Having a higher than average amount of empathy seems to be a disadvantage in many ways. It seems in many cases to be correlated with anxiety and depression. It can be difficult for people with high levels of empathy to recognize the boundaries between their own self and the thoughts and feelings of others. As a kid I was highly empathetic, and it's something I've struggled with my entire life. It never really felt like a virtue, and mostly just brought me pain. I have less empathy now, but it seems to largely be the result of emotional numbing, which isn't pleasant either. Even now though, my mind seems to always mirror the thoughts and feelings of those around me, as if I don't have a self or personality of my own. It's rather odd, but I've read about a number of people with similar experiences.
I've read some interesting things about how in many cases schizoid personality disorder may be the result of highly empathetic children who later withdraw in life because interpersonal contact was a source of significant suffering for them. I seen to exhibit many of the signs of SPD, but I've never been diagnosed. (If you're not familiar with SPD, I'd recommend looking it up. It's likely not what you think it is, and not directly related to schizophrenia.)
Don't numb it, master it and let it lead under control. Empathy is an
incredible virtue, but it must be disciplined.
I don't know enough neuroscience to know what the "right dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex" is exactly but I know that you can over-ride/master
it with reason and discipline.
So I think there's something more to people allowing their better
nature to slip under stress than simple brain chemicals.
A colonel told me, that in the moment of most stress that's when the
men need you most of all, and need you to retain dignity,
self-sacrifice, and thinking about _them_ more than ever. When
everyone is shitting themselves we revert to "I'm alright Jack"
self-preservation mode. That's precisely the time when you need to dig
deep and let _reason_ take the lead. Compassion/altruism etc is a
personality structure, not a fleeting feeling, so it's encoded into
your rational decision making.
So a ton of training is about getting you to "snap out of yourself".
The body moves in fast time, but if the mind can still stay in slow,
measured mode, that's how the best comes out in some poeple under
adversity. Hardballs who have no love for humanity will jump on to the
tracks to save a kid from a subway train, because deep down they are
actually masters of the empathy they've carefully hidden.
I guess that tension between what you know you should do and what you
find yourself instinctively inclined to do - is conscience.
I really don't sympathize with your viewpoint. Lots of research shows that it's hard to go against your natural state. You only have so much willpower - for most people it's a finite resource.
In that context, your comment reads "Why don't you just decide to be better?". Do you think that the original commenter wanted to be this way? That it was a deliberate choice? Do you think it's that easy to change right now? I won't go on, but your comment came off as condescending - whatever your intentions are.
> Lots of research shows that it's hard to go against your natural state.
How do you define 'natural state'? For example, my natural state is to be attracted to food when I'm hungry, to certain humans who I find sexually appealing, etc., but I don't grab those things when they pass by; it's not hard. My natural state is to be angry or upset when my client says certain things, but I don't punch them or cry. My natural state is to be an illiterate, innumerate nomadic hunter-gatherer, like 200,000+ years of ancestors, yet here I am on my fat ass in front of a computer.
People process their emotions in many ways, healthy and unhealthy. It's our choice what we each do with them. Emotions are exceptionally valuable to judgement, intuition, and to your experience of the world. They are your experience of the world, for the most part.
> your comment came off as condescending
I'm not the commenter, but for another POV, that wasn't my impression.
Look, I understand what you're saying. But I don't mean "learning math", I was referring to a fundamental aspect of someone's personality. If a person is impulsive, then it is hard to become "not impulsive".
If a person has angry tendencies, then it is a struggle to handle that anger. Often people need help (ie. a therapist) to deal with these.
It is my experience that you can't tell someone to "turn your empathy into a superpower" the same way you can't tell them to "turn your anger into a superpower" - it just isn't that easy, takes time and effort.
Yes, it can be done, but success looks more like "I managed my anger so I can live a happier life" instead of "I channeled my anger and became a boxing champion". Think "I managed my empathy and set healthy boundaries". What would 'success' even look like in this context?
Of course, most people can muster the strength to choose to pass on the desert or the tryst. I think the parent is referring to the hard cases, where, only in retrospect, you have the clarity to see that you made the wrong choice and wish you'd done otherwise.
But of course you can't. And if you rewound the universe to the exact same starting conditions you still couldn't.
> I think the parent is referring to the hard cases
You only know what's 'hard' after you try to change them.
> But of course you can't. And if you rewound the universe to the exact same starting conditions you still couldn't.
That's too fatalistic. You can and do, but it's indeed hard.
I reject the idea that, to express an extreme case, we are powerless automatons of our worst instincts. We have free will and choices, just not always easy ones; we can change, but sometimes it takes a lot of work. People HN believe their startup can change the world and embrace all the hard work and mountains to climb; we have a much better chance of changing ourselves.
it is a finite resource which is why meditation and training is required for mastery.
people are capable of deciding to be better when they've the faculties and depth of experience and wisdom. Ever manage to troubleshoot a faulty canopy mid fall, or make a decision to cut the main and deploy the reserve parachute? you dont get to that mode of operation overnight.
You're talking about skills, not willpower. Every study I've seen suggests that willpower is not trainable. Maybe it is, that would be great.
Note, that you can train altruistic and empathetic appearing behaviors. So yes, even though you're all starving, the men eat first. Yes, you are going to risk your life doing X. Yes, you are going to tell everyone its okay and appear calm even while you're panicking.
Willpower is not an effective way to deal with emotions, beyond the very short term - and then you will have blowback. Suppressing your emotions is a great way to have them take over your life and without you being conscious of it (you suppressed them!).
