, or archetypes. It's a thing we do—typing and categorizing and labeling people, sometimes as a path to empathy, but other times as a way to reduce our empathy for
those people
(whoever they are). At this point in my life, however, I'm no longer interested in personality typing, and I prefer to experience people as unique and unrepeatable beings, because
honestly, there are only two types of people: those who separate people into types, and those who don't. That's a joke—but not really.

As I searched for a supportive framework to add to Gardner's theory about multiple kinds of intelligence, I read through and discarded dozens of models, because each focused on personality types, polar opposites (where you're one thing or the other, but never all things), and behaviors or temperaments that were written in stone. These models didn't have the necessary fluidity to take into account the uniqueness of every person and the often-startling ways that people can change over the course of their lives. Davidson's work was a wonderful surprise, because it is grounded not only in neuroscience and actual research but also in the understanding that people can and do change. It's also wonderful to see the nuance Davidson brings to his six dimensions, because he doesn't support polarization—that is, he doesn't suggest that being all the way to one end of any of these dimensions is preferred. Instead, he suggests that moderation in all of these dimensions is a really good idea. So, even though he's created a categorization model, it doesn't put people into straitjackets. Wonderful!

These are Davidson's six dimensions of emotional style:

Resilience
is your capacity to recover from setbacks. In this dimension, perhaps you bounce back easily, or perhaps you take a long time to regain your equilibrium. In the dimension of Resilience, Davidson identifies people as fast to recover or slow to recover, and he offers skills to help people balance their recovery rates, because, depending on the situation, both fast
and
slow recovery rates can be either useful or problematic. If you recover too slowly, you can remain uncomfortably engaged in difficult situations for extended periods of time, but if you recover too quickly, you can speed right past situations that could help you develop better emotional and empathic awareness. This dimension is connected to your capacity for Emotion Contagion, Empathic Accuracy, Emotion Regulation, and Perspective Taking in our empathic frame.

Outlook
is your overall approach to life, which Davidson identifies on a continuum from positive to negative. In my empathic approach to emotions, I explore the problem of using terms like
positive
and
negative
in regard to emotions.
All
emotions are necessary, and relegating specific emotions to the dustbin of alleged negativity can create a great deal of trouble. However, Davidson points out that a negative outlook can be very useful and purposeful in some situations, whereas an unrelentingly positive outlook
can be completely inappropriate and dysfunctional—that is, overly positive people can have problems with planning, learning from mistakes, and delaying gratification. Davidson also has some helpful suggestions for creating appropriate balance in your outlook. The Outlook dimension is connected to your Empathic Accuracy and Emotion Regulation.

Social Intuition
is your ability to read people and the signals they send. This dimension relates to a combination of Emotion Contagion, Empathic Accuracy, and Perspective Taking. It asks: How well can you decipher the signals you receive? Davidson measures this skill on a continuum from socially intuitive to puzzled. Although you'd think that being all the way to the socially intuitive end would be great, Davidson points out that, as many of us know, being hyperempathic can be too stimulating and overwhelming. He suggests ways to work toward balance in this dimension. For socially puzzled people, for example, Davidson suggests studying people, interactions, and faces intently in order to develop better Emotion Contagion, Empathic Accuracy, and Perspective Taking.

Self-awareness
is your internal, intrapersonal capacity to identify your own emotions, sensations, and inner thoughts. In our frame, your capacity for Emotion Regulation and your ability to identify Emotion Contagion correctly through Empathic Accuracy exist in this area. Davidson measures this dimension on a continuum from self-aware to self-opaque, the latter of which means that your inner self is pretty mysterious to you. Again, though you might think that being on the self-aware end of the spectrum is the golden position, being too aware of what's going on inside you—your heart rate, your pain sensitivity, your digestion, your transitory emotional states, your temperature, your hormonal shifts—can be exhausting! Balance in this dimension is crucial to your ability to focus on others, rather than being uncomfortably hyperfocused on yourself.

Sensitivity to Context
is your capacity to understand the usually unspoken and hidden rules of social interaction so that you can respond in a socially sensitive way. This skill is very dependent on all six aspects of your empathic capacity, and it's a skill I illustrated very intentionally in the empath-cam scene with Joseph and Iris. Almost none of the social rules or signals that Joseph or Iris displayed were openly discussed; instead, their signals primarily existed in undercurrent, subtext, gestural language, and nuance. Reading those signals required Joseph, Iris, and me to have strong Sensitivity to Context. Davidson identifies this skill on a continuum from tuned in to tuned out.
I would characterize both Joseph and Iris as being on the tuned-in side of this continuum. However, as all of us know, the skill of tuning out context is invaluable when we're surrounded by conversations we shouldn't hear, conflicts we don't want to be a part of, and people we don't want to interact with. Davidson also suggests that being too tuned in can mean that people might lose their own sense of self in deference to the multiple inputs that are a part of each social context they encounter.

