I remember the day I first recognized that the amount of Empathy I was feeling had become debilitating. I was sitting in anger towards my mother as I watched her struggle with the divorce with my dad. This anger I felt confused me because I recognized my justifications of anger were surface level and petty. I then realized that anger is easier to feel than sadness, and I suddenly dropped beneath the anger and got access to immense sadness and pain as I felt myself attempt to “be in her shoes.” I cried and trembled. It was overwhelming, all consuming, and debilitating. I remember googling soon after that “is there such a thing as too much empathy?”
My confusion amplified as my current understanding of empathy was that it was wholly good and important, yet my experience in the moment was telling me otherwise. And so, I shut down my feelings and leveled back up to anger, so that I could get some energy back and function in the world.
Years later, my awareness was showing me that my avoidance of sadness, pain and empathy was maladaptive. I was choosing activities that were numbing or extreme in nature, and I saw more narcissism within me. I was too quick and eager to avoid and turn a blind eye to others’ pain. In fact, other people struggling around me became a huge inconvenience. So once again, I acknowledged that anger and frustration is easier to feel than pain or sadness, and I expanded my heart open to let myself feel what has been lurking beneath the surface all along. Debilitating sadness, grief, shame and an overwhelming empathy flowed in. This time I had some tools to support me. I was able to meet the feelings, go deeper to get to know the sensations in my body, how they moved and how they didn’t move, and I began to visualize little-me emoting these feelings. This was healing on so many levels. I was cracked open and I felt confident in my ability to hold this larger emotional space.
Although this process was able to take me deeper and move through emotions rather than be weighed down or fearful of them, I still found myself in consistent episodes of heartache as I continued to practice my current understanding of empathy, of feel to heal, and occasionally found myself in shame and guilt as I saw my part in others’ pain and took on the responsibility to try to feel what they were feeling. All the while I knew that I would never fully or truly understand what others’ experience is or feels like, yet I thought it was my duty to lean in with my heart and take on some of the emotional baggage my ancestors and my blind-privilege and cognitive bias had contributed to. Yet once again I found myself in overwhelm as empathy weighed heavy on my heart and mind.
On March 5, 2020, I walked into a guided shamanic journey, ingesting over 7 grams of Psilocybin mushrooms, and one of my intentions was to develop a new understanding and relationship with empathy by bringing in compassion and wisdom to balance it. While I could write a novel about my psilocybin experience, this blog post is specifically about Empathy ;). I walked away that day with a visceral understanding that Empathy is not what I had thought it was for so many years. I realized that I can try with all my might to feel what other’s feel, and it will always be a projection as I can only experience through my own lens.
Fast forward several months, and I found myself once again in despair caused by self inflicted shame and guilt around my white privilege, white fragility, and the veil lifted that allowed me to see my part in the racist system and racist ideas and beliefs that have been rained down on me my whole life, and for generations. While I was deeply entrenched I was also highly aware and fascinated as I witnessed my own debilitation and downward spiral. I was able to hold loving space for the part of me that was so habitually ingrained to respond with overwhelming empathy. This opened me up to research, to conversations, to self compassion, and a slow build into a new way.
In my podcast episode uploaded today with my good friend Yemie Sonuga, I share how my white fragility and imbalance with empathy led me to make poor decisions in how I showed up as a friend and ally. And Yemie schools me with love, grace and accountability of what the social justice movement truly needs - people who have done their research and found their stability so that they can join with right-action rather than needing to be held up and educated by those who are fighting the good fight.
A few days later I was speaking with Anshu Narayan on The Expert Connect Wellness Chat and before we went live, Anshu was telling me about a huge gesture her family made over the weekend to support a family in need. She said something along the lines of, “while we can never know their pain, we can let them know we see them, that they are not alone, and that we are here to support them.” My jaw dropped as I felt these words land as the medicine I needed to hear once again. I let her know how timely that statement was and what I have been going through as I find my footing beyond debilitating empathy.
A few days after that, I was at my dad’s house for dinner and began the evening catching up with my step mom and sharing what is alive, exciting and challenging right now. As I walked through my learnings, lessons and insights around empathy, leadership, anxiety and the beautiful sharings I have received in timely conversations, she responded with: “This reminds me of Rabbi Friedman’s work.” She then gave me a synopsis of how as a young mother she had struggled with how to strike that fine-line balance of empathy while not taking on her children’s struggles or pain as her own.
And so I leave you with this, a couple paragraphs paraphrasing Friedman’s work from a post titled “Empathy Doesn’t Cut It”:
“Rabbi Edwin Friedman was even more suspicious of empathy; he saw it as “a focus on weakness or immaturity rather than on strength, an orientation toward others rather than toward self, and a way of avoiding issues of personal accountability” (Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, 1999, 2007, page 134). He argues that although empathy may be “an essential component” in a person’s, and especially a leader’s, “response repertoire,” there is no evidence that it makes one more responsible for their own or another’s situation or destiny.
As a matter of fact, Friedman suggests, empathy is most often a partner to a lack of self-regulation, and therefore the encouragement to invade the space of a neighbor. Empathy without the limiting force of a well-defined and emotionally well-regulated individual acts like a virus: it is “reactive and very much like parasitic dependency.” Thus Friedman scores the “fallacy of empathy.”
In summary my friends, as we all continue to expand our emotional and self-regulation abilities, we must remember that while we cannot truly know the pain of another, when we know our own pain and desire a world that is more fair and just for all, we can use our privilege, our voice, our power, to take a stand for those with less privilege, to lift people up to be heard and seen, and to ensure that we do not berate ourselves into inaction or elevate ourselves at the detriment of others.
xoxo