There was a fire at the plant at which Bernie was a security guard. With operations shut down for the night they sent Bernie home early. While he was bummed about losing out on the hours, he felt good about going home to his wife. He was grateful to Bill, his buddy from high school, for hooking him up with the job. But things had been tough since he and Janice moved to the new town. For both of them. With him working nights, her getting up early for her shift at Wally World, and both taking any overtime offered, they hardly saw each other.
The house was quiet as he pulled into the driveway. It was after eleven and this was a family neighborhood. Beyond the blue glow of a variety of screens and the light from the lone streetlight the road was dark. Bernie let himself in through the side door. He checked the fridge and saw that the leftover steak Janice had gotten such a good deal on was gone. Figuring she had it for dinner he grabbed an apple and headed back to put his gun in the safe in the bedroom closet and kiss his wife awake.
As he neared the door, which was cracked open just a bit, Bernie heard the rhythmic squeaking of the mattress springs. His steps slowed but something drew him inexorably forward. Bernie felt as though someone had stuck a hook in his gut and was reeling him in. Pain was a burning in his stomach and chest. Knowing what he would see when he opened that door Bernie was barely aware of lifting the gun in his hand.
There are a couple of concepts that, based on conversations I have had, people seem to struggle with. One is that “I understand” does not mean “that’s okay”. Understanding may not even mean forgiveness. It all comes down to empathy. Empathy is often confused with a plethora of other emotions. Pity or the acknowledgement, at least to ourselves, of another person’s pain. While this feeling of discomfort in seeing or hearing about the pain of others can be a positive force it often has nuances of condescension which can raise the hackles of any recipient. Usually pity is fleeting and rarely motivates us to action.
Altruism, doing the right thing because it’s the right thing. This is rare. And perhaps that is a good thing as I believe that altruism is what people mean by the road to hell being paved with good intentions. Unlike sympathy, empathy, compassion, or even pity altruism is impersonal. It means doing the right thing solely from our perspectives. When there is a lack of understanding of culture/emotion/circumstances this can backfire spectacularly.
Most often empathy is confused with the similar sounding sympathy. Sympathy goes a step beyond pity because it doesn’t simply acknowledge another’s distress. When we sympathize with someone, we also understand what the other person is going through and care that they are upset. For example, even those of who have been fortunate enough to have never lost a love one can understand the pain and grief of such a tragedy.
The term empathy was developed in 1909 when the psychologist Edward Titchener translated the German word Einfühlung, meaning “in feeling”, into English as empathy. Empathy is the act or ability to put ourselves into another’s feelings. To not only recognize and understand another’s thoughts, emotions, or feelings but to share them. It is the ability to see a situation from someone else’s perspective. Where sympathy allows for a certain distance, empathy does not.
Sympathy and empathy may be connected. And they may not be. For example, we can sympathize with the pain of animals, and even of plants or the earth. We look at the wound of a mining operation, the devastation of a forest fire, or see a living thing killed or abused and feel strong emotions. Even connection. But we aren’t truly capable of understanding things from their perspective. Sympathy means understanding pain or beauty. When we empathize we feel what the other is feeling.
Which brings us back to Bernie.
I get Bernie. He’s putting in a lot of time into a job that is both boring and stressful at the same damned time. He’s doing it for them, both himself and Janice. For their future. They met in high school and she’s not just the only woman he’s ever been with she’s the only woman he’s ever wanted to be with. In real life, anyway. He wouldn’t turn down Sasha Lane for “coffee”. Janice was his everything. And Bill was his friend. Seeing them there, together, in the bed he and Janice picked out. The bed he hoped to make their children in. He just lost it. I mean, the gun was already in his hand.
So, I understand. I get it. Man, under those circumstances I could totally be Bernie. But it’s still not okay. What Bernie did was understandable. But it was still really fucking wrong. As much as we may want to, we can’t kill people because they hurt our feelings. If I was on a jury of Bernie’s peers, I would totally send his ass to jail.
