The Art of Empathy (17 page)

My hypothesis is that this detachment between emotions and feelings (in a neurologically intact person, that is) stems from the constant, repetitive, and relentlessly antiemotion training we get, most of which I wrote about when I described the four problems that ensure emotional confusion in the previous chapter. I think that people aren't aware of their emotions because they've been trained since birth to valence, repress, suppress, ignore, or demonize them. Or they swing to the opposite pole and express their emotions explosively. As we've all seen, repression and expression can both be very troubling, because in many cases, they actually make you less able to understand your own emotions. Luckily, if you can stop repressing or exploding with your emotions—if you can instead learn to simply
feel
them—then you can develop better Empathic Accuracy and stronger Emotional Regulation skills. In turn, you'll become more skillful in all aspects of
empathy. Identifying and naming your emotions is an important first step in learning how to feel them skillfully.

FEELING, NAMING, AND KNOWING

Matthew Lieberman,
³⁸
a psychological researcher at the University of California–Los Angeles, has done some interesting work on the ways that verbal identification of emotions can help you address and alleviate emotional pain. In his and other studies, there's a suggestion that simply naming your intense emotions can help your brain calm down so you can restore your resilience in the face of challenging situations.

I've found this to be true, especially for overwhelmed hyperempaths who have very permeable boundaries and problems with excessive Emotion Contagion. Naming emotions helps hyperempaths begin to articulate and organize emotions so that they can begin to feel more grounded and focused in the presence of strong emotions. On the other side of the equation, people with low emotional awareness and low empathy also benefit from learning to identify and name emotions. I've noticed in my four decades of practice and teaching that learning to identify emotions does three things:

1. It helps you learn to feel and identify your emotions, which helps you calm and focus yourself and develop Emotion Regulation skills.

2. It helps you understand when, why, and how your emotions arise so you can become more emotionally aware and increase your Empathic Accuracy.

3. It recruits your verbal skills to support and consult with your emotions so you can learn from them and take constructive, emotionally appropriate actions.

In my work, I don't set up a hierarchy in which your verbal and rational intelligence is somehow smarter than your emotions. As I wrote earlier, emotions are millions of years older than language, and if there were a hierarchy, I would have to give the higher position to emotions. But I don't do hierarchies. In my empathic work, we rely on your verbal and rational skills to
support
your emotional awareness. Emotions are neurological signalers of what's going on in your world. Emotions are simply data;
you
are the interpreter of those data. How you interpret and work with your emotions determines whether your outcomes are healthy and workable. Research is
continually showing how vital emotions are to your thought and decision-making processes, and if you can learn to feel emotions
intelligently,
then you'll widen the boundaries of your intelligence to include your social, emotional, and empathic skills.

As you learn how to feel more intelligently, a few simple flowcharts may help you understand the pathway that emotions take and where the act of feeling occurs in the process.

THE PATHWAY FROM EMOTION TO FEELING

Let's look at the simplest healthy pathway from emotion to action. (My flowcharts are simplified, and there's clearly a great deal more complexity involved when emotional disorders are present. But these broad strokes are worth understanding.)

Emotion
→
Feeling
→
Naming
→
Acting on the information the emotion provides

Let's put sadness into this flowchart. It would go like this: I
have
an emotion; I
feel
that it is sadness; I
name
the sadness; and I
take the action
my sadness requires (which might be sighing, slowing down, letting go of tension, or crying, among many other sadness-based actions).

But something is missing. I didn't include the situations and stimuli that induce emotions; let's not leave those out. Emotional stimuli can be anything that
evokes
an emotion, including your own thoughts. Emotions tell you that something requires an action; that something can include your own thoughts. Notice that I'm using the word
evoke
here.
³⁹
Emotions are not created out of thin air, and they're not created by your thoughts; emotions have evolved over millions of years to help you understand and respond to the world. Emotions exist within you, and they are
evoked,
not created, by specific stimuli. So let's include those stimuli:

Emotionally evocative stimulus
→
Emotion
→
Feeling
→
Naming
→
Acting on the information the emotion provides

But something is still missing—you may misperceive the stimulus! For instance, you may see a coiled-up rope and experience fear as if you were seeing a snake. Or, if your emotion is evoked by your thoughts about something
(for instance, you might think that your neighbor is intentionally being noisy to annoy you), you can misperceive reality. Your thoughts might not be right, especially if you don't regularly stop to question them. If you act on an emotion that was evoked by stimuli that aren't valid, you might do something misguided or injurious (like race away from a coiled rope or yell at your neighbor). Remember that
emotions are always true,
because they're always responding to emotionally evocative stimuli,
but they're not always right,
because the stimuli may not be valid.

Stimuli can also be unrelated to emotion and yet evoke an emotion anyway. For instance, if your heart rate or your adrenaline rises, your body may respond as if a fearful stimulus were present. Similarly, if you're smiling or frowning, your body may respond as if you were happy or angry. In some instances, it could be that your anger and depression are being evoked by the fact that you're slumping and frowning, without being aware that you are! Emotions give you valuable information about
something
that's going on, but it's up to you to figure out what that something might be.

That's why I created a process that allows you to turn toward your emotions and question them, to identify the stimulus, and (I hope) figure out what's really going on. So here's the complete process:

Emotionally evocative stimulus
→
Emotion
→
Feeling
→
Naming
→
Questioning the emotion
→
Acting on the information the emotion provides OR
→
Deciding not to act
because the stimulus is invalid

I know this seems like a long pathway, but you can actually do it in a split second once you get your empathic skills under you. It's not hard. It's actually much harder in the long run to sleepwalk through your life, being pushed around by emotions that you can't identify or understand.

