On Inflation of Empathy

I don’t need to tell you about the importance of empathy - you likely have heard plenty on that subject already. I am here to touch on the less addressed aspects of this topic because I am a firm believer in a well-rounded approach to a conversation. So, let’s talk about the dark sides of empathy.

Full Disclosure: This will probably be my most provocative post yet. Might have to do with my lack of empathy :)

(SN: You know how sometimes you feel like you have too much to say on a subject but when you try to put it into words, it comes out chaotic and sporadic? That’s me today in this piece - I tried to organize it at least a little bit, but it’s still a little all over the place.)

1. Intro

I would like to start with level-setting on definitions, as to avoid any confusion, because besides empathy, there’s also sympathy and compassion that are often mistaken for each other.

According to Merriam-Webster, “empathy is the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another (usually paired with compassion). It involves actively sharing in the person’s emotional experience.” Meanwhile, “sympathy is a feeling of sincere concern for someone who is experiencing something difficult or painful” and “compassion is the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.”

In my experience, empathy is most often viewed as the capacity for perspective-taking and emotion-feeling relative to another person’s experience (both negative and positive); sympathy is a feeling of concern (usually for another’s negative experience); and compassion is an action out of that concern (again, usually for another’s negative experience). I also like the definitions offered by Lisa Genova, who attempts to write books (such as “Still Alice”) from the perspective of people afflicted by various illnesses in order to shine some light on what those experiences may feel and look like from the inside: “Sympathy if feeling for someone and keeps us emotionally detached, our experiences separate. Empathy is feeling with someone and invites shared experience, intimacy, and connection.” Because it turns out that it’s easier to have/develop sympathy and compassion for a person or an experience that you can empathize with, even if only to some extent.

All three are important, but it feels like lately empathy is being pushed around a little too much. Like a shiny new toy, it’s found its way onto the banners of both elementary school curricula and corporate leadership trainings. Part of it seems to be attributable to the confusion of definitions - people saying empathy when they really mean sympathy or compassion. But part of it seems to do with misunderstanding empathy or at least neglecting to highlight its downsides in conversations. Elevated above sympathy and compassion, it’s being offered as the best solution to mitigating judgment and inconsideration.

Okay, don’t get me wrong - I am not here to discount and reject empathy. It is valuable and should be nurtured. But it is not a panacea and it should not function as a pathway for self-elevation. Empathy comes with responsibility to both self and others. It is supposed to be broader than feeling what other people feel, which seems to be the primary focus in some conversations. But that breadth generally implies understanding another’s perspective, and that’s dangerous territory fraught with presumptions of its own.

The darker sides to empathy that I’m here to discuss are probably more about misuses of terminology and misattributions of certain concepts to empathy rather than some actively malicious intent. Let’s get started.

2. The problem with self-proclaimed empaths

“I’m just a very empathetic person.”

Have you met people who somewhere in the conversation make sure to note that they are empaths? I tend to get a rather visceral feeling of annoyance in response to such proclamations. Because they often function as a setup. A setup for future leverage. A justification for arrogance. A claim to martyrdom and self-elevation through it.

“As an empath, I feel everything deeply.”

“Empaths attract narcissists.”

“Empaths need to protect their energy.”

Okay, I’m probably being a little too harsh. But let me ask this - “What goal is being pursued with pushing the ‘I am an empath’ agenda?” In its most innocent form, the answer is probably along the lines of “I just want to let people know that I might get emotionally overwhelmed sometimes, which might lead to my occasional withdrawal” or “It’s my indirect way of telling people to contain their emotional experiences around me because I’m too sensitive.”

Yet what I see happen more frequently is the use of “I am an empath” proclamations as a (subconscious) manipulation technique. Because if I know I am an empath and you know I am an empath, then that somehow justifies my emotional reasoning that allows me to pass judgements on people based on how they make me feel because obviously I get to feel what they are feeling - so, if I’m feeling “bad vibes” from someone it’s because they are obviously a bad person and not because I’m projecting my own implicit biases on them and turning them into self-fulfilling prophecies. (SN: I’ll dedicate a separate post on emotional reasoning because this one got out of hand.) More often than not, this happens because of conflation of definitions.

Other self-proclaimed empaths talk about absorbing emotions around them. They turn empathy into their identity, and then they use that for moral elevation - “I feel more than others, so that means I’m superior in some way” (somebody please explain to me which way because my own empathy fails me here). I do not wish to reinforce the narrative of guilt in people with large emotional and sensory spectra, but I also do not wish to see this ability to feel deeply get turned into some claim to moral superiority. Because emotions are just information, they are data subject to interpretation.1

In the end, the view of empathy as one’s capacity for deep feeling of another’s emotions is just that - a capacity. Now, the ability to accurately read/interpret another’s emotions - that’s a skill. And the ability to respond to another’s emotions while maintaining the separation between where their emotions end and ours begin is a basis for self-regulation.

3. Empathy as an excuse for professing understanding and passing judgement

“I make sure to put myself in the other person’s shoes.”

“I try to think of a similar experience in my life to be able to better relate to them.”

