The Art of Empathy (2 page)

IDENTIFYING EMPATHS

What is an empath? Well, you are (in your own way) an empath. I am as well, and as the proto-empath (I was the first person to have claimed the title professionally in the late 1970s, and I started writing books about being an empath back in 1997), I've spent my life learning to work with, understand, define, redefine, and study emotions, empathy, and empaths. So, my current definition is this:

An
empath
is someone who is aware that he or she reads emotions, nuances, subtexts, undercurrents, intentions, thoughts, social space, interactions, relational behaviors, body language, and gestural language to a greater degree than is deemed normal.

We're all empathic;
¹
we have to be in order to navigate our way through the social world. We all read emotions, intentions, nuances, and so on, because empathy (as I am defining it—we'll explore more in the next chapter) is central to our capacity to connect to, interact with, and understand others and the social world.

The difference between being empathic and being an empath is one of intent and awareness. For me, emotions, nuances, subtexts, and so forth are the things I notice first in any situation. Words are interesting, but in many cases they tend to hide and obscure the more honest parts of communication and social interaction. For me, there's a wonderfully surprising world that exists in the space between words, and it's the space where my attention is nearly always drawn. Let me show you what I mean so you can understand this in a more tangible way. I'm going to invite you to sit inside my head as I people watch in a regular, everyday situation where I can't hear what's being said. (Is this the world's first
empath-cam
? Yes!) I chose this scene carefully, because it invites you into a level of empathy that's intentional, simple, and fun. (I masked the identities of everyone but my husband, Tino, and myself.)

Empathy wasn't always simple or fun for me. When I was young, my intense empathic and emotional receptivity made me feel as if I were on fire with the emotions of others. I picked up so many emotions and so much nonverbal social information from everyone around me that I often didn't
know who I was or what I felt. The unprotected empathic receptivity I experienced in childhood was overwhelming for me. Too much information came barreling in at me, and I couldn't organize it, separate from it, manage it, or understand it. Part of my intense interpersonal receptivity, or
hyperempathy,
was a response to abuse that had occurred in my early childhood (I'll gently touch on that story in
Chapter 2
). But another part of my struggle came directly from our everyday training about emotions.

Most of us learn in very early childhood to distrust emotions, to categorize them as positive or negative, and to be suspicious about—and frankly afraid of—most of them.
²
I learned through cultural training that receiving emotions from others (unless those emotions were based on happiness) was something to guard against, because emotions were constantly portrayed as unwelcome, irrational, and even dangerous. This training didn't help me in any way, and as I grew up and learned how to live as a hyperempath, I had to actually veer away from almost all of our cultural training about emotions so that I could understand them empathically and work with them intelligently. Now, thankfully, after a lifetime of learning how to recognize, comprehend, and work with emotions empathically and how to understand and manage my hyperempathy, both have become useful tools that I can demonstrate without overwhelming you.

In the following scene, I'll walk you through a safe and grounded situation in which my strong empathy and emotional sensitivity are now helpful traits and not horrendous problems. I'll slow everything down so that you can identify, think about, catalog, reflect on, and predict some possible actions, emotions, and responses—but I'll rein myself in so that this people-watching scene won't exhaust you with too many details.

Note that I'll refer to emotions in a way that may seem unusual to you, but don't worry. We'll learn about my empathic approach to emotions in
Chapters 3
and
4
. For now, just come along with me:

It's almost closing time at the gym. I'm sitting relaxed and alone in the lobby after my swim, waiting for my husband, Tino, to come out of the locker room. The pool behind the large plate-glass window next to me is empty, and the normally noisy building is quiet and settling down after a long day.

Joseph, the maintenance man, enters the lobby and walks to the front desk, pushing a large cart filled with towels and cleaning
supplies. He holds himself tall and proud—never subservient or slightly apologetic, but straightforward and dignified, with a good connection to his healthy anger and contentment. He nods and smiles at me, happily, and then turns and stops at the front desk on his way down the hallway. I can't quite make out what he's saying to Iris, the front desk attendant, as she works to close up shop, but I can see his back and his gestures, as well as her face as she interacts with him.