Here is what I understand. I have no expertise, I have long studied and learned to apply these ideas, after trying the willpower approach for much of my life. Most of all, I encourage you to read what experts say; it's fundamental psychology (even if I denied it for a long time).
I have plenty of flaws but I am blessed with willpower, at a level that drives others crazy; I am always pushing the furthest, always the last to give up. Perhaps that's been built up because I used willpower to solve my problems most of my life; perhaps I used it because it was already a strength. I also used it for my emotions, as if they were an injured knee and I just had to tough it out and would run anyway. In hindsight, I was ignorant. I'm not sure if the following is what you seek, but feel free to ask questions and I'll try my best to answer.
Imagine there is a First Law of Emotional Dynamics, the Law of Preservation of Emotions. You cannot destroy them; you can transform them from one form to another (e.g., fear becomes anger). If you don't process them, they remain, sometimes lifelong (trauma, PTSD). Emotions are going to be there and they are going to have their say. If you try to suppress them, they will have their say without your input or consent. You will deal with them, in an unhealthy way (drinking and drugs are popular!) or in a healthy way. Your choice! The most practical tip I have is, replace unhealthy coping with healthy coping - the drive is genuine and normal; you just need a healthy way to take care of it.
Second Law: Input of emotions is from specific sources, internal and external. Output is by default toward the easiest target. Your boss screams at you, you supress your anger/fear/shame, you go home and find yourself yelling at whoever because they didn't turn off the light - a lot safer to yell at them than at your boss! Much more consequential and also typical: A child feels angry at their parents; the child can't express anger because their parents don't allow it, implicitly or otherwise; the child can't even blame the parents internally because a child is so dependent - for survival - on their parents and trusts whatever they say or imply - 'it can't be their fault'. So the child turns the anger inwardly, toward themselves, and feels shame (anger becomes shame, see the First Law). As they get older, their shame (an incredibly damaging emotion) becomes anger - they hate it - but they still don't turn it at their parents; they probably don't even realize the source. The anger is aimed at easiest targets around them, maybe their own children.
Third Law: Emotional energy is intangible, immeasurable, and indefinable, but it is real and it is limited. You have a limited capacity of emotional energy. I used to insist this was nonsense and that through willpower I would just keep going, and what was going to stop me? It was sort of like insisting that I was going to sprint a marathon. I can insist and have all the willpower I like but my body doesn't have the capacity and neither do our emotions. If you push past your capacity, there will be a rebound effect - I did this all the time, completely disregarding my emotions as a matter of course, and then I couldn't understand why, subsequently, I couldn't seem to function - 'I just need more willpower!'. You can imagine how that worked out. Now, I manage that capacity - I do things that build it up, I spend it selectively, I anticipate my limits, which I have learned about. Sometimes I do have to push myself beyond them, through willpower - if a loved one is seriously ill, then that is more important - but I am making a choice, I have built up my capacity over the years, and I plan for and manage the rebound in a healthy way.
......
But notice that I described my early perspective of emotion as like an injury, as if it's a malfunction or friction in the gears. More than anything else, it is you; it's the core of you, it's your actual experience of the world and your life, and it's also essential to judgment, instinct, intuition, etc. My early perspective was 180 degrees wrong: Have compassion for it, care for it, love it, it's important, it is your humanity. That change in perspective has transformed my experience of life, my ability to love, my perception and experience of the world, and also my instinct and intuition.
Well said. Reminds me of that Lowe/Cash song "The Beast in me". Need
to care for your inner wild animal. You might like Bowlby
(attachment), particularly with regard to how formative parent
relations affect you later.
I just wanted to thank you for putting all this out there. I don't have a substantive reply, and I didn't want to (keep) delay writing back until I had finished thinking about what you wrote.
You are very welcome. I can just keep the tab open and check back once in awhile (unless my browser crashes!) and if you reply, and if I see it, I'll respond.
> Don't numb it, master it and let it lead under control
Numbing it was never a conscious decision, it was an automatic learned response to pain after years / decades. Now that I'm more conscious of what's happening, I can begin to work with it, but personality traits like this are generally highly stable and resistant to change. Which isn't to say there's nothing that can be done about it, just that's challenging (and in the process, you may be losing some of the benefits of that learned behavior).
> personality traits like this are generally highly stable and
resistant to change.
Yes. Impossible to change some would say. So my message was wear it
with pride. There's a philosopher called Kierkegaard who would say
that you can't be "cured" of what you are. And since empathy is a
gift, instead make it a superpower. That happens when you control it
instead of it controlling you. Good luck, and I hope your gift brings
you great things.
> personality traits like this are generally highly stable and resistant to change
From one person's experience with other personality traits, it's both hard but just lots of hard work and determination.
> and in the process, you may be losing some of the benefits of that learned behavior
You will gain so much more, you can't even imagine now. You will look back and laugh at worrying about what you were going to lose. It's like forgetting how to run a super-marathon while learning that you have wings and how to fly.
> you to retain dignity, self-sacrifice, and thinking about _them_ more than ever
> That's precisely the time when you need to dig deep and let _reason_ take the lead
I would say when self-sacrifice, thinking of others first is what's called for, that's actually empathy leading, at its most high-functioning.
Empathy is taking the lead, but it's somehow a deeper kind, qualitatively distinct from day to day sympathy and personality. Sometimes a person you thought was rather heartless day to day, turns out to care for their buddies in such a moment, and you don't forget their actions.
Of course it is empathy in concert with reason. Reason, intuition, skill, knowledge - and that measured mind - are all required in difficult situations, but without empathy would often lead to self-preservation mode.
