The Art of Empathy (11 page)

DEVELOPING EMOTIONAL GENIUS

Understanding emotions has been a lifelong process for me. From my early days as an emotionally inundated hyperempath, I struggled to make sense of my own intense emotions and of the intense and confusing emotions that ruled my neighborhood after the case against my neighbor was dropped. With the help of my wonderful animal friends, I found a place to explore emotions in safety—out on the lawn with my cat and dog friends, I could relax and think aloud about what I saw in the land of emotions. For instance, I watched anger in people who expressed it as rage, and I studied what they were trying to accomplish. I also watched people, like my mother, who were never openly angry; I contrasted their behavior with the behavior of the rage-filled people I knew. How did life work for them? What did their anger do for them? What did it prevent them from doing?

I watched people who expressed lots of fear and anxiety and contrasted them with people like my father, who never seemed to feel much of either emotion. I studied how people lived and the things they were able to accomplish in their relationship with these emotions. I also watched neighbors who were seemingly always depressed, and I contrasted them with people who always seemed to be upbeat. I studied how people's lives worked or didn't work in relationship to depression and happiness. For me, emotions were the most interesting parts of human nature; but in this special area of interest, I was pretty much alone.

People never seemed to want to talk about emotions at all. It was almost as if they were ashamed of emotions and couldn't bear to hear anything about them. This was very strange to me, and it took me almost two decades to acquire a functional, empathic understanding of emotions and their purpose—
not
because it takes decades to understand emotions, but because our ways of approaching, thinking about, and dealing with emotions are so backward and unhelpful. Even today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, people who come across my work are startled by the absolute newness of it (it is still the only work anywhere that covers all of the emotions in terms of what they do and how to work with them) and by the absolute “Well, duh!” aspect of what anyone should have known.

Emotions were not well understood when I was young. Although a great deal of work is now being done in emotion research, emotions are still an area of massive confusion in numerous academic fields. If you'd like to read about the process that I underwent in my quest to understand emotions empathically, my book
The Language of Emotions
is a chronicle of that decades-long work. In this book, however, we'll move forward without too much preamble, except for an introduction to the most helpful definition of emotions that I've found so far, plus a discussion of four key problems that lead directly to emotional confusion.

ACTION-REQUIRING NEUROLOGICAL PROGRAMS

In his work as a neuroscientist of emotion, Antonio Damasio has been able to study people who have lost their ability to feel some or all emotions. If you have been trained to think of emotions as mostly problematic, you might think of these people as lucky. Many of us imagine that without emotions, people would be completely rational, like a computer or like the hyperlogical and seemingly unemotional
Star Trek
character Mr. Spock. However, nothing could be further from the truth. What Damasio discovered as he worked with many emotion-impaired patients throughout his career is that each emotion has a specific role in the maintenance of essential social and cognitive functions. If you take emotions away from people, they don't become smarter; instead, they become less able to function independently, they lose many of their interactional skills, and they often require direct assistance to care for and protect themselves.

For instance, Damasio wrote about a male patient
²⁸
with brain damage that severely impaired his emotions. Although this patient was still able to think, speak, and drive, he had a fascinating inability to make simple decisions. Damasio described giving this patient two possible dates for an
upcoming appointment and then watching in frustration-tinged fascination as the man spent nearly thirty minutes listing all of the possible differences between the two appointment dates (weather, driving conditions, other appointments—he was exhaustive). Finally, Damasio spoke up and suggested one of the two dates. The man agreed willingly and easily—nothing in his meticulous list seemed to matter to him in the least—and then he left.

This patient's logical, linguistic, and sequencing abilities were intact. His memory was intact. He could easily orient to day and time. But he couldn't make any decisions about his preferences, and he couldn't respond appropriately to the boredom and
hurry-up
signals Damasio was sending. He was as smart and as logical as anyone needs to be, but without his emotions, he couldn't make decisions. Damasio eventually realized that decision making is the emotional process of attaching value and meaning to data. This patient knew all of the facts, but he didn't know how he
felt
about any of them, and he was unable to make even a simple decision without assistance. Emotions are intimately involved in our cognitive processes, and without them, facts just pile on top of each other without meaning or value. Emotions help us understand what's important and what isn't, and they help us attend empathically to the signals and needs of others.

Even the allegedly “negative” emotions are intrinsic to our functioning—even shame, even fear. Damasio wrote about another patient,
²⁹
a young woman who had a head trauma in early childhood that interfered with her ability to feel shame, guilt, or embarrassment. Although you might think that this would be a wonderfully freeing state, it was a disaster. Without the ability to feel ashamed or embarrassed, this young woman was a social hurricane, unable (and unwilling) to behave in ways that worked for others and, eventually, for herself. She was insensitive, unapologetic, unreliable, self-endangering, other-endangering, and so disruptive that she landed in multiple treatment facilities as a teen. Eventually, as a young adult, she had to be conserved because she was so socially disabled. She was intelligent, she came from a good family, and she had plenty of therapy and support. But without her shame, guilt, and embarrassment, she couldn't function socially, feel concern, empathize effectively, maintain relationships, complete schooling, keep a job, amend her behaviors, apologize for her misdeeds, or live independently. Without her shame, she couldn't live as a fully functional member of the social world.

