The Art of Empathy (9 page)

If you were to observe me as a child, you would never have thought, “Say, there goes a very empathic child!” No, you would have thought that I didn't care about people at all and that I was a little hellion to boot. In a different family, my arc as an empath might have turned out very badly indeed, but my mother (with the help of that wonderful neurologist I wrote about in
Chapter 1
) protected me from a lot of people who wanted to punish and control me. To the extent that she could, she provided a safe place for me to grow up. Mom identified my hypersensitivities as what she termed
plus
disabilities, and she did what she could to surround me with love, music, art, animals, books, laughter, physical activity, and lots of freedom.

I contrast the scene that I wrote for you about Joseph and Iris to so many scenes in my childhood, in which my social, emotional, and empathic awareness was excruciatingly difficult for me to tolerate, moderate, organize, or even comprehend. With Joseph and Iris, I chose a scene in which the emotional situations were rather delicate and large, obvious actions weren't required from me. I also chose that scene to give you a sense of all six aspects
of empathy working together for me now, in a way that's comfortable, understandable, manageable, and accessible to my conscious awareness.

AN EMPATH IS SOMEONE WHO IS AWARE

I'm going to return to my definition of an empath, but this time I'll emphasize my sentence a bit differently:

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.

As a little girl, I wasn't aware of what I was reading or why; I wasn't aware that I could perceive things others couldn't or that my abilities were greater than normal. I was just struggling to keep my head above water as wave after wave of emotions and social information hit me full force, while other people stood by, comfortable, seemingly uncomprehending, and more upset by
my
behavior than by the truckloads of emotions careening all over the joint.
What?
Until I gained awareness of what an empath was, I really wasn't able to make heads or tails of the human world.

It took me about a decade to discover a preliminary definition for
empath
(from an episode of the original
Star Trek
TV show,
²⁵
of all places), and it took about another five years to get on top of my hypersensitivity and hyper-reactivity. I've spent my life since then studying emotions and social interactions empathically, helping hyperempathic people learn how to work with their sensitivities, and helping fellow trauma survivors heal. I also wrote an entire book on reframing emotions empathically (
The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You
) to help people at every level of empathic ability learn how to work with emotions skillfully and how to view emotions as absolutely essential aspects of cognition and social functioning.

I've told you my story so that you'll know there's hope for you if you're a hyperempath, no matter what kind of early training you had. There's also hope for you if you've experienced empathic burnout. And there's hope for you if your current level of empathic awareness is pretty low. The empathic world of emotions and interactions
is
a hidden world, but it's a tangible, knowable, and marvelous world that babies as young as eighteen months can access. You can access it, too.

I'm glad you're willing to do so, because we need more healthy empaths in this world. Empathy and the extensive sociability it makes possible helped early bands of hairless, clawless, small-toothed hominids become the dominant mammalian species on Earth. Now that we've reached a population of approximately seven billion souls with wildly differing notions of what's true and what's important, empathy has become a crucial element in helping us learn how to live with one another. Empathy is what made us such a successful species in the first place, and now, empathy is what will help us address our many conflicts so that we can survive and flourish.

C
HAPTER
3

An Empath's Guide to Empathy

Developing Your Social and Emotional Intelligence

THE FIRST STEP in the process of becoming a happy and healthy empath is to realize that there
is
such a thing as an empath. You can now check off that step!
Bing.
Easy, right? The second step is to separate empathy into manageable pieces.
Bing
—we did that by identifying empathy's six essential aspects. Your next steps are to gather specific skills and create a series of supports around yourself so you can become more able to identify and effectively address what you're picking up (or what you're missing, if your empathy levels are currently low). That's what this book is for.

From this point forward, we'll work from the inside out. We'll start by creating a supportive structure of self-care and mindfulness skills so that you can work with your empathic sensitivity (or relative insensitivity) in new ways. Then we'll look at ways to bring healthy empathy to yourself, your home, your family and friends, your love relationships, your communication skills, your work, and your approach to social justice. In essence, we'll work to create a support structure that can function as a wonderful container—a terrarium, perhaps—for your sensitive self: a container, a framework, and a clear-eyed standpoint from which you can become a comfortable, happy, and healthy empath.

Before you learn these specific skills (in
Chapter 5
), I'll introduce some concepts that can make empathy and emotions more comprehensible and more comfortable. The first is Howard Gardner's concept of
multiple intelligences
. The second is Richard J. Davidson's
emotional styles
framework. And the third is my empathic approach to emotions as tools that contribute specific skills and abilities that help you function in every area of your life—from basic cognition and self-awareness to your most skillful and perceptive empathic interactions.

YOUR SEVEN INTELLIGENCES
²⁶

When your empathic abilities are strong, you tend to
get
people and animals and their needs in the way some intellectual geniuses
get
mathematics or physics or in the way artistic geniuses
get
color, shape, and perspective. Empathy is one of the multiple kinds of intelligence we humans have. However, many of us grew up in a world in which there was not any idea about multiple intelligences. It was only in 1983 that Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner's work on multiple intelligences became known. Gardner identified more than just the
logical
intelligence that most people focused on at the time—which is the intelligence that allows us to do math and science, identify patterns, and use logic and deductive reasoning. Logical intelligence is the form that can most easily be measured on an IQ test; for decades, it was the only aptitude that was openly called
intelligence.