> deep down they are actually masters of the empathy they've carefully hidden.
It’s the generalization that is wrong. People are not permanently one way. They fluctuate. They are infatuated at 20, struggling for money at 30, tired at 40, getting things in the correct order at 50, disconnected at 60… They make different conclusions about life. They may save a kid at 30 and not when they themselves have a family. Or the opposite. Generalization is erroneous.
> Good sentiment. But when your being hurt emotionally and physically
most days. Numbness becomes your only real defense.
What you are alluding to sounds like abuse. As you can see in this
thread I am being chastised for offering unsolicited, condescending
advice about things I know nothing about - as if the vicarious snipers
knew anything about my experiences or expertise, and as if my tone was
out of place here.
If your comment pertains to yourself I'd heartily recommend you read
[1][2] below. People are using the word "numb". That could mean a lot
of things, drugs, alcohol, or other indulgences. But there are
specific dangers with the coping behaviour that clinicians call
"dissociation". I wish you well.
> But when your being hurt emotionally and physically most days. Numbness becomes your only real defense.
While I empathize with people using numbness, it's not true that it's the only defense. Hurt is something in you; it's your perceptual experience and you can control that. Someone hurts me because I let them. That doesn't excuse them, but takes away their power: I can look at it differently.
It's not a panacea, but I've been through what you've talked about and not surrendering my empathy, not letting them destroy that part of me, was something I was determined to do.
Compassion is a great too, your armor: Compassion for yourself, displacing the hurt from others, and for the abusers, which takes away much of their power.
I've noticed that at least some military officers, especially above a certain rank, seem to have this supernatural calm under stress. I read a story about a submarine accident, where some outsiders happened to be on-board, and they said that as the crew starting running around, the captain - who likely had just lost their career - got on the loudspeaker and said, in an almost friendly tone, 'hey, I know your hearts are pump, pump, pumping. Just remember your training and trust each other.' I've seen it in other places.
What is the training or technique used? I'd love to learn more about it.
Imagine having direct experience with these things, genuinely sharing your hard-earned experience of what works for you in the language you have available to you, and then some third-party who doesn't know anything about you misrepresents your statement and then tells you to "shut the fuck up about mental health problems you don't have."
the OP has mastered their emotional response and will be fine by their own reckoning. i wouldn’t be so direct if the person hadn’t insisted they could handle it. i was in fact respecting their autonomy by treating them in the exact way they said they prefer.
What are the odds that GP would post "I don't know exactly what these brain regions do, but I know that these transgendered people who had fMRI showing their brains function much closer to their identified gender should simply stop being transgendered by overriding/mastering the differences with reason and discipline."
I'm guessing zero... but because it's a study on empathy, it's totally a-ok to say "i don't know a thing about this, but since its not a problem for me, it shouldn't be a problem for you"
"While anger makes us certain in our righteous indignation, anxiety,
and surprise make us unsure of what’s going on and what will happen
next. And when we feel uncertain, we tend to fall back on what we know
to be true — namely, our own perspectives and feelings"
Rather than saying "You are close to understanding, but keep going", it would be more helpful to explain why you think that disciplined empathy is no longer empathy.
I agree with the previous poster, but I'm curious to learn what you mean.
The vagueness of the Dao De Ching is not in the book, it is in reader.
It is not myself that creates the Dao, but I can thank you for creating the Dao!
When a superior person hears of the Tao,
She diligently puts it into practice.
When an average person hears of the Tao,
he believes half of it, and doubts the other half.
When a foolish person hears of the Tao,
he laughs out loud at the very idea.
If he didn’t laugh,
it wouldn’t be the Tao.
If you notice, much philosophy - generally defined, including religion - is vague. Much great art is vague. It may turn out that, unlike technical manuals, there is no value in spelling out everything. Either the reader engages or not and if they do, they don't need it spelled out - they create it in their own neural pathways, in their own mind, which is far more valuable than reading it. And if they don't, it doesn't matter anyway. It's not a new idea:
From the Christian Gospels (Mark 4)
Jesus tells the parable of the sower, ending, ""He who has ears, let him hear." And when he was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that 'they may indeed see but not perceive, / and may indeed hear but not understand, / lest they should turn and be forgiven.'" And he said to them, "Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables? The sower sows the word. And these are the ones along the path, where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: the ones who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy. And they have no root in themselves, but endure for a while; then, when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. And others are the ones sown among thorns. They are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. But those that were sown on the good soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.""
From the Quran:
As for the unbelievers, alike it is to them / whether thou hast warned them or hast not warned them, / they do not believe. / God has set a seal on their hearts and on their hearing, / and on their eyes is a covering, / and there awaits them a mighty chastisement.
The controversial and difficult question is why these medieval thinkers chose the allegorical form, and whether the text can be understood without its allegorical form. Avicenna tells us that what he purports to do by allegory is to convey one message to the "many" in sensible imagery they can understand, while conveying a different message to the philosophically minded few .... Neoplatonic and Christian writers ... [cited] the importance of not 'casting one's pearls before swine' ...
I'd argue that you're conflating philosophy and religion, and that unlike what you're suggesting by that conflation, much of philosophy isn't vague - it's careful and well thought out. Here's a random passage from Decarte's Meditations:
I have always considered that the two questions respecting God and
the Soul were the chief of those that ought to be demonstrated by
philosophical rather than theological argument. For although it is quite
enough for us faithful ones to accept by means of faith the fact that the
human soul does not perish with the body, and that God exists, it
certainly does not seem possible ever to persuade infidels of any
religion, indeed, we may almost say, of any moral virtue, unless, to
begin with, we prove these two facts by means of the natural reason.