Empathy, to some extent, is what makes us able to connect as humans. Mirror neurons, first discovered in the 1990s by a team of Italian researchers at the University of Parma led by neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti, MD, are a type of brain cell. As I noted in in Visualize this! http://mammiddleagedmama.com/visualize-this/ research has shown that we stimulate the same brain regions when we visualize an action as when we actually perform that same action. It turns out that mirror neurons mirror the response we have when someone else responds to an action. Why we wince when we see someone stub a toe or get a lap full of hot coffee. Or get shamed in public. Rizzolatti hypothesizes that mirror neurons help us to not only read other people but to connect and feel empathy for them.
Feeling empathy for those familiar is easy. It’s much harder to feel empathy towards those who are different than we are. Studies, including this one https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jasp.12279?campaign=wolearlyview& published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology in 2014, have found that watching movies and reading books can help us to generate empathy for people we mark as very different from ourselves. The study focused on Harry Potter, which, as you know, is awesome. After reading the fantasy full of people fighting to overcome prejudice against themselves and other beings, participants showed greater empathetic responses to people not like them. Specifically, the group showed greater empathy towards minority and outside groups. The researchers concluded that engaging with Harry Potter’s story of struggle, despite the fact that the story was one of fantasy and that many of the people were not people at all, helped participants better understand outside perspectives. More, practicing empathy is like practicing anything else. The more we use it, the easier it becomes to connect.
Nursing scholar Theresa Wiseman’s four attributes of empathy start with sympathy, the ability to understand another person’s feelings. We then have to be able to communicate our understanding of that person’s feelings- without trying to fix things. We must see the world as others see it. And, perhaps most difficult of all, be nonjudgmental. For those who work or live in a joyous atmosphere empathy can spread that joy. We can all think back to times when a stranger’s laughter made us smile. Unfortunately, most of us work and live on earth where, to quote Thomas Hobbes, life is often ‘nasty, brutish and short’.
Which is why when most of us think about being empathetic we think of victims. When witnessing another in pain the act of empathizing leaves us vulnerable and can be exhausting. This is especially challenging for those who work in occupations where they routinely encounter the suffering of others. People in healthcare, law enforcement, social workers, and the military have high rates of burnout and higher risks for suicide and other forms of self-harm like addiction. This burn out is often referred to as “empathy fatigue.”
Compassion, a feeling of concern for the suffering of others, may be able to help with this. Empathy allows us to share in another’s emotions. The problem is, this can leave us feeling helpless. With compassion we share in other’s emotions and move to alleviate that suffering. Compassion is acknowledgement of pain and the desire to alleviate the pain. Compassion is active. https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/9/6/873/1669505 Research suggests that compassion, which employs a different region of the brain than empathy, may be able to combat empathetic fatigue.
The Latin root of compassion means “to suffer with.” The act of compassion means sliding into the metaphysical skin of another person in order to help alleviate their pain, and by extension lessening the pain in the world. In the practice of compassion, we stay present in the suffering, not allowing ourselves to run away nor to be overwhelmed. More significantly, compassion is a renewable resource. When we work to lessen another’s pain, when we focus on the other and the good we are doing them and not on ourselves, we are less likely to burn out.
I understand does not mean that’s okay. Being empathetic or compassionate does not mean allowing ourselves to be abused or accepting that which we find morally repugnant. A prison warden can feel compassion for the men under his watch. He can understand that the backgrounds from which most of them come made their bad choices almost inevitable. And still, in good conscience, he can enforce their sentences. He is simply more likely to treat them with respect, as fellow human beings, in the process. It takes compassion to put the just in justice.
https://time.com/247/millennials-the-me-me-me-generation/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/our-changing-culture/201408/are-millennials-generation-nice
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/empathy-is-the-youth-power-skill-of-the-21st-century_b_5a26d43be4b0f7f1679a038d
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/failure-empathy
https://youtu.be/35Wt8LhoVHA
https://www.apa.org/monitor/oct05/mirror
https://chopra.com/articles/whats-the-difference-between-empathy-sympathy-and-compassion
https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/9/6/873/1669505
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-23431793
https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-10-21/watching-movies-may-help-you-build-empathy
Interesting side note on psychopathy https://www.thecut.com/2018/08/my-life-as-a-psychopath.html