The Art of Empathy (42 page)

Sometimes what looks like a tantrum can actually be a sign of emotional or sensory dysregulation. It's important to empathically observe what triggers the tantrums and what's going on in the child's environment. Are the tantrums a response to an anger-evoking situation in which the child's needs or sense of self are being challenged or thwarted? Or are the tantrums occurring in response to sensory overload or fatigue? Underdeveloped Emotion Regulation skills are normal in younger children, and tantrums have a specific purpose in helping them build these skills, but sometimes tantrums are a sign of hypersensitivity and hyperempathy. This is especially true for autistic and hyperactive children, who may be so overwhelmed by sensory overload that they either lose their Emotion Regulation skills, or they ramp into intense emotions as a way to fill their bodies with extreme activation that may temporarily shut out the sensory bombardment they're experiencing. If you have a child who has regular tantrums, don't punish for the tantrums; look for the triggers. If you also see rhythmic self-soothing or self-injuring behaviors during the tantrums, please reach out for the help of a developmental psychologist who can help you create a supportive environment for your hypersensitive and hyperempathic child.

SHYNESS AND PHOBIAS

Each child is born with a unique emotional style, and some children are naturally bold, while others are naturally more reticent. Shyness in and of itself isn't a problem, unless it's connected to a great deal of fear or anxiety. These two emotions are very activating, and they can easily get stuck in a feedback loop if a child does not have effective self-soothing skills. Also, shyness, fear, and anxiety are all seen as signs of weakness, and a shy child may shut down and refuse to ask for help for fear of being further shamed. If you can unvalence the situation for the child, you can help him or her address the fears (“What are you sensing?”) or complete the specific tasks that the anxiety is trying to address. Remember to recruit the magic of list-making for
anxiety; this anxiety-specific action will address the exact issues that evoked the anxiety in the first place. Playacting and dramatically preplaying anxiety-producing situations are also wonderful activities, because they treat the anxieties as valid, and they give children safe, consequence-free opportunities to develop multiple responses to anxiety-producing situations.

You can also use playacting around phobias, with the caveat that if the fear ramps up too high, you might just overwhelm the child for no good reason. With a phobia, there's a visceral reaction that tells a child to avoid something as if it were toxic. So you have to respect that powerful instinct. However, you can help the child learn to find internal places of calm, strength, and resourcefulness, even when the phobic item is nearby (our empathic skill of resourcing is very healing for phobic people).

Playing rhythmic games with phobias is also very helpful. Let's talk about something specific, like fear of the dark. You can help a child walk a little way into a dark room with you; then you both run away—run!—and hug each other and laugh when you're safely away. Then, when the child has down-regulated, you can approach the room again and go just a tiny bit further, then
run!
This game is ancient and primal—it helps young animals learn to deal with frightening things, and it can help children understand that everyone is afraid of something.

Many online videos show baby animals learning how to approach scary objects. One of the most hilarious is called
Kitten vs. a Scary Thing,
⁵²
which YouTube user Ignoramusky actually scored with horror film music. Your child will fall down laughing as he or she watches the brave little kitten approach, reapproach, and run away from a very scary thing (A tennis ball?
Auugh!
). But as you watch this brave kitten, notice his rhythmic game: It's a careful approach—a ramping up into intense fear, a quick retreat, and a calming phase. And the kitten repeats the cycle over and over and over again. Eventually, that kitten will be able to look at a tennis ball and feel, “Oh, that thing, ho-hum.” But he has to interact with it intensely and learn to play with his emotional reactions before he can get to that calm place.

As you work with a shy or phobic child, look at Richard Davidson's six dimensions of emotional style from
Chapter 3
and see if there are any dimensions that can be addressed with support from you or with a change in the child's environment. Specifically, look at the child's overall Resilience, as well as his or her Attention, Sensitivity to Context, and Self-awareness. A shy and phobic child may be a highly sensitive and hyperfocused being who needs
many self-soothing, resourcing, and boundary-setting skills. And, of course, kitten videos.

In older children with phobias and anxieties, you can offer support by closely observing their school situation (Could there be so much homework that their anxieties are hyperactivated?), their social world at home (is your home a safe empathic terrarium?), and among their friends, where arguments or run-ins with bullies (see below) could be triggering anxiety, phobias, or social withdrawal.

SIBLING AND PEER RIVALRY

As children develop emotionally, they also develop awareness of their social position in relation to people and things that compete for the attention, resources, love, and recognition of their parents and loved ones. As you know, we're in the sphere of jealousy and envy here, and these emotions arise to make sure that we're securely connected to sources of love and loyalty (in the case of jealousy) and to sources of recognition, security, and resources (in the case of envy). Children can ramp themselves up into jealousy and envy very quickly—partly because their Emotion Regulation skills are still developing, but also because their social position is actually very precarious.

Children don't have a long life full of relationships to look back on when threats to their relationships arise. They have one or two central caregivers, and one family. So their jealousy will be hyperfocused in that sphere. Threats to these central love relationships can be heartrending, and children have to learn how to keep themselves securely attached to the only source of love they know, which means that jealousy will be absolutely necessary. If there are threats to these intimate bonds, you
want
to see jealousy arising in a child; you want to know that the child's emotions are working properly and that he or she has developed healthy attachment.

Most people try to shame jealousy (and envy) out of children, which, if you understand the purpose of these emotions, is a sick, backward thing to do. Forcefully repressing jealousy in a child can turn a normal, healthy emotion into a twisted and dark thing—and that's not a loving or empathic action. If you support love, loyalty, and attachment, you need to support jealousy and help children learn how to work with it. You can do that very simply—by noting the emotion and talking about what the child needs and wants and what would help him or her feel loved. That's it. No shame, no fuss—you just respond to the emotion and help the child complete its action.