What about this is vague? He's clearly laying out his goals and how he intends to do it. If you want to say that religion, as a particulary subset of philosophical thought, is often vague, then sure, but a lot of philosophy is very intentional and focused. It's setting out a goal and working towards achieving said goal, not trying to write in a manner that will appeal to everyone.
You are claiming that the writing in modern Western philosopy is known for clarity? Also, those aren't Decartes' words, which were in Latin (or French?).
A wolf behaves differently than another wolf. Yet they are both wolves. Even the same wolf expresses differently in different contexts or in arbitrarily similar contexts at different times. Yet he never stops being a wolf. Even a wolf in a cage is a wolf.
To say otherwise is to say there is no such thing as wolf or that there is a single platonic wolf and all other wolves are inauthentic. Either of these may be true, but I doubt there is much practical advice in this idea for learning to deal with a lack of boundaries created by empathetic confusion.
> To say otherwise is to say there is no such thing as wolf
I am not saying otherwise. There is no such thing as a wolf.
Yet there is.
Our language is a tool we use to categorize an infinite reality. Like you said, there are an infinite amount of wolves, but we reduce them using language. There is nothing wrong with this until we start thinking our language is the reality.
So where is the border between wolf and dog? If A wolf is nice too a human do we suddenly call it a dog? Does not the very distinction of a wolf and a dog rely, not on the species, but on the human? Does a dog think still think it is a wolf? Is a dog just a wolf that tricks us so it can get free food and shelter?
We do the same thing with empathy. By defining it with language we reduce it and confine it which it cannot be reduced or confined. Like everything else, empathy is infinite and unlimited in its expression.
I was like you in being extremely empathetic. What had helped me is to focus on longer term outcomes for people rather than short term. That really gave my empathy more perspective and allowed me to see that the “hard” thing that may not seem as empathetic today is the right thing for the people involved in the future.
Admittedly, this might just be me creating a mechanism to cope, but it seems to be effective.
You might find the research about sensory processing sensitivity interesting.
"Theory and research suggest that sensory processing sensitivity (SPS), found in roughly 20% of humans and over 100 other species, is a trait associated with greater sensitivity and responsiveness to the environment and to social stimuli. Self-report studies have shown that high-SPS individuals are strongly affected by others' moods, but no previous study has examined neural systems engaged in response to others' emotions."
> the boundaries between their own self and the thoughts and feelings of others.
The perceived thoughts and feelings of others, and that's critical. You don't know the minds of the people around you, and presuming some kind of negative experience on the part of others is not often accurate.
The problem with empathy would be if you presume everyone to be having a bad time when it seems like, to you, they should be having a bad time.
IMO, that's actually arrogant, to think you can accurately know what someone else is thinking and feeling. Perhaps part of your struggle is this unidentified arrogance that you know the minds of others.
You _can_ get a fairly accurate sense of how people are feeling or what they are thinking, and some people are better at this than others. Call it intuition, body language, or whatever else, it doesn't inherently make it arrogance. Being mindful of how you could be incorrect in what, at the end of the day, are assumptions that require confirmation, is important; without this is where the true arrogance lies.
I think assuming how people feel and what people are thinking without asking them, giving them agency, is nearly the very pinnacle of arrogance. further, this can be some of the most damaging behavior you participate in on a daily basis, both to you and to the person you do it to.
I cannot overstate how toxic to your relationships and to yourself this behavior is. You need to let people express themselves, and listen when they do. That's about as close to a "prime directive" I can think of right now, when it comes to human interaction.
I find your reaction to this pretty toxic, tbh. Stop trying to assert your dogma and actually practice what you preach.
No one is saying that they are making assumptions for others or not allowing them to express themselves. But if you deny that you are prejudiced, you're going to end up imposing your own will on others because you continue to suffer from your predisposition without being cognizant of how that affects them.
I am talking about the people who are making assumptions for others and therefore not allowing them to express themselves.
If you want to talk about groups of people doing things other than this, why did you create two new accounts to reply to me?
I believe you're one of the people I'm talking about, and I don't think you're taking it very well to find out some folks think of you as arrogant.
I'm not surprised you find that, "pretty toxic, tbh", but I stand by what I said. You're not the first "empathetic" person I've talked to who gets unreasonably upset at the notion that their perceived good trait is actually a negative trait.
You are right that assuming you completely understand another person’s mind can cause (serious) problems in your relationship with them. But people also “tell you how they feel” with more than just words. So it’s not as simple as “ignore everything but the spoken or written word”.
How you react to something is just as important as how you say you feel after the fact. People do judge and form opinions on your behavior as well as your thoughts. Wishing it was otherwise is the real arrogance in this scenario.
I'm all for letting people figure out how they feel about things, but sometimes we don't have the luxury of time and we need to interpret in the moment. This will happen no matter what as long as we have a biological form, and pretending otherwise serves no one.
Oh yeah, high empathy is correlated with above average anxiety and depression. This is a well known psychological thing and there are plenty of articles and podcasts on it. So your intuition is correct. It's your inner child basically doing this because you want people to like you -- this is something you learned as a child and is now habit. In many cases being highly empathetic was a survival mechanism for the child.. who had to attend to someone else's needs above their own to stay safe.
> In many cases being highly empathetic was a survival mechanism for the child.. who had to attend to someone else's needs above their own to stay safe.
