Miracle at JJ's

[Lillieperl]

JJ wrote

How do you empathize with someone who is feeling envious of you? I've often felt that my H is generally envious of my happiness, but what can I do about that? Make myself less happy? Try to make him more happy? Neither of these options are very productive in my experience, so I feel like I'm only left with the option of indicating that he has to figure out how to make himself more happy and of course this may come off as less than empathetic.

You sound just like my bf! "Hey, I can't fix what's going on with you, so I'll be over here working while you get over it!"

Empathy is not about "being productive." It's about being with someone-- just being WITH them-- without trying to fix anything. The essence of empathy is listening. It doesn't mean joining the other person in feeling bad. When your partner is talking about his/her feelings, three words will convey your desire and willingness to empathize: Tell me more." So, for example, to empathize with his feeling envious of you... "Honey, tell me more... what's that like for you?" If you can't picture yourself saying this, well, I can't picture my bf saying it either, except with impatience, as in, "Can you PLEASE tell me more of what's going on with you so I can get back to what I was doing, which frankly, was a LOT more interesting than listening to YOU!"

If you can find a copy of "Alternative Medicine" magazine this month (actually it's the June issue, so maybe it's off the shelves by now), there's a terrific article on empathy.

(Pause while I google...)

Wow! Through the miracle of the internet, I found the article and here it is. The bold paragraph is my favorite and captures best the essence of empathy. Another important quote is this one:

But the point of empathy is learning how to listen with your whole body, not simply reacting with a version of how you’d feel if you were in someone else’s place.

This may be what you're doing instead of empathy.

Here's the article:

Practicing Empathy

By Ann Japenga

Experts say the trait that oils all human interactions is a survival skill hard-wired into our consciousness.

For Harvard psychology instructor Arthur Ciaramicoli, Ed.D. Ph.D., the quest to understand empathy began with a conversation he had 30 years ago with his only brother, David. Growing up in a blue collar town in Massachusetts, the boys were handsome and athletic, seemingly destined for achievement. But shortly after graduating, David fell in with a group of dropouts who experimented with drugs, including LSD and heroin.

Over the years he tried to right his course with help from a doctor, a parish priest, handfuls of vitamins and self-help books. But in 1974, his friends talked him into driving the getaway car in a robbery. One of the perpetrators was caught and jailed. Fearing he’d be next, David fled to Amsterdam.

At the time, Arthur was working on his doctoral degree in psychology at the University of Massachusetts. Knowing his brother was in trouble, he called him and urged him to come home.

But for David, the specter of punishment was overwhelming. “I’ll kill myself if I have to go to prison,” he insisted.

Arthur didn’t take him seriously—something he’ll regret for the rest of his life. Focusing on his own agenda—to get David home—he assured him the family would stand by him.

When they hung up Arthur went off to his classes. David’s subsequent actions immediately after the call can only be assumed. But Arthur believes his brother then walked to the Chinese district of Amsterdam and bought a bag of heroin. What Arthur does know is that David returned to his room, locked the door, and gave himself an overdose of the drug. Before the day was over, Arthur Ciaramicoli’s only sibling was dead.

For years afterward, Ciaramicoli wondered whether there was something he could have done to save his brother. He moved home to live with his heartbroken parents and he ran for miles every night to obliterate his pain, asking himself over and over, “What could I have done differently?”

Ciaramicoli’s faith in his chosen discipline, psychology, was battered. He had read all the books and studied all the theories, yet nothing he’d learned had helped him reach his brother when it really counted.

Ciaramicoli started to pay as much attention to how people treated others as to the substance of their talk. In class, some professors lectured brilliantly about counteractive defenses and cognitive styles—yet they didn’t really seem to listen when another person spoke.

And he noticed there were others—like his father—who did just the opposite. When you had something to say, his father would lean toward you, fold his hands and listen without interrupting until you were completely finished with what you had to say. Then he’d pause, and only then begin to speak. Ciaramicoli loved to watch his father in conversation because people always came away relaxed and relieved. There seemed to be something in this way of listening and seeking to comprehend—something that held a clue to what went wrong with his brother.

On his own, Ciaramicoli read and read, zeroing in on the work of Heinz Kohut, a psychoanalyst who believes empathy is the trait that oils all human interaction.

With that discovery, Ciaramicoli’s search began to take shape, and he was launched on his lifelong study of empathy. In his two best-known books, The Power of Empathy: A Practical Guide to Creating Intimacy, Self-Understanding and Lasting Love (with Katherine Ketcham; Plume, 2001) and Performance Addiction: The Dangerous New Syndrome and How to Stop It from Ruining Your Life (Wiley, 2004), he argues that empathy is an innate trait that each of us can develop and improve upon for the benefit of ourselves and each other. By Ciaramicoli’s definition, empathy is “a powerful, genetically endowed ability to accurately read another person.”

In the last few years that ability has become a popular topic among researchers, whose work has confirmed some of Ciaramicoli’s notions. They’ve found, for example, that all life-forms—from elephants and slime mold to chimps and humans—come factory equipped with the ability to read others of their kind.