In our examples above, we worked with some pretty simple emotions. Now, let's put the intense emotion of rage into our flowchart to see how this process might work in a troubling real-life situation in which you might explode with rage (note that the stimulus and actions in these flowcharts are rage specific):

Something threatens your sense of self, standpoint, or voice
→
Anger is evoked
→
You don't stop to name the anger; instead,
you add assumptions and accusations on top of it
→
More anger is evoked (this time, by
you
), and the anger morphs into rage
→
You attack
→
The other person backs down or attacks back
→
Rinse and repeat
→
Welcome to Hell!

Okay, we all know that flowchart! It's active on the Internet (and in the U.S. Senate and Congress) pretty much every day. But let's look at rage again, this time with cognitively moderated pauses and intentional emotional skills. (Please note that I'm not describing a rage disorder in either of these flowcharts. In a rage disorder, the stimulus is often untreated depression, other neurochemical factors, or possibly PTSD. The rage we're looking at here is common, garden-variety rage.)

Something threatens your sense of self, standpoint, or voice
→
Anger is evoked
→
You calm and focus yourself and feel the anger
→
You name the anger and note its exact intensity, which gives you a moment to organize yourself
→
You ask yourself the questions for anger (
What must be protected? What must be restored?
)
→
You discover what the issue is, set clear boundaries without violence, and restore your sense of self without offending the humanity of the other person
→
Anger program ends
→
Congratulations!

Did you notice that there was no need to go to rage in the second flowchart? When you understand that you're having an emotion, that you can feel it skillfully, that you can identify it, and that there are specific things you can do to examine the stimulus, then you don't have to throw yourself into the raging rapids every time an emotion appears.

When you have Emotion Regulation skills, you have options—and freedom and breathing room—no matter what is going on around you.

So an emotion does this: it gives you information about an emotionally relevant stimulus, and it tells you what you've perceived and what you're experiencing. Your job as the partner of your emotions is to
feel
the emotion,
name
it,
ask
the correct questions, and
act
in a way that is both emotional
and
rational. I'm saying it's doable—not to mention vital for your mental health, the quality of your empathy, the quality of your relationships, and the health of your community. When you can work with your emotions empathically, your Emotion Contagion capacities will become much more understandable
and manageable. This process will also support your Empathic Accuracy and your Emotion Regulation skills, which will increase your empathic abilities in healthy and workable ways.

When you know how to feel your emotions, empathic awareness becomes easy (and fun and enlightening). More important, when you know how to feel your emotions, name them, and take the necessary, cognitively moderated pauses that will help you understand whether the stimulus (or your reaction) is valid, then your big, intense, and potentially dangerous emotions will become less toxic, and so will you.

As we move forward into learning empathic mindfulness skills and empathic communication techniques, it's important to remember that the quality of your empathy relies upon the depth of your intrapersonal awareness. To become more empathically skilled, your primary empathic interaction needs to be internal—between you and your emotions (especially if you are currently dealing with any troublesome ones). In the next chapter, you'll learn the empathic mindfulness skills that I developed to help you work with emotions and your empathic abilities at a moment's notice. All of these skills will help you bring balance to your life—but again, if you're dealing with an emotion that's too much, please reach out for support from a friend, counselor, therapist, or doctor.

C
HAPTER
5

The Art of Empathy

Gathering Your Tools

EMPATHY IS DEVELOPED (and flourishes) in healthy interactions. What I notice in people who are somewhat overwhelmed or overstimulated by their empathy is that they haven't found a balance between interpersonal interactions and intrapersonal self-care. Many empaths spend so much time on the needs of others that their personal needs get pushed aside or disregarded. This is not necessarily a sign of poorly developed empathic skills, because in many of the six aspects of empathy,
it's not about you.
It can honestly be tricky to balance your life in response to a skill that asks you to put the needs and perspectives of others before your own.

In people who experience empathic burnout (or caregiver burnout, which is a similar situation), I notice the presence of a type of either/or dichotomy: “
Either
I can take care of everyone else and get drained,
or
I can take care of myself and be selfish, but I can't do both.” But I challenge that rigid idea and in this book, I provide options that restore flexibility. Empathic self-care can and does coexist with strong empathic skills. As we all know, it doesn't have to, but in our quest to be happy and healthy empaths, self-care is a must.

As we learn these empathic mindfulness practices, I'll explain each not only in terms of its purpose, but also in relation to our six aspects of empathy. I'll also relate my practices to Richard Davidson's six dimensions of emotional style. I want you to understand the intention behind each of these practices so that you can pick and choose among them, depending on your individual strengths and challenges.

THE FIVE EMPATHIC MINDFULNESS SKILLS

Each of my empathic mindfulness skills is an emotion-aware and emotion-honoring practice, and each relies upon the gifts and abilities that your emotions contribute to you. This is a distinct departure from many meditative practices, where observing and then completely releasing emotions (often called
extinction
) is a central activity. As I look at emotion-releasing practices, I see that most of the four problems that lead to emotional confusion are active. Certainly, there's the belief that most emotions are negative—otherwise, why else would you try to release or extinguish them? Releasing an emotion is not toxic in and of itself, because when an emotion is in a feedback loop, then certainly, you want to be able to calm yourself and calm that emotional activation. But merely observing and extinguishing an emotion is a repressive technique that undermines the action-requiring neurological program that's trying to occur. Repression can be a wonderful emergency skill if you're feeling an emotion that isn't socially safe to express (or that's stuck in a feedback loop), but in most other instances, repression will impede your emotional intelligence. It won't help you understand the emotion that has arisen; it won't help you recognize emotional nuance; and it won't help you identify why your emotions arise, how they interrelate, or which actions they require.