Empathy versus compassion

This exact moment is the time to imagine it.

I am so fucking tired, you guys. I bet you are too. I took a month off from writing this column over the holidays. I planned to come back last week, or maybe it was the week before—they’ve all blended together—and then Renee Good was murdered. I tried again to write something last week, and then Alex Pretti. And I stopped knowing what to say. I wanted to start this year with an honest but relatively light update about manuscript revisions and being late to the Severance party and how my daughter and I got addicted to puzzles over the holidays. Maybe next week.

I don’t want to be that person who’s like, Well, the world is on fire and everything is terrible, so why should I write about anything because nothing matters. First off, I don’t believe that. Second, every day in my work with women, I insist that they are allowed to express their truth and share their pain without requiring permission, without filtering, without tacking on disclaimers like, “At least my family is safe,” or “Things could be worse.” I mean, gratitude and perspective are obviously important, but— well, there I go with the disclaimers, too. It may be uncomfortable to resist the urge, but I fully believe that shaming ourselves into gratitude is not a useful practice.

My point is this—the world burns and we still go to the dentist. Democracy crumbles and it’s still your daughter’s birthday. Micro and macro crises are never-ending, and you are still allowed to be proud of your new job or celebrate your anniversary or share a photo of that killer thrift store find on Instagram.

And I could still show up here and show you pictures of my puzzles and tell you about my dog climbing onto my lap while I spent another 13 hours in my basement revision cave working on my book, as my hyperfocus mode is terribly dysregulating to her.

But I also want to show up and simply say: FUCK.

Here is what I posted on Facebook earlier after Saturday’s assassination of an innocent US civilian. (Please feel free to join me here; it’s my personal account and not a business page, but you can still follow me unless things get out of control and I change my mind.)

For the past months (and years), I have tried to find the “right balance” between staying informed and staying sane, as is often recommended. Yesterday was one of the first days I let myself just go there, immersing myself in social media and news. Being a Midwest native, I have so many close friends and former classmates in the Twin Cities—it’s where people from Iowa and South Dakota went for some culture and a good time, and I love it there. I am thinking of my MN friends constantly.

And I have been hanging on their every word these past few days. Many of them have kept their kids home from school for weeks, especially if they have brown skin. Many of them live or work near the scenes of these murders. Some are protesting or attending vigils. They are sharing what they are seeing. This is real, and it is as bad or worse than you think. There is no “other perspective” or neutrality here. Being complacent does not make you Switzerland. Keeping your head down does not keep you safe. If you voted for this, it’s not too late to speak up. And if you still support this, one day you will understand that you were on the wrong side of history, of morality, even of Christianity, in the sense that it theoretically embraces the teachings of Jesus. And you will have to live with that.

Frankly, I can’t think of anything else to say, except maybe this:

During a therapy session a few months ago, I was struggling with my emotional reaction to my daughter’s pain; I skew towards enmeshment, what can I say. My therapist brought up the difference between empathy and compassion. She said, and I’m paraphrasing, “People sometimes share that they are empaths as though it is a badge of honor. But really, it can be very unhealthy to actually feel another person’s pain and take it on. Extending compassion is similar, but it doesn’t make you experience or carry someone else’s emotions.”

I absolutely identify as an empath, and I agree that it has almost become a bragging point when used as a buzzword. “OMG, I’m such an empath, I just can’t even go to the grocery store anymore. I’m like a magnet for other people’s energy.” Personally—and I do believe I am an actual empath—I think it can be a fairly shitty quality. For one, it is excruciating to truly imagine and take on the pain of those around you, especially your children. Second, it is sort of a recipe for terrible boundaries, and is kind of the gateway drug for becoming a one-woman rescue crew. Empathy can certainly lend itself to both people-pleasing and its dreaded second cousin: a fixer of broken men people and a justification to perpetuate codependency. “But he’s just in so much paaaaain!”

My therapist’s point was this: It was not especially healthy for me to sign up for the full immersion experience of my adolescent child’s emotional turmoil. My mom used to tell me that a school guidance counselor gave her the best advice during a difficult period of life: Do not flush yourself down the toilet with your kid. It is never a good idea to enter self-destruct mode because someone else (or the entire world) is hurting, and you certainly won’t do anybody any good by carrying baggage that doesn’t belong to you. You will burn out, and you will also deprive the person experiencing their feelings of the opportunity to do their own work to cope, heal, adapt, or dig out of a rut.

However.

At this particular cultural moment, I am fairly confident that this country is in dire need of substantially more fucking empathy.

Even the hurting kind. Especially the hurting kind. When the federal government is signing off on the murder of civilians and then attempting to twist narratives to gaslight the entire world, a tepid offering of compassion falls flat. Right now, garden variety compassion feels like a detached, arms-length platitude of “thoughts and prayers.” It feels like a shitty Hallmark sympathy card from your mother-in-law that reads more like thinly veiled schadenfreude. At this moment, compassion feels like fucking bullshit.

Because if you can’t really, truly feel in your bones and guts and heart what it means to have your five-year-old baby pulled from you and detained, then you need a reality check.

If you can’t take one second to stop saying “I can’t imagine. . .” and instead actually imagine the pain of knowing that your partner or child was murdered in cold blood in broad daylight with witnesses and videos while leaders of this country lie to everyone’s face and paint your slain beloved as a criminal, then you are part of the problem.

If you are unable to put yourself in the shoes of a black or brown child who is terrified to go to school, you are what’s wrong with this country.

Take your ineffective, pathetic, bullshit compassion and stick it where the thoughts and prayers don’t shine.

It’s not enough. Only your empathy will do. Imagine it. Feel the pain.

Yes, we need to protect our nervous systems and it is not healthy to live in a constant state of absorbing pain. My therapist’s advice, and the guidance counselor from the 90s were both correct—we certainly need to maintain boundaries that serve our mental health. (Though I suspect that if you are at risk of empathy exhaustion or compassion fatigue, this message may not be aimed at you.)

I often lament that it is impossible to give another person an “insight enema” (yes, I coined that phrase, and I apologize for its crassness, sort of), and I feel the same way about empathy. It seems unlikely that by sheer force of will, we can inject another person with the ability to empathize if they are unwilling to widen their perspective. I don’t know how to wake up the portion of this country that is either unfazed by this government sanctioned violence or has bought into the mass gaslighting of the administration’s justification. Perhaps my prayer, however theologically nontraditional it may be, would be this: God, please open the heart of this country.

In grief and fury,
Steph