Joseph is talking about their shared work, and he's using analogies from the Bible to engage with Iris. I know this not just because I've heard Joseph bless me and other people, but also because he's using the rhythms and cadences of the Southern Baptist church. I don't know if Iris is a religious woman, and I'm concerned and apprehensive that he might offend her, so I watch her respond to Joseph as he sways slightly and gestures in a gracefully theatrical way.

Iris doesn't break his gaze to look at me with any sort of apology or irritation, so I gather that she's not offended or embarrassed. However, she holds her body a bit rigid, not matching Joseph's swaying rhythm. She displays a hint of anger and smiles at him, but it's not a big smile, if you know what I mean. She's engaging with him, yet she's keeping her distance, cool and somewhat businesslike, as she works to close down her desk for the night. Uh-oh! I feel my faint apprehension return. I'm not sure yet if her subtle anger is a function of their possibly unequal statuses within the workplace, their racial and cultural differences (Joseph is black; Iris is white), or perhaps some interpersonal problem between them.

Joseph displays a momentary bit of wariness—a soft form of fear that he follows quickly with a light display of happiness. Then he shifts his body and his story, turning slightly away from Iris and almost addressing an invisible audience. Oh, nice! I feel calmer, and I feel respect for Joseph's social skills. Joseph has oriented to her anger signal, and he has corrected his approach by applying a split second of appropriate shame to his behavior. Iris now has the space she needs to focus on her work. Joseph still wants to tell his inspirational story, but he has picked up her signaling and responded to it with empathic skill; he's created a win-win situation. I know this because happiness arises in Iris as she smiles a bit wider, and though she breaks his gaze to attend to her closing duties, she begins swaying with
Joseph—slightly, almost imperceptibly, but it's there. She's dropped a boundary, and she's engaging with him willingly. This tells me that they're not having an ongoing interpersonal problem (because he was so quickly able to repair the situation, and she was so willing to let the repair happen) and that their workplace status appears to be fairly equal (because he understood her need to get back to work and didn't monopolize her time as a superior might have). However, I'm still interested in the cultural and racial divide between them.

As the conversation between Joseph and Iris continues, Iris sweeps her gaze toward me with some wariness—soft fear and a bit of appropriate shame (because she's not working “properly” in front of a gym member). I look down quickly and pretend not to be watching them. This is the end of a long day for them, and they need a sense of their own private time. Even though I'm just a few yards away, I intentionally ignore Iris to create a kind of privacy wall between us. Iris turns back toward Joseph, and her soft fear and shame subside, because she's satisfied that I'm not a problem she needs to attend to.

Joseph reaches a natural pause in his story, and Iris leans toward him happily and adds her own piece about some biblical character. Okay, so she's religious, and she's not offended by his biblical references. But as she speaks, I see Joseph's back tense up slightly—with small amounts of anger and shock—and he shifts his body sideways, away from her, tilting his head as if he's listening to something that he is not quite sure of.
Ouch!
I wonder if Iris has made a faux pas; perhaps she's mentioned the wrong part of the Bible or the wrong character. Joseph knows his Bible, it's clear, and I wait with some apprehension to see how he'll respond.

Will Joseph correct Iris in a paternal, shaming way (and shut her down)? Will he argue with her (and create conflict between them)? Or will he shun and disengage from her (and hurt her feelings)?
Yow!
This could go sideways very quickly! I scan the room: Will I need to create a pretense to get up and move into their relational space—maybe to get a drink of water—if one or both of them gets stuck and needs some social support or a way to disengage?

At the end of her comment, Iris waits (so do I!). Although she may not be able to consciously identify the signals Joseph's body language is sending, she's aware that something is off and that she's done
something wrong. She looks down and flushes with shame almostimperceptibly, and then she covers her embarrassment by leaningtoward Joseph wordlessly, smiling in a broad but faintly apologeticway, and slightly lowering her entire body below his in a shame-submissive, sadness-and fear-moderated shrugging gesture.