Of course, sometimes the child will ask for the moon, but jealousy and envy have an inner core of fairness and justice in them, and you can talk about what would work for everybody so that you can help the child open up the experience of jealousy to encompass the love needs of others.

Envy is another crucial emotion in the lives of children, who don't yet have lists of accomplishments that could help them feel an internal source of recognition or self-worth when threats arise. Children don't own anything, they don't control any resources, and they're completely at the mercy of their caregivers and families for every possible form of security. You bet they need their envy—it's the emotion that helps them begin to have a sense of their value, their worth, and their sense of individuality—of what
I
want, what
I
need, and what's fair. Working with envy is just as easy as working with jealousy if you understand what's occurring in the development of the child's basic sense of self-worth.

Envy itself will help you here. Envy is a surprisingly honorable emotion if you address it respectfully and ask what would be fair for
everyone.
Yes, as with jealousy, sometimes children will demand the moon and the stars when they're learning how to work with envy, but you can help them think about how everyone needs to feel recognized, secure, and resourced. You can help children develop a larger and more nuanced understanding of how their needs relate to everybody else's. I would ask you to protect children from too much self-sacrifice here: definitely help them state and advocate for their specific needs, but also help them ground those needs in relationship to what is available for everyone else. Caring about others is a necessity, but healthy jealousy and envy will support children in balancing their needs with the needs of others.

You'll find that jealousy and envy are some of the most beautiful emotions there are, if you can approach them empathically and engage with them respectfully. They tell us how crucial love, security, recognition, and loyalty are to our very survival. They're powerful emotions because they exist to protect powerful needs.

BULLYING

Bullying is a huge issue in schools, online, and in the workplace. It's a situation in which people feel free to pick on, harass, isolate, shame, and intimidate others. Bullying can start quite early—it's been observed in children as young as three years old (these children were often exposed to a lot of aggressive behavior, including violent movies and TV shows). Luckily, many bullying-prevention
programs (
NoBully.com
is one of the most empathically grounded) have sprung up to address the problem of bullying, which involves poor Emotion Regulation skills, inadequate Concern for Others, and insufficient Perspective Taking abilities. Thankfully, bullying is no longer seen as something to tolerate. So if you have (or work with) children, let them know that bullying isn't okay and that they should report bullying as soon as it happens.

This new movement to openly identify bullying is certainly protective for victims, but it's also protective for the bully. A bully might look strong on the outside, but when someone is lashing out and hurting people intentionally, there's serious trouble going on in their boundary-setting abilities. A lot of problematic emotions are involved in bullying—certainly, you can see the anger dysfunction, but there's also a surprising emotional condition that occurs in bullying. In many cases of bullying,
contentment
has gone completely off the rails.

We can clearly see that abusers and bullies have problems with anger and shame. Their anger gets unleashed constantly, without any moderation from healthy shame, which means they don't have healthy brakes on their anger. Subsequently, they behave in dishonorable and dishonoring ways. But strangely, many bullies score high on tests of self-esteem, which means their contentment is in high gear, even though their behavior is the exact opposite of worthwhile or commendable. In the bullies I've observed, shame becomes unhinged somehow, and it no longer works to help the person manage his or her honor or boundaries. The rules of healthy behavior and Concern for Others get erased, and the person finds a way to feel twisted contentment that doesn't actually track to anything real. The contentment inside a bully seems to be saying, “Yeah, your anger is so righteous! You don't
ever
need to feel ashamed of anything you do, so yay for you and screw everyone else!” It's a hellish, inflated, unhinged form of contentment.

Yet if you look at the way bullies work, you'll notice that they primarily force shame onto others and attempt to break down the self-image and boundaries of their victims. Bullies might crow about the glories of anger, but they don't actually make any room for healthy anger or natural contentment to exist in others. So even though they seem to be very comfortable with anger and wildly full of contentment (and essentially shameless), bullies spend an awful lot of time disabling the contentment, the anger, and the boundaries of their targets with huge helpings of toxic shame. This tells me that their anger posturing, their seeming lack of shame, and their artificially
inflated contentment are all a show. No one who is good with anger, shame, or contentment would ever try to disable these emotions in others. Nope. Bullies aren't fooling me.

Many people think that the cure for bullying is to use shame, punishment, and social shunning to bring the bully back into line, but this is precisely the wrong tack to use with a person who already has a severely disabling problem with shame (and a deeply problematic connection to anger and contentment). A chastised bully might publicly apologize and show contrition, but applying more shame to a person with a severe shame dysfunction will backfire. In some cases, it will essentially harden and weaponize the bully. Remember the party scene in
Chapter 3
(where our friend shockingly insulted us in front of others)? A person who attacks others already has very poor boundaries. If you attack back, you can easily injure and enrage him or her. That's not smart.

An excellent approach with bullies is to model healthy anger and shame and to allow your own anger to strengthen you so that you can display vulnerability. I know this sounds wildly and dangerously counterintuitive, but it's one of the few ways to help a bully come in off the ledge of severe emotional and behavioral dysfunction. Bullies are nearly always survivors of abuse or neglect (or both), and more abuse just cements them in their behaviors. It also solidifies their worldview, which is that other people can't be trusted and aren't worth caring about. Showing vulnerability to a bully—in a healthy, anger-supported way that isn't self-abandoning on your part—is one of the bravest and most revolutionary things you can do, and bullies
will
notice it. What they do next is individual, but one way to bring bullies back into the realm of functional human relationships is (surprise!) to model functional human relationships for them and to engage with them as if they matter.