The Art of Empathy (40 page)

Boundary definition is something else you can teach behaviorally from a very early age. You do this by paying attention to the baby's signals and helping him or her to choose what feels right and good and to avoid what feels uncomfortable and unpleasant. Boundary definition is self-definition; it's about discovering the self as a distinct organism with distinct wants and needs. Favorite animals, toys, and blankies will often become a part of the baby's self-image and standpoint; these items may feel like an intrinsic part of self, so make sure that you pay close attention to these clear signals of your baby's preferences. Also, if there are siblings or if the baby shares space or a central caregiver with others, make sure to spend clear and focused time with the baby so that he or she will feel safely connected to sources of love, recognition, loyalty, and security (we'll explore more about sibling rivalry below).

Boundaries are managed through the skilled use of anger and shame. These emotions can be difficult for little ones to wield. Intentional Tantrums can help children develop anger skills in safe, consequence-free zones. Stories about the misdeeds of others (where you ask children what they would do to make things right) can also help children learn about the remorse, the behavioral corrections, and the amends that need to be made when people do hurtful things (even if they don't mean to hurt anyone). You can make a game around any emotion, and you can help children play with, try on, activate, and then resolve emotional activation as they develop better Empathic Accuracy and stronger Emotion Regulation skills (we'll look at ways to play with emotions below).

As you work with children and their boundaries, keep an eye on how much anger expression you allow. Most of us were raised to squash anger expression in ourselves, and we tend to enforce that behavior with children. This can lead to anger problems for children, so make sure that you make room for anger play and anger talk. In addition, keep a close eye on the way you use shame, because most of us got pretty terrible training with shame, and we tend to apply it from the outside, rather than helping children develop their own healthy forms of shame, remorse, and contrition. Shame is a vital social emotion. Without shame, children can't learn how to tune into the
needs, emotions, or pain of others. I'd say that shame is actually the basis for Concern for Others, because you have to care if you hurt someone, and you have to care enough to want them to feel better. Concern for Others springs from the shame, guilt, remorse, and contrition that help you make amends and change any behaviors that injure or offend others. In
Chapter 2
, I mentioned a patient of Antonio Damasio's who was unable to feel shame and how this deficit led to so much chaos that she was eventually unable to live independently. Certainly, too much shame can make you focus on others to the exclusion of all your own needs, but a healthy amount of appropriate shame will help you engage perceptively with others in a way that really takes their needs into consideration. Healthy, authentic, and appropriate shame is a central feature of healthy empathic engagement.

However, many of us don't have much experience with healthy, authentic shame. Many of us were regularly shamed as children, and we've had to do a lot of work to uncouple those shaming messages from our own authentic sense of shame and self-worth (this is an ongoing process, just so you know). Therefore, it can be hard to know how to support healthy shame development in children. Here's the trick: what you want to do is help children connect to
their own
appropriate shame and remorse (not yours). In the shame chapter in
The Language of Emotions,
I wrote:

Appropriate shame is something we should all support in ourselves and others. If we discipline a child and it's clear that he or she is truly sorry, the discipline needs to end immediately. What you want to see is appropriate shame arising in response to the original affront—and not to your strict discipline. Continuing onward with the shaming after a child has shown remorse is just abusive, and it often leads to a hardening in the child's soul. . . .

If you're parenting or working with children, it's important to help them connect to their authentic shame in healthy ways. A great way to do this is to let them be involved in setting punishments, if any, for their misdeeds. When I suggest this, many parents scoff and imagine that children will choose extra ice cream as a punishment; they won't take it seriously because they're all little outlaws. But what I found in parenting, teaching, and sports coaching is that most children are very solemn about their acts of contrition—they feel remorse deeply, and the punishments they create for themselves are
often comically medieval. As the parent or authority figure, you can easily lighten their suggested punishments and help children find a way to make amends without (as has been suggested by various little ones I know): Never eating again; paying $2,000 to the police; or giving all of their toys to homeless kids. When children can be involved in deciding upon their acts of contrition, they can connect to their shame in healthy ways (as long as you stop them from inflicting retributive self-flagellation upon their own souls).

Shame is a powerful boundary-setting emotion, but it has to come from within. Otherwise, it will create fundamental problems with setting, maintaining, and respecting boundaries in the self and in others. We'll look at these problems in relationship to bullies later in this chapter.

One empathic mindfulness skill that I'm really not comfortable using with children is contract burning. As children develop their sense of self and their autonomy as individuals, their behaviors are an intrinsic part of their selfidentification. Especially in a sibling context or a social group, children often self-identify as the quiet or friendly or musical or angry or smart or athletic child. Their behaviors form an intrinsic part of their boundaries, which is why it can be so painful or almost unbearable for a child to hear that you love them but that their behaviors are unacceptable. Many children really can't understand what the heck you're talking about, because behavior, identity, self, and me are all intertwined. They're not separable for some children until the teen years and, sometimes, not even then. As such, I'd be very careful with anything that attempts to strip a child of behavioral self-identifications. It's far better to play with behaviors and use dramatic, imaginal play and teaching stories to gently help children view their behaviors as choices.

And let's look empathically at a child's connection to behavior in terms of identity and attachment as we observe a child's similar attachment to a favorite stuffed animal or blankie. Nothing about these beloved fetish items is objectively special, and in fact, these items often become hideously disfigured by energetic love and the fact that you cannot wash them without all hell breaking loose. But these fetishes are crucial until the child learns how to manage without them. Behaviors are often the same; they're intrinsic to the child's identity and even to his or her sense of survival—until they're not. As such, I'd say that Burning Contracts is a skill for teens (possibly) and adults (definitely), but not for little ones.