This is 100% the case for me. My parents had children when they were very young, immature, and with major problems of their own, and I had to learn from a very young age to be highly attentive to their (very frequently shifting) emotional state. And then I had to become essentially an extra surrogate parent for my younger siblings in order to fill in the gaps that our parents weren't able to fulfill.
I think that's probably true, but it's more about conscientiousness than empathy. If you're empathetic and lack conscientiousness, you have a great advantage in being able to "work" people. And you feel no guilt if things don't go well for them.
On the other hand, you could be highly conscientious and lack empathy. You may try to do the right thing, but you feel guilt anyway because you're unable to understand why what you did wasn't in line with what the other person was feeling.
Hmmm, in my mind empathy isn't just cognitively understanding that somebody is feeling pain, it's feeling that pain on their behalf. Most people have that ability to some degree, but it's extremely magnified in certain individuals.
Yeah I tend to separate empathy (being able to put yourself in another's shoes and feel what they're feeling) and "other-oriented-ness". Having empathy means you understand what the driver behind you at the fast food restaurant is feeling emotionally if you take too long at the window. Being other-oriented is feeling stressed and wanting to move forward before you've completely checked your order, because you don't want the driver behind you to feel upset by your taking too long.
That's an interesting way to look at it. And a very good example, because that drive through scenario is literally the type of thing I feel almost constantly. I laughed out loud when I read it, because it perfectly describes how I react to almost everything in life that involves other people.
Feel the same way as you, and I had to withdrawal as a child and now have mental disorders in the spectrum of schizophrenia. So anecdotally, I imagine that’s correct.
The loss of boundaries thing is very real, I know there are some upsides to it but most days it’s hard to not feel like a curse
Just FYI "schizoid personality +/- disorder" has absolutely nothing to do with (the spectrum of) schizophrenia, they're about different things on different systems on different axes etc.
And yeah, psychologist REALLY suck at naming things!
And one of the reason to avoid ever discussing about "schizoid personality" with people who aren't trained psychologists since they're 90% likely to think you're talking about the wrong thing :|
> It seems in many cases to be correlated with anxiety and depression.
So is intelligence. However on the balance intelligence is a pretty significant advantage.
Empathy can be a super power for those who are able to control it - one that can be used for good or evil. Think high EQ, natural political instincts, very persuasive, ability to push emotional states onto people.
The hypersensitivity you mention is the flip side of that coin.
SPD and paranoia is more like seeing patterns in the noise. I think pattern matching is a big component of empathy, but I do think you can have highly sensitive pattern matching facility that does not translate across domains.
I think a big part of it is having a supportive and understanding environment growing up that helps you foster the empathy in a healthy way, while teaching you to build and maintain your own self boundaries at the same time.
If you didn't have that, it can be very difficult to change it as an adult.
Many traits that are seen as desirable can wreak havoc on the lives of those who possess them. We envy those traits when we see them in others because we do not have access to their visceral experience, and lack awareness of their inner turmoil and struggles.
I think it important for all of us to extend ourselves grace. Living ain’t easy and we are often doing better at it than we think :)
A different way to think about it: if you play soccer (or any game) with too much empathy, you will make own goal after own goal to please your opponent. Nobody wants that, of course, so in reality you're not being empathic enough.
Being too empathic has different problems if it also makes you shy. Shy people are scary, because people can't read you. It is important to internalize this. Again, this makes shyness not just your problem: it's their problem too. So you have to be more empathic about it.
I’m deeply sorry that you didn’t have the necessary support network to navigate your empathy when you were young. Now that you’re older, have you had any success in developing navigational skills and regaining your levels of empathy?
Thank you! I've only begun to put the pieces in the last couple of years while trying to figure out why my behavior is the way it is. Haven't made a ton of progress, but knowledge feels like a good first step. Planning to try to find a therapist, but one of the challenges is that many people in this position apparently avoid therapy, because they fear empathizing too much with the therapist, rather than focusing on themselves. It's rooted in a fear of enmeshment, and it's also why there's very little research about schizoid personality disorder, because those people generally avoid therapy. I suspect I may have SPD, but I don't want to self diagnose (and it's maybe too simple to label complex behaviors like this with one label anyway).
That makes sense, thanks for the insight. I’ve had similar concerns in the past and it seems when I stuck with licensed workers (licensed social workers, clinical psychologists, and psychiatrists) they seemed well trained to wall themselves off emotionally from me (refuse to give personal information, refuse to visibly react to things I say, very careful when expressing an opinion, refuses to suggest an interpretation of who I am or who they are). It’s also apparently deeply unprofessional to be unable to avoid enmeshment, including the responsibility of referring a client away from oneself if one notices too much emotional closeness. I’m not saying this to convince you either way but I hope this data is useful to you. Thanks for your vulnerability in talking openly about this.
That does help give me more confidence in pursuing therapy, thank you.
Sometimes I run through imaginary scenarios about how interactions with a therapist would go, and it always ends up with me worrying about them, feeling like I'm overwhelming them with my problems, causing them extra grief when their life probably sucks too, etc. It helps to know good licensed workers should be trained to help the patient avoid feeling like that. I probably would anyway, but that kind of maladaptive thinking is the exact reason I want to try therapy anyway...
Congrats on your progress so far :) This stuff is very difficult and it takes a lot of courage to face these things.
I believe high empathy has contributed to some of my difficulties. I've tried therapy a few times before without much luck. Recently I've found a therapist who has helped me immensely. We have a good connection, which is very important. She also uses somatic approaches, with I think is more effective for people who need help working with and processing their emotions. It also seems to be better than standard talk therapy when working with trauma.
Somatic therapy might be helpful for you :) And make sure you feel comfortable and safe with your therapist.
