The Art of Empathy (14 page)

Question 10: The Gifts of Envy.
This question may seem to relate to your capacity for self-preservation and financial and social viability—and it does. But these are also the gifts of envy, which help you create and maintain stable connections to security, material and financial resources, and appropriate social recognition. Envy is related to the emotion of jealousy, though the two have distinct differences: envy helps you function effectively in the area of security, resources, and recognition, whereas jealousy helps you create and maintain stable connections to loyalty, mate retention, and love.

Envy and jealousy are possibly the most hated emotions in the entire emotional realm, but they are absolutely crucial to your social survival. As we explore relationship skills in
Chapter 7
, childhood rivalries in
Chapter 9
, and workplace relationships in
Chapter 10
, we'll look at how healthy envy and healthy jealousy can help you become more effective in your relationships.

Question 11: The Gifts of Anxiety.
This question may seem to relate to being a good planner, and it does, because that's one of the gifts anxiety brings to you. People are often surprised to learn that anxiety contains specific gifts, because anxiety is usually described in terms of disorder or disease. However, at its most subtle gift level, anxiety (which is related to fear) helps you plan for the future and complete important tasks. I call anxiety your
procrastination alert system;
a bonus with anxiety is that if you're feeling it, then there's probably nothing to fear in the present moment. If there's a problem in your immediate environment, fear will help you orient to change, novelty, or possible hazards. But if you're feeling anxiety, it relates to the future, and its presence usually means that things in the present moment are pretty stable.

As we all know, anxiety can become problematic if it isn't attended to, and it can become uncomfortably repetitive. We'll look at a specific practice for anxiety (Conscious Questioning) in
Chapter 5
.

All emotions bring you specific gifts, and all emotions exist in a continuum of different intensities. As the questions in my short emotion quiz demonstrate, your emotions actually contribute vital skills that support your basic cognition and social functioning. If you can learn to identify the subtle
presentations of your emotions, these skills will be available to you in every waking moment; you won't have to wait until a mood overtakes you. It's important to develop an awareness of emotions at many different and subtle levels so that you can become more skilled with these basic tools of social intelligence and empathic awareness.

To help you develop a larger, more nuanced range of emotional awareness, I include the “Emotional Vocabulary List” in
Appendix A
to give you many vocabulary words for specific emotions at three different levels of intensity. In the list, I refer to the subtle, gift-level presentation of emotions as their
soft
states. I call their more obvious presentations
mood
states. When they're highly activated, I call that their
intense
states.

To help you understand what I mean, let me put anxiety into the mix and run it through the three states. In its
soft
state, anxiety simply helps you be aware of what you need to bring for an upcoming trip, for instance. You don't feel obviously anxious; you're just connected to anxiety's capacity to help you prepare yourself for the future and to complete your tasks intelligently.

In its
mood
state, your anxiety is more insistent. You feel more of a sense of a time crunch, and you might experience intense focus and energy. You might orient toward the future and bring a great deal of laser focus to what you need to do; you might even ignore things in the room that are not related to the tasks you need to complete. You feel more activated in this state, and you might be a bit snappy if anyone gets in your way. This is a very task-oriented emotion, and it has things to do! In this state, you feel a little bit riled up, but not uncomfortably so, and you're able to identify that you're working with the gifts of anxiety. In their mood states, your emotions are usually obvious to you and others.

In its
intense
state, your anxiety is in a kind of feedback loop, which can be initiated by many things. Internally, it could be generated by an increase in adrenaline, cortisol, heart rate, or other physical conditions unrelated to task completion. When you feel those ramped-up intensities, you might think, “Oh, I have a ton of work to do on a tight deadline!!” Externally, this intense level of anxiety could be initiated by a sudden, overwhelmingly close deadline or by a flurry of things that need to be handled but are actually impossible for one person to do. In situations like this, your anxiety might set itself into a tizzy of activation. It might spin out and take you from room to room, completing three tasks badly and four not at all. You might orient so strongly to one thing that you miss other things in the room, and you might
trip or walk into a wall. Or your focus might get so overwhelmed that you can't see or find that check you just put down on the table,
dagnabbit!!
At this point, Conscious Questioning (in
Chapter 5
) will be invaluable.

Notice that all three levels of activation involve the exact same emotion—anxiety. But also notice that when we talk about anxiety, we usually only talk about its intense state, and we usually categorize anxiety as a thoroughly negative emotion. That's understandable, because if you only know anxiety in its intense form, then the act of valencing is actually sort of logical: An emotion that walks you into walls and makes you lose checks is not helpful! It's negative! But that's not all that anxiety does, and it's important to remember that all emotions exist at many different levels of activation and nuance, and all emotions are necessary.

Increasing your emotional vocabulary and extending your emotional awareness to include nuance will help you become more articulate, more knowledgeable, and more empathic about emotions—in yourself and in others. It will also help you increase your Emotion Contagion, Empathic Accuracy, Emotion Regulation, and Perspective Taking skills. Increasing your emotional awareness increases your empathic awareness.

THE PROBLEM OF QUANTITY

Emotions don't arise one at a time in a kind of military precision. Instead, they usually arise in pairs, groups, or clusters. In many cases, such as the party situation I described earlier, we saw that fear and shame arose alongside anger when our mouthy friend insulted our clothing. These three emotions arose together because we needed all three of them. We needed
anger
to address the direct affront to our sense of self, we needed
fear
so that we could be awake and intuitive about possible hazards, and we needed
shame
to help us moderate our behavior so that the situation wouldn't spiral out of control. All three of these emotions were necessary in that situation.