Attention
is your capacity to focus yourself or to screen out unrelated emotional, social, or sensory input. In this dimension, Davidson has identified a continuum that ranges from focused to unfocused. He discusses ways to reduce hyperfocus and to increase focusing capacity in people who are unfocused.

These six dimensions of emotional style are malleable—some more so than others. Davidson explains each in terms of the neurological structures that underlie each dimension. He also makes specific suggestions for how to manage, reduce, increase, or temper each dimension so that you can live more comfortably. (See
Appendix B
for a description of Davidson's suggestions.) Davidson's focus is primarily on Buddhist meditation practices (he developed his theory of the six dimensions after performing extensive functional magnetic resonance imaging observations on mindfulness meditators); on cognitive behavioral therapy; and, in some cases where change isn't currently possible, on creating environments in which specific emotional styles can be accommodated rather than changed.

Davidson's work is theoretical. Although he has more raw data to back up his six dimensions of emotional styles than Gardner has to back up his multiple intelligences, I want to be clear that Davidson is working in a new area and is bringing a very specific frame to his observations. Because this work is new, it can and will change over the next few decades. I'm including it not as a concrete set of facts, but as a useful set of ideas and approaches.

I'm drawn to the emotional styles frame, as well as to Davidson's assertion that the brain can change and that people can modify ingrained patterns, because I've experienced this change myself—and I've helped many other people experience it. I didn't have Davidson's framework underneath me as I struggled to become more resilient; to ground my outlook in the present, rather than on the horrors of my past; to balance my extreme Social Intuition, Sensitivity to Context, and Self-awareness; and to manage my ADHD-like lack of focus, which I combined with hyperfocus when it suited me. In my work as an empathic healer, however, I created mindfulness practices to
address each dimension (you'll learn these practices in
Chapter 5
), and I've watched thousands of people use these practices to make significant and lasting changes in their social, emotional, and internal functioning.

It is vitally important to realize something as you move deeper into the art of empathy:
you can change.
If your empathy is way off the charts, to the extent that it's making you miserable, you can modify and work with it intentionally, and you can change. If your capacity for empathy is currently low or if you hit empathic burnout quite a while ago, you can address your areas of difficulty (now that we have these frameworks), and you can change. And if your experience of your own or others' emotions is very uncomfortable, you can approach emotions in new ways so that you can access their wisdom and their gifts, and you can change.

EMPATHIC MINDFULNESS MEDITATIONS FOR KINETIC SCULPTURES

I want to make these next points carefully and with respect to people whose neurology and physiology are different from mine: Davidson's approach, which I outline in
Appendix B
, relies in most cases upon various stillness meditation practices. These forms of meditation are very helpful for many people; however, they don't work for everybody. In my particular case, they actually make things worse. My mother became a yoga teacher when I was ten years old, so I was introduced to stillness meditations very early, but sitting was never my path. I'm a kinetic sculpture, and I learn through movement. Extended imposed stillness is not supportive for me. Specific kinds of meditations work for specific people, and they don't work for others. For instance, people with anxiety disorders may experience increased anxiety and even panic attacks during stillness meditations.
²⁷
If stillness practices work wonders for you, then by all means, keep doing them. Just know that there are other ways to achieve similar outcomes.

The simple empathic mindfulness techniques I developed more than three decades ago were my way to achieve the kind of grounded focus, integration, and relaxation (in real life and in everyday situations) that people seek in extended stillness practices. Many very empathic people often do not have the time to sit on a cushion or wait for a long meditative retreat when situations become intense. Instead, empaths and sensitive people need to work on their feet in each moment to understand, reframe, ground, refocus, respond to, and shift their perspectives. I find that I need to be able to access my inner
resources and my mindfulness immediately, and that's what these empathic mindfulness skills allow me to do.

This book contains many empathic mindfulness techniques that you can use in the moment, on the fly, with your eyes open, and with your thoughts and emotions fully engaged. I certainly want you to read Davidson's book, and if his forms of meditation and therapy work for you and your body, then by all means, focus on those. But I also want you to know that there are many ways to become more mindful. If you're an emotionally aware kinetic sculpture who simply doesn't respond to stillness meditations, that's cool. I've got your back.

Now that we've looked at the working theories of Howard Gardner and Richard Davidson, I'd like to introduce you to my empathic theory of emotions. Since empathy is first and foremost an emotional skill, let's look empathically at the exquisite world of emotions themselves. And let's add a new category of genius to the kinds of intelligences we can have.