Yeah, I was stressed out when I accidentally make other people mad. Now I just apologize and move on, if they're having meltdown I just assume they're assholes and move on.
It's really a balance— you can do your best to do right by other people, to do what they're asking of you and behave in prosocial ways, but any therapist will tell you that ultimately other people's feelings are their responsibility to manage and work through, and not yours.
Traditional CBT says this is even the case in romantic relationships, though EFT is a bit more nuanced on this— you're not directly responsible for your partner's feelings and emotions (you don't owe them an apology when you cheat on them in their dream), but understanding their emotions is an opportunity to be a better and more supportive partner, which can be massively enriching to the relationship if both parties are fully committed to doing the work and have the language to communicate effectively about it.
I would argue that it's a disadvantage only from the self-centered perspective that modern society encourages us to cultivate. Empathy is an incredibly useful tool for humans that exist as part of a community, but our societies are structured to benefit those who seek to maximally exploit others, our role models are sociopaths, and the cultural narrative is that our only value is either in being them or being useful to them.
It can be an advantage when it's been tuned and trained properly. When it hasn't been, it mostly just leads to additional pain for the empathetic person, and eventual withdrawal.
Parents need to be taught how to recognize children that are highly empathetic, and given the tools to teach them to train and deal with that aspect of themselves. Otherwise they'll experience great emotional pain in their lives without any of the tools they need to cope with it. That can have a rebound effect, leading to emotional numbing and social withdrawal.
Empathy is great for the society, a burden for the individual. Very empathetic people have a hard time minding their own path in life for they get caught in the suffering of others. Regardless of setbacks and disilussionments, empathetic people feel good when helping others.
This chain of comments reminds of what I read in a paper regarding multilevel group selection, namely:
"Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups". Though there is a bit of controversy around that if I remember correctly.
Thank you for writing this. You helped me realize my own condition which is similar to your and the more I research, the more it lines up with what you have described here. Do you avoid social gatherings and prefer to work remotely ? I love spending time mostly with my family and go out of my way to avoid social contact even with relatives.
i have gone through similar situation and i too might have spd and never been diagnosed. all that you say here resonates with me. for me other things are okay, but "I don't have a self or personality of my own" is something of a fundamental problem for me. because of this, when i interact with anyone, i tend to adjust to how they are. if i interact individually with person A and then individually with person B, the most confusing part is interacting with A and B together. confusing for people i mean and people think, oh this is not how you are.
not able to dance and disconnection from body is another sad thing.
i am 41 now and with time i think i have improved. i share more with people and care less about what people think of me. i hope it will improve for you.
> Having a higher than average amount of empathy seems to be a disadvantage in many ways.
The grass may be greener, etc., but I am jealous - I would love your superpower and its tradeoffs; I'll give you mine. What a way to experience the world and people.
I think one thing that people don't realize is that with high levels of empathy you risk enmeshment with others, and a loss of your own self boundary. You don't know where there thoughts and pains end and where yours begin.
It leads to desperately wanting to fix those around you, because you suffer as long as they suffer. And when you discover you can't fix everything, you either detach from everyone, or begin the process of numbing yourself. (Most of these are unconscious reactions to painful stimuli.)
So I guess: be careful what you wish for!
I still want empathy, I just wish I could tune it down by like 50% without numbing.
It's absolutely enmeshment. I think enmeshment can emerge when children with higher than average levels of empathy aren't given the tools and support they need to deal with that.
(Also now a psychologist, so I could be off base. But they do at least seem to be related things.)
Empathy, also called compassion or karuna in Buddhism, is one of the most sublime mental states that exist. The trick is to learn how to experience compassion without also wounding yourself. This is what Buddhist practice teaches you how to do.
I don't understand your response. It's very common for empathetic people to feel great suffering. It's not "common sense" knowledge to learn how to maintain deep compassion while preventing the pain from affecting your own being. In fact, most highly empathetic people, like OP, feel burdened by this emotional state because the untrained person experiences compassion as double suffering (the suffering of the object of compassion and the suffering to oneself that comes from untrained empathy). The result is that highly empathetic people try to numb out or attempt to restrict their capacity for empathy.
The early Buddhist texts (the canonical suttas) describe meditations and trainings to develop this skill. The reason the suttas devote so much time to explaining these techniques is because they are NOT common knowledge.
The etymology of compassion means "suffering with". It's baked into the word (in English) the assumption that compassion involves suffering for both parties.
In Buddhism, we learn that compassion doesn't have to create suffering for the holder of compassion. We learn that it's possible to dwell in the state of compassion as a way of moving out of suffering, rather than moving into it.
The understanding I've gained as an Orthodox Christian is that God works in us, using the suffering to help us repent. He prepares us for resurrection unto life. This justifies the suffering, gives it enough meaning to keep going. When we have this conviction of compassion and do not run away from it, but shoulder it as a responsibility and work through it to find the truth and serve within it to the best of our ability we are living out what it is to be the long-suffering servant.
I am grateful to you for pointing out this etymology. I find it to be beautiful because in compassion I can be suffering with Christ. So, thank you.
Thank you for sharing your perspective! I'm not Christian, but I'm a person of faith. It's interesting to see how the different faiths approach suffering.
People made a religion out of turning others into schmucks with the dual whammy of sorrow and shame. The only correct use of sorrow is to attain stillness when someone uses humor to deflect emotions, but that doesn't keep a priest gainfully employed.
It can be good and bad. Having a high amount of empathy but being able to control your reaction can be very helpful. You can adapt to how others are reacting much better than folks with low empathy.
