Empathy vs Inner Distance
Having observed a few instances over the past days when empathy has left, wondering about the inner distance.
This song usually comes up for me when I am depressed, which I’m not yet, thankfully.
But today it is a specific bit:
There is no pain, you are receding
A distant ship smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying
I have been observing in myself at times I wish to be present with people I care for very much a feeling of increasing distance, and since I hear them imperfectly from out there, watching myself in a kind of horror respond in ways that lack empathy.
Why is that?
Connection cannot be feigned, nor should it be. It’s difficult to be fully present with myself and with those around me when my mind is too full of competing thoughts and also when self-protective mechanisms start to kick in.
I learned a long time ago, probably as a small child before I have real memories, that a great way of staving off the pain of abandonment was to leave first. If not physically, to leave emotionally, mentally, spiritually.
So the fact that part of me is checking out from being present with people I care about is definitely something to look into.
Why is that?
Empathy, Sympathy, Compassion, Pity
εμπάθεια is, funny story, not the source of the English word empathy, which was apparently coined in 1909 as a translation of Einfühlung. Still more interestingly, it was originally looked at in terms of form and aesthetics, not empathic connection as it is more commonly used today.
This early empathy was not about understanding another person, but about projecting one’s own imagined feelings and movements into objects. Empathy explained how a viewer perceived a mountain or architectural column as if it were rising because the viewer transferred his or her own feelings of stretching upwards into the mountain or column.
The Surprising History of Empathy
So what is Einfühlung about and how does it relate to sympathy, compassion, and pity?
When I work with empaths (or with people who are having trouble with empathy), I always ask about their art form, because art is a specific tool to help people access emotions, express emotions, and work with their empathic Einfühlung capacities in intentional and healing ways.
For many of us, the meaning of empathy is rather problematic. It’s something we learned to do, yet were never actually taught, so we don’t know the steps. We don’t know how we pick up emotions from others, or why, or how we empathize, or over-empathize, or under-empathize, because we don’t have a language for what we’re doing, or the emotional skills we need to fully understand what’s occurring.
Excerpt from this Karla McLaren blog
Very comforting for several reasons. First, it resonates with my observations both of empaths and empathetic people, that they often feel deeply with or in art, music, drama, the natural world, a flying hawk…
Also that I am not the only one struggling with empathy and that it makes sense, because it has been learned intuitively and, as I now realize, in a kind of competition or struggle with the self-protective mechanisms to distance in anticipation of being hurt by someone close.
Why or how I over-empathize is, I think anyway, pretty clear to me. I believe it is a function of confusing or conflating my emotions with the person in front of me, probably because I have been triggered and catapulted back into an earlier version of me experiencing something that feels similar. Thus I cannot in that moment be truly empathetic because I got lost in my own past pain.
In this post, though, I am looking more at the under-empathizing, where it’s starting to look suspiciously like sympathy (feeling for someone, but not truly entering into their experience, at a distance) or, even worse, pity (feeling sorry for someone but with the horrifying element that somehow you feel better than them and are looking down at them).
It does seem that for me at least the under-empathizing is a function of inner distance.
Compassion is about taking the next step, beyond the empathetic connection of feeling what the other is going through, motivated to meet that suffering with an intentional act.
Empathy and being fully aware of what the other needs of you is then vital for true compassionate action, because otherwise you can so easily jump in and ease your own guilt or whatever by doing something that makes you feel better instead of whatever the other person actually needs.
This kind of white (doesn’t have to be white but often has been) saviourism has been covered pretty well in the beginning of season 3 of The Rookie, where our hero cuts a lock on a playground and starts fixing the lights in it before taking any time to listen to the community to understand why the lock was there and what will probably happen to the lights.
Inner Distance and Self-Protection
The next question, then, seeing that the difficulty I have been having lately seems to stem from self-protection and the resulting distance, is what has triggered those to kick in? Isn’t everything going wonderfully well in my life?
Yes and no. Definitely I can make a long list of everything I am absolutely delighted with that is my life right now, and for which I am deeply grateful.
But self-protection, it appears, is a kind of early warning system for my self. It is kicking in before it has properly come to my attention that there is a problem.
Likely at least one of the ‘problems’ or current situations is a vulnerability to a depression. Before I actually become depressed, there is an indefinite period of weeks or months where I gradually become more fragile and sensitive. I worry more about emails and am reluctant to open them. Some remain unopened because they ‘feel’ too dangerous. I worry that people I am usually sure like me are angry with me and so I withdraw from them so that nothing bad will happen. And so on.
I am encouraged, because for the first time in my life, before being depressed, I am closely observing these warning signs, while continuing to keep my daily wellness practices at the top level of consistency.
Will self-awareness, self-nurture, and self-inquiry stave off the next depression? Will it slow its approach? Will it shorten the duration and help me emerge from the other side more quickly?
Only time will tell.
In the meantime, just having a better understanding of how these things are connected is deeply reassuring.