Being an Empath Is Not Always A Good Thing

Empathy is Khaleesi when it comes to how we care for others. She is the crowd favorite. We all aspire to be her. Compassion and sympathy look up to her. She’s iconic. Without her, you are at best, unkind, and at worst, a narcissist, according to the internet.

It’s unclear when her rise to fame was. Perhaps the rise in popularity of self-help books has some significance. “Unit sales of print books got off to a blazing start in 2021. Sales jumped 19.3% over the week ended January 2 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. Moreover, units were up nearly 25% over the comparable week in 2020,” reports Publishers Weekly.

Then one day out of the blue, with little warning, groups of people started calling themselves empaths. Empathy is now in our everyday lingo. It’s used to insult (that person has NO empathy) and compliment (that person has so much empathy).

But Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, Ph.D., will have you know that there is more nuance to empathy than meets the eye. It depends on the circumstance. And it isn’t always the best judge of character. You don’t always want to channel your empathy towards others and you don’t necessarily want everyone to be empathetic towards you in every situation.

The way Bloom sees it: empathy, not to be confused with sympathy, is going beyond simply understanding how someone is feeling and feeling the emotion of the person you are empathizing with. But, how are we to know what others are really feeling anyway? We can guesstimate based on what they are saying and their body language, sure. But even if they tell you, how can you know for certain? To empathize, at times, is to manifest an emotion that might not even exist within the other person. In the end, you are just feeling things based on how you think the person is feeling.

Say you’re at a therapy session. You dump a decade worth of trauma onto your therapist. Do you actually want them to empathize with you? Can you imagine what an enormous toll that could take on the session if the therapist felt all your emotions? For the therapist to be able to help you, detaching themselves from empathy for a second allows them the energy to focus on what they do best: therapy. You could even argue not empathizing with you at all is most constructive in this scenario. Imagine if a therapist went home and held onto all the emotions of their patients. Their profession would be hindered by emotional exhaustion.

In fact, not empathizing in certain situations is a great emotional skill to develop. This can be hard with people we care about. If your partner gets home from work and tells you how awful they felt all day, in theory, it sounds nice to say you empathized with them. But is that really what they need from you at that moment? They want you to understand, sure, but still have the emotional space and energy to listen and help them feel better. Chances are they don’t want you to feel awful as well. Then there are two people in the room, and both of them are feeling lousy. It’s not very productive.

Compassion and actions tend to speak louder than empathy in cases like these. You can sit back and feel all the things you think your partner is feeling… Or, you can listen, and use your energy to figure out what action you can take to make your partner’s day better.

Needless to say, empathy is not all bad and unproductive. Empathy is a great sales tactic. Think of all the vegan protestors. Showing clips of baby calves getting taken from their mothers whilst holding up “have some empathy” signs on the sidewalk does get people to think about the dairy industry in a new light. Hence the new milk alternatives that come out every year.

Or take the movie Easy A for example. Olive Penderghast, a regular high school girl, starts a rumor about herself to spice things up in her seemingly average life. The rumor spirals faster than she anticipates (as rumors often do) and though she finally has some attention on her, it’s not quite the kind of attention she wanted. Evidently, the whole school thinks she did numerous things she didn’t. How did she get people to stop and believe her? She live-streamed her side of the story. She divulged how it felt to be spoken about by her peers, how embarrassed and sorry she was for the mistakes she made, and ultimately revealed a narrative to the entire student body that tugged on their empathy. It worked.

Though that’s just a movie, we can see real-life re-enactments of this in what influencers today call “an apology video.” Some of the most noteworthy ones are James Charles’ apology videos on Youtube. The aim here is the same Olive Panderghast had in 2010: to tell her story and to get people to empathize with her.

Whether these people were guilty of whatever warranted the apology videos, be that as it may, empathizing with these people is not inherently bad or good. Psychologists have done many studies that show even psychopaths are capable of empathy. Perhaps, it should be regarded as a tool or emotional skill we can learn to exercise depending on the situation. You can channel it to help others or you can use it to manipulate. Ultimately, it’s great to develop some kind of boundaries with it, as it can also be a slippery slope into emotional burnout.

You don’t have to feel everything everyone is feeling to be a good person. We all know how tiresome the “thoughts and prayers” tweets can be whenever another media-frenzy tragedy arises. Cue eye roll, am I right? Thoughts and prayers indicate sympathy or empathy, but they don’t indicate any real action. It’s great and important to empathize. But it doesn’t buy you a get-free card into being a good person; being a full-blown empath and being a decent human being are not always mutually inclusive.

This article is originally being published by me here on this platform: https://medium.com/illumination/too-much-empathy-is-not-always-a-good-thing-73d993f7a42f