Gardner saw intelligence differently, and he eventually put a name to many other forms of intelligence in addition to logical intelligence. It's important to point out that some educators and researchers have strong criticisms of the implications of Gardner's work. However, I'm not proposing any sort of teaching style or any reframing of IQ tests here. Instead, I'm using Gardner's work to explore the idea of intelligence as a larger, more full-bodied constellation of talents and abilities than the merely logical one that many of us grew up with (and which is still the basis for formal designations of IQ). I'm also focusing on Gardner's unique approach to social and emotional awareness as a distinct form of intelligence.

Gardner identified many areas of skill, talent, and ability beyond the logical, mathematical, and reasoning capacities that are the focus of most IQ tests. (Note: I'm not including every form of intelligence Gardner identified, because his categories are still in flux.) In Gardner's framework, four of these extra intelligences are
linguistic
intelligence, which enables you to write, communicate, and learn languages skillfully;
musical
intelligence, which enables you to identify tone/pitch/rhythm, appreciate music, compose it, and perform musically;
bodily–kinesthetic
intelligence, which enables you to use your body with great skill (think of dancers, athletes, and gymnasts); and
spatial
intelligence, or the ability to recognize patterns in space and to use space in novel ways. Architects, builders, sculptors, geometricians, and most visual artists would be high in spatial intelligence.

The other two intelligences Gardner identified are
interpersonal
intelligence, which allows you to understand the intentions, motivations, and
desires of others, and
intrapersonal
intelligence, which gives you the ability to understand
your own
motivations, intentions, and desires. These last two are incredibly important forms of intelligence that help you pilot through the social world. Because empathy is first and foremost an emotional skill, it's important to focus on these interpersonal and intrapersonal areas of intelligence if you want to understand and develop your empathic skills.

With the ground of Gardner's work to stand on, we can refer to intelligence as a rich constellation of talents, abilities, and traits and not simply those skills you use on IQ tests. However, here's the problem for empaths: When most of us were growing up, the only kinds of intelligence that mattered were the logical and spatial kinds on those IQ tests. Even today, social and emotional intelligence are not considered true aspects of intelligence, except in Gardner's work. Maybe our musical and artistic intelligences were accessed in school, and probably our bodily, sports-focused abilities were too, but P.E. and art were probably not an equal focus of our school day. When I went to school, P.E. and art were not seen as essential to learning, and now, with all the budgetary problems and the testing focus facing schools, P.E. and art are even less likely to be a large part of the school day. Therefore, schools don't tend to access the full richness of our many different kinds of intelligence.

However, it is important to note that our interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences are not a part of our formal schooling at all. I think I took a citizenship class once, but I can't really remember it. What I do remember, in school and out of it, is that behavioral and social skills were often taught on the fly. We learned how to act by watching others or by being praised or shamed, but there wasn't any actual instruction. No one said, “Here's what anger does, and here's how it's different from fear and sadness.” No one said, “When other people are feeling these specific emotions, here are some ideas for how to respond.” No one explained complex social behaviors to us: “Watch how that tall girl drops her body when she's around boys; it looks as if she's trying to project a version of femininity that is actually detrimental to who she is as a person.” Or, “Look at that gang of boys; it looks as if they're not dangerous, because their body language is loose, and they're making nonthreatening eye contact with out-group members. They're probably a friendly gang and not a mean gang.” (These days, however, now that bullying has become such a problem in schools, some social skills courses, conflict-mediation workshops, and empathy curricula are being offered in schools.)

We learned how to work with emotions and how to understand people through osmosis or on the fly or by the seat of our pants. We didn't receive direct instruction about our relationships or our emotions, unless we made some huge social mistake, such as openly displaying unwanted emotions or unwittingly trampling over someone's obvious social cues. We were taught reading, writing, math, and perhaps languages; we were taught science, history, and P.E.; and some of us were taught art and music. But in regard to our emotions, our interpersonal skills, our intrapersonal skills, and our empathic skills, we were just supposed to figure it all out somehow.

As children, we were expected to come into school with our interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences already fully matured. We were expected to have our emotions, our social awareness, and our understanding of others under our belts already. We got demerits or gold stars for our behavior, but we didn't learn
how
to identify our emotions or work with them skillfully in ourselves and others. So if we were angry or sad or afraid at school, we had to keep it hidden or risk being made the center of attention. If we openly cried or expressed our angers or envies, we were often sent to the principal or the school counselor, or we'd go to detention or stay after school. Our emotions would take us out of the normal school day, out of the classroom, and out of the way. If we acted out our fear or our sadness, other kids might see us as weaklings and make us targets, or we might become the teacher's pet, which is often the same thing as being a target. Other kids would learn, “Don't express most emotions, or you'll be isolated, punished, or publicly shamed.”

What I saw growing up—and what I still see—is that we're asked to grow to maturity while keeping two of the most important aspects of our intelligence—our intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences—under wraps, in the shadows, out of the way, and off the radar. As adults, we tend to need therapists, counselors, and psychiatrists to help us access not only our emotions, but also these two intelligences, even though they belong to us and are essential to pretty much everything we do. It's not surprising, then, that we don't know what emotions are or what they do. It's also not surprising that we're left to figure out emotions for ourselves. And it's not surprising that empathy, which is first and foremost an emotional skill, is such a difficult thing for so many of us to figure out.