I realize that I'm holding my breath, concerned and apprehensive. But Iris's adroit gestures of contrition shift everything. Joseph immediately leans in toward her, moving his head downward and joining her in the submissive space she has created, and with his head, he makes a kind of scooping upward gesture as he engages, “Yes!” and weaves her story into his own. Iris rises with him out of the submissive space—almost as if Joseph were pulling her upward with the movement of his head—and they are equals again, happy together, swaying together as the story continues.
Whew!
Nice social repair, Joseph and Iris! My apprehension subsides, and I begin to breathe again as I look away, relaxed and a bit dreamy.

Tino walks into the lobby from the locker room and sees Joseph and Iris talking. Although he feels appropriate shame as he looks down and attempts to walk gently past them to give them their privacy, Joseph stops his story and greets Tino jovially. Iris also stops what she's doing, and Tino slows down to address each of them with a happy smile and open, though faintly apologetic, gestures. As Tino passes them, Joseph and Iris look at each other and nod silently in unison to end their interaction and get back to work. Tino approaches me with a smile of happiness and relief, sees my absorption and curiosity, and asks, “Whatcha doin'?”

“Oh, nothin'.”

Nothing indeed. The interaction I watched between Joseph and Iris took fewer than two minutes. However, as I mentioned earlier, I had to rein myself in as I wrote about it for you, because it was filled with enough social, emotional, interactional, cultural, gestural, and subtextual information to fill this book. There's a fascinating, deep, endlessly surprising richness that exists in the interactional space between people—and though we all swim in, live with, trip over, and depend utterly upon this space for our social existence, our knowledge of it exists in a hidden and unspoken area that only specialists seem to be able to access consciously.

Actors, musicians, dancers, choreographers, composers, animal trainers, performance artists, and martial artists are some of the specialists who have knowledge of this interactional space. So do novelists, poets, creative writers, and playwrights. Social scientists and behaviorists study this space intensively, and psychologists and counselors work to help us understand and become skillful in regard to it. This book adds another category to this list of interaction specialists:
empaths
.

You're already an empathic person, because your awareness of emotions, nuance, gestural language, and interaction is a function of being a member of our highly social species.
The Art of Empathy
will not magically turn you into an empath—you were born with these skills, and you use them every day. What this book will do is help you become a healthy, effective, and
intentional
empath so that you can understand emotions, use your empathy comfortably, and pilot successfully through the richness of interactional space.

You already use your nonverbal empathic skills every day—when you socialize, read body language, work with animals and infants, listen to music, laugh at physical comedy, and appreciate art and drama. You also use your verbal empathic skills when you speak and when you decipher spoken and written language, because you actually cannot make sense of verbal or written communication if you can't decipher subtext, context, nonverbal cues, and the multiple meanings behind words. Empathic skills make you verbally and nonverbally sensitive to and aware of yourself, others, and the social world.

If you're highly empathic, you might appear to be magically and supernaturally aware of others. For many years, I mistakenly thought that my intense hyperempathic abilities meant that I was a psychic (I realized my mistake and ended my entire psychic healing career in 2003). If you can read and decipher emotions, intentions, nuances, social space, and nonverbal language, you can see deeply into people's lives. You can see the issues people think they're hiding, you can quickly understand how people approach life and relationships, and you can become very skilled at getting down to the essence of who people are.

A quick example: I was an intensely active and fidgety child, and I had trouble with language (a stutter and other verbal-processing issues). I had wildly sensitive hearing and vision, recurrent nightmares, and great difficulties regulating my emotions. When I was four, my mother took me to a neurologist to see if he could help me. When he first met us, this doctor came into the consulting room in his nice white lab coat and smiled warmly as he sat down. I studied him for a few seconds and said, “Why are you so grouchy?”