Research has shown that adult humans respond instinctively to the emotions of others. In a study of 16 couples, Tania Singer, of University College London, positioned the female in an MRI scanner while her male partner was shocked. The MRIs showed that pain centers in the brain of the women empathizers were activated merely by witnessing their beloveds’ distress.

All this suggests that the ability to empathize is not a matter of good child-rearing, but a survival mechanism encoded in us. Early humans needed to be able to assess each other quickly: Is the hairy guy bounding up the trail friendly? Today, it’s more likely to be: Is the boss a backstabber? But what shows up in the recent studies is empathy in its rawest form. This elemental empathy is akin to intuition—an immediate understanding we pick up through facial expressions and body language. Our challenge as humans, Ciaramicoli says, is to refine that raw information by adding effort and reasoning. “Empathy is critical to our health. It reduces tension, lessens the release of stress hormones and widens the lens with which we see the world, allowing us to form relationships with a diverse group of people,” says Ciaramicoli. Empathy is key to good relationships, he asserts, and friendships result in healthier human beings.

Indeed, in recent years research has established that it’s impossible to separate the health of relationships from the health of individuals. Hostility, in particular, has been shown to be bad for our hearts and immune systems. Forgiveness and human contact, the antidotes, reduce blood pressure and heart rate and help stave off serious illness.

And empathy is central to all of these things, according to Fred Luskin, director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project and author of Forgive for Good (Harper San Francisco, 2003). “Any trait that softens the sense of threat we feel from others also reduces damage to the cardiovascular and nervous systems,” he says.

Over the years Ciaramicoli replayed in his mind his final conversation with his brother many times, always looking for ways he could have altered the outcome. As he learned more about empathy, the script in his head began to change. He saw possibilities for intervention where before there had been none.

During the long-distance phone call, Ciaramicoli had been awash in his own fears as well as David’s panic. That didn’t help him hear what was really going on with David. What was needed was an objective step back from the problem. Sympathy, he discovered, is pure emotion: a clench in the chest. Empathy is a built-in capacity moderated by intelligence and imagination.

In fact, strong emotion gets in the way of empathy. If Ciaramicoli had been able to put aside his own reactions he might have asked David directly about his suicide remark: “Do you have a plan to hurt yourself?” “How close are you to doing it?”

Ciaramicoli also began to see that he hadn’t taken the time to truly grasp David’s despair. A quick judgment about someone’s emotional state is not empathy. For example, in his training, Ciaramicoli has seen therapists diagnose and medicate people after just a short session. They are relying, in part, on sympathy, he believes, which works on generalities and assumptions. For example, during his phone call with David, Ciaramicoli sympathesized by projecting his feelings about the situation onto David.

But the point of empathy is learning how to listen with your whole body, not simply reacting with a version of how you’d feel if you were in someone else’s place. Over time, Ciaramicoli realized that his brother had been even more terrified of being a failure than of going to prison. “I was sort of guessing at what he needed and what he was experiencing,” he says. “I intervened too soon, without really listening long enough.” In doing so, he says, “I left him alone with his pain.”

These days, when his patients feel they cannot bear another hour of their fear or sadness, Ciaramicoli fixes them with his gaze and says he will be there to listen to them no matter what. He offers them empathy. And when they respond with relief, sometimes he catches a glimpse of David looking back at him.

Ann Japenga is a freelance writer living in Palm Springs, CA.

Sidebar:Too Much Empathy?

Women sometimes come to see Arthur Ciaramicoli, Ed.D., Ph.D., complaining “This empathy is killing me.” They think they are feeling too much empathy when, in fact, they are actually identifying too closely with the troubles of others. “If people are truly practicing empathy they can never have too much,” he says.

“When you use it well it doesn’t wear you out.” To use it well, Ciaramicoli suggests following these rules:

Take a step back. An observer stance, or so-called “engaged detachment,” is essential to empathy. If you’re swamped by another person’s pain or fear, you can’t see them clearly. Say you come home ranting to your husband about your awful boss, and he takes on your feelings: “Why don’t you just quit? Why don’t you tell him to go to hell?” Your husband clearly has not disengaged, and being so close he is not an effective coach. By stepping back from his own distress, he could offer some perspective: “You’ve had this problem before with the boss and the situation usually calms down in a few days.”

Stay cool. No one can practice empathy in the midst of a shouting match—or in any case when passions run high. Wait until you’re calm before trying to really listen to what your partner, parent or child is saying. “When intensity goes up our capacity for empathy goes out the window,” Ciaramicoli says.

Use your head. Empathy is not about simply putting on someone else’s feelings. You’re trying to understand, and that requires the use of your brain as well as your heart. You might feel the anguish of a relative with a dire diagnosis, for example, but after the initial wave of feeling it’s helpful to listen to the other person intently, for as long as it takes. Your goal: to fathom subtleties and glean what the situation really means to that person.

Listen before acting. Charging in to rescue someone is not empathy. After all, if you’re rushing around you’re not focusing on the goal: listening and truly understanding. If your style is to help someone who’s sick by researching new therapies, you might want to wait until you can figure out what the other person really needs. Maybe she just wants an ear, someone with whom she can share her fears.