FWIW, I have a close relation that matches the pattern you’re identifying, and they have had very positive results from Internal Family Systems Therapy.
+1: this comment describes me and I'm actively in internal family systems therapy. took me a while to get used to the style, but it's been beneficial for me.
I think the therapist’s personality might have an impact (I could see certain aspects of it feeling a little “woo”), but it has been useful to frame and work through certain emotions/reactions/situations in a productive manner. My email is in my profile if you want to reach out.
consider the idea that with empathy you can effectively communicate and persuade others better as you can gain insight into who THEY are and how THEY feel. its an attribute necessary for EFFECTIVE leadership, not of the brainwashing manipulation kind, but of the trusting kind. takes learning
Reading the replies to you, it's obvious that some of the perfected alpha libertarians typical of HN have shown up, and as often happens, they don't really know wtf they're talking about. But they do greatly enjoy expressing their overly abstracted, overly generalized, overly confident opinions that arise from brains that enjoy a hyper-filtered perception of the world. Perhaps you should just simply change your brain to be more like them?
Numbing it was never a conscious choice, and it's not like I even noticed it happening while it did. It was a learned response to significant pain over years / decades, without having a support network to help deal with it in a healthy way. This is one of the theorized ways schizoid personality disorder presents itself, and it's not a conscious choice that people make. And it's not just a switch I can turn on and off at will, it's much more complex than that.
I can empathize with this :), high empathy is almost always a curse and gets taken advantage of. I've also numbed out over the years but its not ideal either. I've been accused of being sociopathic at times simply because empathy is not a knob one can tune and sometimes the only option is off rather than an on, because being empathetic would mean losing boundaries.
> To reach this conclusion, researchers asked the participants to make donations before they were asked to undertake a stressful task; they were asked to donate things again after the task was over. While people who were found to have high empathy donated more than the others did before undergoing the stressful task, their charitability declined sharply afterward.
Isn’t asking for 2 unexpected donations in short succession a major confounding factor?
Agree. The study asked for 2 things from one group and 1 thing from another group and is trying to suggest that we should ignore the first ask.
The authors are also abusing cortisol measurements to imply cortisol is something specific for bad stress when it’s not really that. Cortisol isn’t really a “bad” hormone like a lot of people believe. If you have too little cortisol you’ll feel terrible. Even fun activities will raise cortisol levels. Taking synthetic cortisol analogs often makes people feel good (for a very short while, chronic use will quickly downregulate this effect and requires slow tapering, don’t do it unless medically necessary).
Depends on if the study tried to control for this by also testing 2 more groups with single donation before/after the stressful task.
Can't access the original paper to confirm though.
Why does stress make more empathetic people less kind, but has little effect on others? We believe this is due to a set of linked phenomena. The first is publish or perish. When a researcher needs a publication, his or her cortisol levels increase. This reduces the researcher's ability to empathize with the victims of useless scientific results, or their own future self when their work turns out to be a dead end. A second cause is the garden of forking paths. When a main effect fails to reach significance, it is all too easy to find an interaction or sample subset where it is significant. For example, if stress didn't affect charitable donations, you can always check the result among high-empathy people, or women, or nursing students. These root causes come together in p hacking, where desperate researchers kid themselves that they always meant to run that particular interaction, and absurdly pretend that their p values and careers have some meaning...
[Not TFA, obviously, but I wouldn't be surprised.]
A bit off-topic, but any discussion of altruism these days I bring up effective altruism - a movement of people focusing on effective ways of helping as much as possible (within any specific area, and focusing on finding the most-important areas of focus). These individuals (myself included) often give at least 10% of their income (see https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/). I really hope more people join in on the global movement:
The title would be better phrased as a question, because this is a single study with the observation that...
If you have less empathy to start with, the less stress affects how much empathy you have. This is apparently this is a significantly higher delta than expected, because the control group didn't appear to change in any significant way.
Regarding empathy, there’s also an argument that it tends to be significantly biased, and that rational compassion is preferable for decision-making: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Empathy
When making decisions on moral grounds, and regarding altruistic actions. For example, seeing a picture of a single child suffer tends to induce relatively more empathy than seeing a picture of a whole family or town suffer. (That’s why you predominantly see the former in charity ads.) With rational compassion, it would be rather the converse. Having empathy with a group one is close to (in thought/space/time) also tends to make people more willing to inflict harm on a group that is more removed from them, while rational compassion would try to avoid such a subjective bias.
Regardless of whether the methods are queationable, the results are consistent with other studies I've come across on the topic of how stress affects empathy and compassion:
This is of particular interest to me as I find that I very easily become wrapped up in a sort of protective self-absorption when I get stressed or criticised, making it sometimes impossible to empathize or conduct proper conversations. This in turn has a very negative affect on relationships.
If you're in a similar boat, you might find the practise of compassion-focused mindfulness useful.
The idea is similar to CBT, but with an emphasis on mindfulness and compassion towards oneself and others. I've learned that the "oneself" bit is extremely important. Until you can accept and be gentle on yourself, with all your flaws, you will struggle to be vulnerable around others and thereby cultivate genuine connections.
"Stress Makes the Most Empathetic People Less Kind" when others do not help them relieve their stress.
Acting out when under stress is a call for help.
Please do not go around controlling yourself, it only prevents change for the better, as they implied in the article;
"But it helps to have scientific evidence to bolster the case for public and workplace policies that might make our lives less stressful — and thus, we hope, more compassionate.”
We do not need better people, we need a better society.
