Where do you finish and where do I begin?

Still processing the learning from Strong Ground, I continue to think about the notion of empathy. It is probably the feeling that has helped me connect with most of the people I know and at the same time sabotaged my mental wellbeing the most. And I just thought that was the sacrifice that one has to make if they want to be truly empathic. It did feel hard so I must be doing something right, right? Wrong! It took this reading to put words behind what I felt was amiss in the way I chose to empathize with others.

Dr. Brown makes a very clear difference between affective empathy and cognitive empathy and gives very poignant examples. Cognitive empathy is the deep understanding of what others are feeling by drawing upon similar feelings in our own lives She clearly explains that we do not have to have had the same exact experience of the people in front of us in order to empathize, just to recall a similar feeling. In fact, and this is important to point out, Dr. Brown cautions us that when we recall a similar experience we tend to then impose our way of dealing with that as a “blueprint” and we are then as far from empathy as can be. You know, the empathy killer words: “Let me tell you about … . “

Reading through Strong Ground I understood that the reason I was suffering and the reason I was unable to support people I would have liked to in productive ways was the fact that I was falling into affective empathy, a feeling that Dr. Brown also calls enmeshment. Very dangerous. For me (and I am sure for many others who go this route), “empathizing” this way brought internal turmoil, (re)trauma sometimes, the feeling that I was in fact living what the person in front of me was recounting. Although it may seem like something a very compassionate person does, it cannot be further from that. If one of us is in a dark, dark hole and we go down there with them, we are both in the dark; there is nobody left with enough boundaries and clarity of mind to speak comforting words and hold our hand from the light. And that is dangerous for both parties.

I realize this will take serious unlearning and relearning for me. My constant practice of affective empathy, while making me more resilient to some forms of mental struggle, has now created a very trodden path for the way I relate with friends in distress. To stay within the realm of cognitive empathy, that place where we say “I don’t even know what to tell you, I am just so glad you told me,” and simply asking “What does help look like from me right now?” and then be silent, listen and stay within those boundaries feels like selfishness. It will take quite the interogation of that feeling of selfishness to discover the hidden beliefs behind it and dismantle them one by one so as to understand at a deeper level that boundaries are indeed life saving, for everyone. Just like Prentis Hemphill was saying, in my most favorite definition of boundaries: “the distance at which I can love you and myself simultaneously.”

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