Emotions arise because they're necessary, and in many situations, multiple emotions are needed. Emotions are action-requiring programs, and you can easily have more than one program running at any given time. Emotions are a collection of interrelated skills, abilities, and aptitudes, so it's natural for them to arise in pairs or groups. It's also natural for them to follow one another swiftly after you complete the distinct actions required by each one.

Vocabulary may be a problem here: In the English language, we have almost no words that meld emotions in the way they actually work in real
life. Some friends and I were talking recently about finding a word for the kind of happiness that makes you cry, perhaps when something is so beautiful and also so touching that you become overtaken by joy and sadness and happiness (and sometimes grief) all at once. The closest we could come was
bittersweet,
but that's not an emotion—it's a flavor!

To find emotion-melding words, we actually had to go outside the English language. In the German language, for instance, a wonderful melded-emotion word is
schadenfreude,
which means “feeling joy about the misfortune of another.” In schadenfreude, which I sometimes call
savage glee,
there's anger, happiness, joy, a distinct lack of shame, envy, jealousy, and a sense of righteous exultation when you see someone receive what you deem to be a much-deserved comeuppance. Usually, there's a lot of history behind those combined emotions—the person who is suddenly brought so low may have been lording over you for quite some time or may have received many undeserved accolades while your own work went unacknowledged. When that many emotions arise in a cluster, there's a tremendous amount of social information that can be gleaned empathically. It's a continual source of fascination for me that the English language doesn't identify clustered emotions. Besides the word
nostalgia
(which is present-day sadness or longing for past happiness) the only other word I could think of is
gloating,
which is a little bit like schadenfreude. In schadenfreude, the other person has lost, but you haven't necessarily won. But when you gloat, you win or prevail over someone, and you gloatingly express your savage glee, apply shame to your opponent, and kick her when she's down.
Ouch!

The English word
ambivalence
describes the state of feeling more than one emotion—and if you're a wordsmith, you'll notice the word
valence
right inside
ambivalence.
Ambivalence means that you're feeling an allegedly negative emotion and an allegedly positive emotion together, and you're confused because you can't possibly decide which of the two emotions is true (hint: they're
both
true!). We actually do have a word in our language that tells us that two emotions are
way
too many and that confusion is the correct response. Wow, English language, wow!

I'm interested in our limited emotional vocabulary in another way—I notice that people use the word
emotional
to mean just about anything. “You're so emotional” can mean that you're angry, anxious, sad, or fearful, or perhaps that your emotions change a lot (as they should). “Let's not get emotional” can mean almost anything, but it's usually a way to shame you out of
a behavior or a position that doesn't work for the other person. “Emotions ran high” can mean that people fought in anger, that they cried, or that they responded in many different ways, such as laughing, shouting, booing, or walking out in disgust. The word
emotional
can mean everything and nothing, mainly because many people don't have strong emotional vocabularies. Sadly, this also means they don't have strong emotional awareness, which also means their empathic skills are likely very limited. Luckily, the work we're doing now will help with all of these problems.

Understanding emotions individually is a great first step in increasing your empathic skills. But out in the real world, emotions don't always arise individually. For instance, I wrote earlier about the connection between anger, shame, and contentment. If you want to feel more contentment, you actually need to make sure that you're working well with the gifts of anger and the gifts of shame. If you don't know that emotions are strongly interrelated, you might waste your time trying to evoke an individual emotion, such as contentment (which can't arise healthfully until you actually do something commendable), without understanding that other emotions need to be involved.

Another problem that arises when you don't know that emotions work together is one that happens regularly with anger, which many people misidentify as an allegedly secondhand emotion. Anger is sort of the whipping boy of the emotional realm (okay, all emotions, except possibly happiness, are the whipping boy at some point), and I notice that people hold a great deal of entrenched misconceptions about anger. The secondhand mistake is a case in point, and it's a very easy mistake to make if you don't understand how emotions work together and how anger, in particular, will arise to protect you and your other emotions (especially sadness and fear).

Think about this in terms of the self-protective gifts that anger brings you: In many cases, honestly expressing your sadness or fear is actually socially dangerous. Openly displaying sadness (and tears) can cause you to lose face; likewise, openly displaying fear can make others think you're a coward. Neither of these displays is good for your standpoint or your self-image. In these instances, your anger will be activated, not because it's a dishonest or secondhand emotion, but because it's
necessary.

We've all had the experience of feeling sadness—of feeling as if we're going to cry—and then suddenly getting angry and cranky at someone instead. Or with fear, we've all had someone jump out and scare the wits out of us, and right after we jump back, we snap angrily, “Cut it out!” In these situations,
the “real” emotions are being protected by expressive outbursts of anger. That's anger's job; it's a protective emotion. It's not a secondhand emotion when it jumps in front of the supposedly real emotions you're feeling. Anger is real, too. Anger is doing its job. It's protecting your voice, your sense of self, and your standpoint.

You can clearly observe the ignorance-producing effects of emotional valencing when you look at another secondhand emotion that might arise in these two situations. In both situations, happiness can also jump out in front of your “real” emotions: If you're about to cry but it's not safe, you might smile or laugh instead. And if someone jumps out and scares the heck out of you, you might laugh after you jump back. In both instances, the smiling and laughing will cover your sadness and your fear, and yet no one calls happiness a secondhand emotion. In fact, if you laugh when someone scares you, you'll be seen as a good sport. Yet it's the exact same mechanism, with one emotion jumping out to protect you when displaying the so-called real emotions might be socially unwise. However, when anger is involved, it's suddenly a big problem. Valencing makes us blind to the actual functions of individual emotions, so thank goodness we don't have to rely on valencing in our empathic work!