However, there's one area of identity that directly impedes emotional and empathic functioning, and I do suggest challenging it carefully and empathically: gender roles.

EMPATHIC BOYS AND EMPATHIC GIRLS

In
Chapter 2
, I wrote about the deeply sexist notion that empathy is a female skill and that males are constitutionally less empathic or less emotive than females. This offensive idea often leads people to treat boys and men as if they're not empathic. But little boys can play peek-a-boo like nobody's business! Little boys love stories and cuddling and love and emotional play and silliness and scariness and empathy. Little boys are fully empathic beings. However, gender roles are powerfully enforced and powerfully valenced—as we saw in the experiments I referred to in
Chapter 2
, where babies were treated completely differently depending on whether they were wearing
delicate
pink outfits or
dynamic
blue ones. Gender valencing is a fact of life, and it even influences whether girls will be encouraged to develop their math and science skills in school. Neuroscientist Lise Eliot, who wrote the wonderful book
Pink Brain, Blue Brain,
notes that there are relatively minor differences between the brains of baby boys and those of baby girls at birth. She goes on to say that the differences that show up later are primarily socially created, in the same way that the brains of people who learned two languages or who learned to play the piano are different from the brains of people who didn't learn those skills.

As I wrote in
Chapter 2
, Eliot notes that there are some early differences in verbal abilities (girls are sometimes more verbal than boys, but not always), as well as some difference in activity levels (boys are sometimes more active than girls, but not always). However, these differences are not so large as we've been led to believe. In fact, there is more difference
between
girls in these traits and
between
boys in these traits than there is between the sexes. However, parents tend to support these gender-linked behaviors very early. For instance, they may respond positively to baby girls' vocalizations while subtly ignoring their activity levels (and vice versa for boys).

Eliot also notes that the old information about girls being less able to read maps or do math and science has been disconfirmed many times, as has the old idea about men being less emotionally capable than women (or having smaller corpora callosa than women). Yet sadly, these incorrect ideas stay in the culture as people repeat them over and over and expect less emotional awareness from men and much less math and science awareness from girls.
So the biological truth about boys and girls is ignored, while valenced myths and prejudices mold little brains into gender stereotypes.

There are people who can tell us a great deal about the discrimination that this stereotyping encourages: gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and asexual people live in a liminal space between the genders. Because of this, their social and physical well-being is often at risk. Those of us who challenged gender roles as children might have been looked down upon or taunted as tomboys or sissies, but if we
also
displayed conformist gender behaviors (or showed romantic interest in the opposite sex), we probably got away with our challenges to the stereotypes. But people who can't fit into enforced gender roles often experience intolerance, discrimination, and persistent social control attempts—shunning, shaming, bullying, exclusion, isolation, emotional abuse, and often physical violence. Empathically speaking, gender stereotypes are unhealthy for everyone, but they're actually endangering for people who can't force themselves into these binary gender caricatures.

Let's look at the concept of
caricature
empathically, because it tells us something important—that is, gender roles are imaginal. Gender roles are dramatic personae; they're performances that are enforced through incessant social and emotional training that starts the moment we're born (or the moment our parents discover our gender). Gender roles are dramatic roles that we learn in our families, in stories, at school, on television, and everywhere we look—and these roles come complete with costumes, props, and scripted behaviors that fool a lot of people. Those people who thought the same sleeping baby was delicate in pink and dynamic in blue—their Einfühlung capacities were actually fooled by a simple costume change—presto!

Good actors expose gender roles, and they can easily switch genders and convincingly play across and between our make-believe gender divide. This is because they understand all of the social training that's required to play a gender role. Gender roles are thresholds, fetishes, and personae; they are not empathic destiny. Socially created reality can be challenged; you can create thresholds around gender discrimination and individuate from it. It's difficult, because gender valencing is a powerful fetish that many people can't even imagine living without. However, as you work with children, see if you can avoid gender valencing as much as possible in the area of emotions and empathy. If you can intentionally make room for talkative, emotionally aware males and active, scientifically aware females—and everyone in between—you'll
create a more empathic civilization, one person at a time. Babies arrive in this world with a full complement of emotional, empathic, intellectual, and linguistic possibilities—so many options are available to them. To the extent that you can, help babies develop all of these human characteristics, and not just the ones that fit into those stifling pink and blue costumes.

Of course, we live in the real world, where gender roles are vigorously and profoundly valenced, and we all know that stepping outside those lines is socially dangerous. My suggestion is that you create a valence-aware empathic sanctuary at home for your little ones and teach them gender roles as a part of dramatic play and as an act of intentional personae creation. If your daughter is a rough-and-tumble individual, let her know that many people will want to change her. Talk about ways to deal with those social control attempts or even ways for her to pretend to be a conformist in unsafe environments. If your son is an artistic or sensitive individual, help him understand the hazards and work around them with the help of dramatic thresholding, playacting, and intentional personae construction. But know that peer pressure exerts powerful social control on children and that your child's friends and schoolmates are learning to valence gender by copying, embodying, and enforcing the endless valencing messages they get from every direction. So your athletic girl may come home from a play date and suddenly become fascinated with princess lore and makeup. Or your artistic boy may turn away from his painting, singing, or dancing and ask to join the football team.