Damasio wrote of another woman
³⁰
with a very rare disease that caused calcium deposits to collect in, and essentially disable, her amygdala—a
small, almond-shaped region of the brain that's involved in processing fear. This intelligent woman, an artist and mother, was able to feel and identify all other emotions except fear. She couldn't even draw a fearful face, though she could draw facial expressions of other emotions. She was a happy, outgoing person who had no social impediments, but she couldn't tell instinctively whether people or situations were safe. She had to learn the hard way, and she reported that many people she had trusted had gone on to take advantage of her. Without access to her fear, this woman was not completely safe in the world; she didn't have the instincts or the intuition she needed to identify people and situations that might have harmed her. We've been trained to think of fear as a negative emotion, but without it, people are actually quite vulnerable.

Patients like these helped Damasio see through the confusing mists that obscure our understanding of emotions and helped him identify the
purpose
of emotions. These patients and their disabilities helped Damasio create a working definition for emotions that brings them into clear focus: emotions are
action-requiring neurological programs.
They're not positive or negative, glorious or shameful, right or wrong; they're action-requiring neurological programs.

With this definition in place, we can approach emotions empathically—not as problems to be eradicated, but as action-requiring programs that are essential for the maintenance of our whole and healthy lives. Understanding emotions as action-requiring neurological programs helps us observe them more intelligently and more functionally. Because if an emotion requires an action, the next obvious question is (1)
Which
action? And then, the question after that is, (2) What happens when I perform that action?

The answers to these questions are (1) The action you perform depends upon which emotion has arisen, and (2) When you perform the correct action, that emotion should recede naturally. This action-requiring approach helps us reframe not just emotions but also the conditions we usually blame on emotions, such as repetitive anxiety or depression, or problems with anger, fear, or envy (and so on). Instead of looking at emotions as problems in and of themselves, we can—with this action-focused approach—become more empathically intelligent about them.

WHICH ACTIONS ARE REQUIRED?

Let's look a bit more closely at Damasio's assertion that emotions are action-requiring neurological programs by focusing on the requirements of specific
emotions. I'll go into more detail in the next chapter, but for now, let's look at five emotions and their related actions (the following is based on an essay that originated on my website
³¹
).

Fear
requires that you take action to orient to change and novelty or to avoid possible physical hazards.
Anger
requires that you take action to protect or restore your sense of self or your standpoint (or the selves and standpoints of others, if your anger is related to social justice).
Shame
requires that you take action to avoid embarrassing or offending yourself or others (
if
the shame is authentic to you, it's important to first identify whether the shame has been applied as a control mechanism from the outside).
Sadness
requires that you take action to let go of something that isn't working anyway.
Grief
requires that you actively mourn something or someone that is lost irretrievably. And so forth.

Each emotion represents a unique action-requiring neurological program that, as Damasio explains, has evolved over millions of years to help humans become a successful social species. In the following excerpt from his book
Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain,
my explanations of Damasio's terms are in brackets:

Emotions are present even in cultures that lack names for the emotions. . . . The universality of emotional expressions reveals the degree to which the emotional action program is unlearned and automated. The execution of the same emotion can vary from occasion to occasion but not enough to make it unrecognizable to the subject or to others. It varies as much as the interpretation of [George] Gershwin's song
Summertime
can change with different interpreters or even with the same interpreter on different occasions, yet it is still perfectly identifiable because the general contour of the behavior has been maintained. . . .

The fact that emotions are unlearned, automated, and predictably stable across action programs [emotional responses] betrays their origins in natural selection and in the resulting genomic instructions [human genetic inheritance]. These instructions have been highly conserved across evolution and result in the brain's being assembled in a particular, dependable way, such that certain neuron circuits can process emotionally competent stimuli [anything that evokes an emotion] and lead emotion-triggering brain regions to construct a full-fledged emotional response.

Emotions and their underlying phenomena are so essential for the maintenance of life and for subsequent maturation of the individual that they are reliably deployed in early development.
[All normally developing human infants are born with specific emotions intact, and all develop further emotional responses at dependable stages.] (123–124,
emphasis mine
)

Emotions are essential for the maintenance of life.
That powerful statement stands in stark contrast to what most of us were taught about emotions—even in otherwise supportive meditative practices, in which we're often taught to disengage from our emotions or to breathe them away as if they are impediments to consciousness. Sadly, in most places you look, many of our emotions are treated as signs of pathology in and of themselves. We've received endless instructions about how
not
to have the allegedly negative ones or how to have the allegedly positive ones all day long. But that's not helpful, because it teaches us to treat emotions as problems, when they're actually essential and highly evolved aspects of consciousness, cognition, social skill, empathy, and human nature.

It's so helpful to understand emotions as action-requiring neurological programs, because it means that you get to decide which action (out of dozens) you want to take. This gives you intentionality and agency in regard to your emotions; you become a person who can act intelligently when your emotions arise, rather than being their puppet or their puppet-master. This concept also lifts away the blotch of pathology that has been smeared onto emotions for so many centuries. Emotions are necessary, evolved, and reliable.

When a snake crosses your path, your
fear program
starts so that you can orient yourself to change, novelty, and possible hazards. You take action to avoid the snake, or you pick him up gently and get him out of harm's way, or any number of other responses. Then your fear recedes.

When your brother calls you a jerk, your
anger program
starts so that you can address challenges to your sense of self and your standpoint. You can take action to repair the damage: you could yell, but that might just start a war; you could ignore the slur, if that's the best idea; you could lean into the relationship and gently ask him to explain his behavior, if you want to protect his sense of self and move the relationship to a new place; or you could laugh and defuse the intensity. Whichever action you take will complete the program—though fighting back will require a new and stronger anger response
that could get you into trouble. (We'll explore this in the section on repression and expression of emotions in this chapter, and in “How Much Emotion Is Too Much?” in
Chapter 4
.)