This reminds me of Ronald Inglehart's work [1] on "Material" and "Post-Material" values and their relation to wealth / stability - ie high amounts of the latter are causal to Post-Material values, which would include charitable giving, tolerance, etc.
Using his World Values Survey [2], surveying individual values across 100 countries from 1981-today, he showed across all major cultures that you can see how several generations of stability (both income and sociopolitical) are required to get to post-material values, ie you don't get rich and change your values, they crystalize in your early/mid 20's, so you need to feel good until then and not experience trauma after to maintain those values.
Psychologist measured that people differ by personality, and can be roughly grouped into 16 categories based on traits. I used to think everyone was more or less the same. I'm not sure if 16 is the correct number. But my understanding of the world has been helped by the concept that there are people that do and act in particular patterns. For example some of the battles on twitter that are going on, are just extensions of these personality clashes.
I am myself very wary of this kind of personality tests but the case has been made in an interesting article that I can't seem to find that it is a form of "syntactic sugar" for the (apparently?) more established Big Five model. Anyways, I think OP's conclusion that it is eye opening that people have their own emotional structure/pattern of behavior from how they grew up and that you can find resembling patterns in different people quite reasonable.
Yes I was. But I'm also aware of the Big 5 personality traits. Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Neuroticism and Agreeableness. Which people seem to statistically group with some low or high mix of these traits.
Knowing that someone is more neurotic than 99% of other people, would seem on surface be useful in predicting how they might react to new or novel situations.
I believe in jobs before charity. there are things that need to be altruistically funded due to market failures, but not most things. the root causes of scarcity need to be addressed, and feel-good ad hoc donations tend, in my opinion, not to accomplish that. in the micro, I will never fault someone for doing something self-less, but things need to be fixed at the policy level, or let the market work where it can.
What are the chances this study is actually reproducible? What was the sample size?
Personally I’ve shifted to a default position of extreme skepticism regarding any study that makes any claim on any kind of human behavioral pattern. Burned too many times.
We might as well just debate astrological predictions.
Cortisol can be very destructive. A lot of people are either unaware of high stress levels, or don't do anything meaningful to bring those levels down. I've been taking Ashwagandha and it works really well.
What? You can't post nationalistic slurs to HN and I'm shocked that a user with your history here would sink to that.
No more of this on HN, please, ever. You can make your substantive points about corporate practices and whatnot without talking about how an entire nation of people shouldn't be trusted.
This is really basic stuff and applies regardless of which country anyone has a problem with.
This is a hilarious/sad generalization of a country of ~330 million people masquerading as an investigation into stress. I get the impression that you started with the point you wanted to make - "never trust an American" - and then stumbled backwards from there into a very rigorous exploration of the the cause and effect of stress.
That's just plain old-fashioned bigotry. Literally every culture on Earth has had some form of "never trust a <blank>" where the blank was whatever race, religion, nationality, tribe, ethnicity, etc was their neighbor or rival.
Most people would treat it as a shameful thing from a bygone era if they had a grandparent tell them "never trust a <whatever>", it's quite unfortunate that you seem to agree with this sort of nationalistic bias and bigotry.
Also, the US spends over a trillion dollars per year on the safety net. The federal budget for giving food to low-income people is $60 Billion per year, medicaid (free health insurance for non-working people) is $670 Billion per year, $51 Billion on housing assistance. There is also unemployment benefits if you're laid off, and you can keep the health insurance from your former employer or switch to a plan from healthcare.gov (which will be subsidized by tax payers if you can't afford to pay the premium). It's not a perfect system, but it's ridiculous to pretend there is "no safety net" when there is in fact an incomprehensibly large safety net.
Not parent, but agree with your first point, want to run some numbers on the second. According to https://www.compareyourcountry.org/social-expenditure (which is sourced from OECD) Australia and the US spend similar amounts of GDP on social programs. I'm gonna punt on the healthcare question - our healthcare is on average twice as expensive as everywhere else yet not any more effective, so it's a bit trickier to compare. Australia has universal health care, and we don't, anyhow. From a personal anecdote point of view, anyone I know who is/was broke (and working cheaper jobs that don't offer health care) continually puts off going to the doctor due to the great personal expense. That's the biggest thing as far as the "no safety net" meme goes - if you're working, you'd better not get sick. And this was after the introduction of the ACA.
Interesting. I tend to put a high amount of trust in people and have rarely been let down. The cases where I was let down were exclusively with drug users earlier in my life, a very predictable outcome in hindsight. I don’t think the advice you were given was good.
> My experience in Australia is that there are basic standards of decency that can be expected. This is not the case in the US.
This varies, perhaps regionally but definitely from individual to individual. I can assure you that some of us in America grew up learning to be more like how you characterize Australians, and totally bought into that, only to be rudely awakened by the actual reality in much of this country. The shock took me about a decade of adulthood to really start to get over.
Fargo season 4 has a scene where this Italian mobster goes...
"I think I'm finally starting to understand this country. You say one thing, yet do the complete opposite".
It's a bulls-eye for me. Americans are fake, not genuine, dramatic/hysterical and hypocritical like no other culture I've ever seen.
They also have quite a few positive traits. And any other culture you pick, including mine, too has negatives and positives. It's not a contest but we should be able to reason about it. It's fair game.
I've read some interesting things about how in many cases schizoid personality disorder may be the result of highly empathetic children who later withdraw in life because interpersonal contact was a source of significant suffering for them. I seen to exhibit many of the signs of SPD, but I've never been diagnosed. (If you're not familiar with SPD, I'd recommend looking it up. It's likely not what you think it is, and not directly related to schizophrenia.)