Empathy Hurts

I was thinking about empathy. I do that a lot. I was wondering why people avoided really empathizing with another person. Even people who know all about empathy, such as people trained in Nonviolent Communication do not empathize as much as one would think. So I watched myself to see what happens when I empathize.

As I took myself through the feelings step by step, I noticed that at a certain point I had to take my attention off myself. Some part of me did not like losing my attention. So that is certainly one reason people find empathy difficult. Then at another point I saw that I during empathy I feel the same emotion as the other person. If she felt sad, I felt sad. If she was angry, I felt angry. Since, like most people, I do not enjoy feeling sad or angry, I wanted out of the emotion. I wanted to feel better, so I immediately sought to make the other person feel better. I either wanted to console them or advise them.

Two experiences make empathy difficult, having to focus exclusively on someone else for a few moments and feel what they are feeling. We become like a tuning fork resonating to the pitch of A.  The other person is vibrating at sad frequency and we attune to it. However that's not the final piece. For I must also know in my heart that pain is OK. It's like taking your child to the doctor for a vaccination. You feel the child's fear, resonate to it, while at the same time knowing that her fear is OK.

You match the child's frequency. The child feels that you understand. The child feels heard, and so doesn't feel the need to fight against his own feelings. He doesn't have to stuff the feelings down, ignore them, or belittle them. If you are calm with his fear, then so is he!
The fear is free to work itself out on its own. And it does. What a gift your presence has given this child.

But what I notice is, that to do this, one must have faith in the experience of natural pain. (meaning pain that comes naturally from life experiences) All our lives we are told that pain is bad. That pain may even be a sign of moral weakness. Drug companies and chocolate makers bank on our fear of painful emotions. But we are more than physical bodies. Our souls journey toward wisdom and meaning. All emotions bring valuable information to us. To suppress them or advise them away is to lose their messages.

Just for fun imagine that you lived in a society that frowned on laughter. (I think the Puritans might have been such a society) If every time you laughed someone tried to help you suppress it, what would you lose? Wouldn't that be weird? Fortunately we live in a culture that trusts laughter's effect on us.