Very few people are actually opposed to empathy.
Most of us value empathy and wish we had more of it, for ourselves and for the world. We just have questions.
Here’s the biggest one, I think: Is empathy empowering or enabling?
We want to understand the lives of other people, we want to be compassionate and kind, we want to make the world better. But sometimes our attempts at compassion go awry and we wonder if we actually made things worse.
Honestly, maybe we did. I value empathy about as much as I value anything; it is one of my leading guiding principles. And I have sometimes made things worse.
Empathy makes things worse when . . .
When we confuse empathy with pity.
When we feel sorry for someone, we risk reducing them to characters in our story. Instead of seeing them as humans that are just as complex and interesting as we are, we may overemphasize their weakness or their suffering, distinguishing ourselves and our strength or character.
We may feel bad that they are having a hard time but we’re sure that we would never let what happened to them happen to us. Then we’re likely to make ourselves the hero of the story with one-way engagement in which they are needy and our job is to help them.
When we assume that empathy and boundaries are mutually exclusive.
When feeling for someone else makes us stop thinking for ourselves, we’re dangerous.
Healthy relationships and healthy systems rely on each person taking responsibility for themselves. When we use empathy to avoid defining ourselves in healthy ways or taking a stand in our own lives, we make things worse. Boundaries, the limits we place on ourselves, are meant to protect us and others. Boundaries are the way we love ourselves and others at the same time.
When we absolve others of their rightful responsibility.
Again, healthy relationships and healthy systems rely on each person taking responsibility for themselves. When we empathetically move past caring about people to taking care of them, because we see them as weak or needy or incapable, we deprive them of the thing that makes us human – responsibility for and agency over our own lives. We may be well-meaning but we can relate to others as if they are our children or our pets instead of autonomous human beings who also have responsibility for their part.
When our empathy doesn’t change anything.
Some psychopathic criminals are empathetic to the extreme. They are exquisitely tuned in to the terror and helplessness of their victims. They just don’t care.
As we scroll endlessly on social media, we’re invited to empathize with more people than we could ever know personally. Being invited into their stories drains our energy, actually making it less likely that we will take action. This emotional cycle keeps us deeply compassionate, overwhelmed and helpless all at the same time.
None of this is new. Supporters of slavery warned against a robust empathy because seeing enslaved people as human and imagining what their lives were like might lead people to act to change the dominant laws and culture–and that was unacceptable. Luckily for them, empathy that leads to overwhelm keeps us helpless and ineffective.
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The difference between empowering and enabling
For almost 40 years, I worked as a counselor in private practice. I cared deeply about my clients and worked hard to understand their lives from their perspective. I could use my own experience to imagine what they were feeling and reflect that back to them in a way that helped them to feel normal and understood.
However, there were times when my empathy made things worse. When I left my office distracted and then ruminated as I made dinner and stared at the ceiling at 3 am, I was making life worse for myself and not helping my client at all. When I failed to set reasonable limits for my work with clients, I deprived them of the right to be treated as capable and responsible.
Over the years, one key question helped me to be wiser with my empathy:
What belongs to me?
I choose to use empathy – to try to see another person’s experience through their eyes and to understand what they are feeling and why. That choice belongs to me. Their experience and their feelings, however, don’t belong to me. Responsibility for my choices belongs to me. Responsibility for their lives doesn’t.
I learned to lock my office door at the end of the day while reminding myself, “You walked with a lot of people today. Your nervous system absorbed some of their emotion. You care about them deeply. And . . . their story isn’t yours. Their feelings don’t belong to you. You will need to handle your life and trust them to handle theirs with God’s help until you see them again.” And then I walked away.