This is misuse of empathy as a conduit for taking on and understanding another’s perspective where it’s treated as an antidote to arrogance while actually contributing to it - you’d think that “arrogant empathy” would be an oxymoron.

This is based on an assumption that our imagination of another’s experience is accurate and representative of their actual experience. This is just not true, even if we both have had similar experiences, the way we’ve processed them would be different because we are different people. Yet our ability to imagine that experience leaves us convinced that we “understand” it. And a more pessimistic view could be that most people don’t care to truly understand others, so they use “empathy” as a tool to confirm and justify their perception/judgement of others.

See, we’re pretty bad at not applying our current motivations and beliefs to the versions of ourselves we imagine in somebody else’s shoes. Or well, that’s just it - by imagining ourselves in another’s shoes, we’re simply imagining the current version of us in that other person’s circumstances. Without any regard/consideration for who we’d be if we had walked the entire path of that other person. We fall into this curious self-serving conviction of personality permanence, which pretty much comes down to this - “Who I am right now is who I’ve always been. No matter my circumstances, no matter the environment I grew up in, I’d have my current set of values and beliefs and would act on them.” You know, nature vs nurture. Although the baffling thing is that even though that personality permanence conviction is based on the nature-dominance argument, these people actually tend to get very uncomfortable with the idea of personality being thus predetermined - they will tell you that it’s our choices that make us who we are and yet that it shouldn’t matter what examples of choices we have around us because we can still choose differently. Self-righteousness at its most conflicting.

This perspective-taking works especially poorly in relation to people that we perceive as “out of group,” especially a very different type of out of group, where our imagination of somebody else’s experience leads us to believe that we’d have handled that situation differently and solidify our biased judgment of that person’s actions. And yes, I’m thinking of some very specific examples as I’m writing this. One of them is a friend of mine waxing self-righteous about women in extreme poverty choosing to sell their bodies (aka prostitution). Because she would have never “stooped so low” as to engage in that, no matter her circumstances - she would study, and work a decent even if hard job, and create a better life for herself. As a result, she feels justified in her judgement of these women - after all, she’s able to imagine what it would be like in their shoes, isn’t she?

Arrogant empathy presumes understanding, leaving little room for humble curiosity. Empathy is not just about imagining ourselves in another’s shoes where we can see the world from their perspective, but also about understanding that all we’re really doing in the end is imagining our version of their perspective - the understanding that no matter how much we think we “know/understand,” we’ll never know/understand exactly. Still, we can expand our ability to understand through exposure, through reading accounts of various experiences, through inquiring about and traversing into circumstances of those different from us with curiosity rather than judgement.

4. The problem with using empathy for the golden rule

“I’ll make sure to treat others the way I want to be treated.”

“How can you use empathy to promote diversity and inclusion on your teams?”

If your workplace is in charge of your training curriculum, chances are, you’ve seen a variation of this question (probably one time too many). So, in my work-related in-person trainings, I started to play Devil’s advocate and ask instead, “How can empathy stand in the way of better diversity and inclusion?”

What do you think?

Well, the very reason I started posing this question was because the answers (including examples from the training facilitators) to the original question were permeated with “I’ll make sure to put myself in the other person’s shoes” or “I’ll think of a similar experience in my life to be able to better relate to them” or “I’ll make sure to treat others the way I want to be treated” and so on and so forth.

My problem lies not so much with the answers themselves though but with the absence of nuance in those answers - they don’t invite deeper reflection into what they really mean and how those approaches might go wrong. A senior executive who’s been with the firm for two decades is going to presume that they know what a junior team member is going through because, well, they also were a junior team member once, so they “get it,” right? And because they get it, they know the best way to manage that person is by treating them the way they remember wanting to be treated in their role (all those twenty years ago). Or worse - the way they think this junior team member wants to be treated because obviously this senior executive knows better.

A lot of examples to draw upon here, but one that came to mind first is a female leader who would place career above family and end her maternity leave early and then expect other female team members to do the same - her assumption of being able to relate to and empathize with other women on the team on the basis of them being women fueled her expectations and left her blind to differences in values. Using your experience as a claim to understanding what someone else is going through - that right there is not empathy. Why is it so hard for us to accept that we might have no idea what the other person is feeling and let that lack of knowledge fuel our curiosity and compassion? Everyone will have a different experience of love and loss, of grief and joy, of passion and fear.

Okay, I should probably admit here that I’m a bit jaded from my experience with the corporate culture at this point, but my point is that by promoting empathy as a pathway to relation and understanding, we promulgate the golden rule, when in reality, the platinum rule - treat others the way they want to be treated - is often a better approach, even if neither of them is perfect. At the very least, can we please ask people about their experiences and how our actions impact them? It might not be feasible to tailor one’s management approach to every person on their team, but I believe it’s quite a bit worse to presume we already understand others because we can think of similar experiences in our lives and fail to get any input from them.

5. Empathy as an excuse for inaction

“I feel your pain.”

This is a limited application of empathy as a conduit for feeling what others feel.

As a kid, I remember thinking that if my loved one were to suffer, I’d like to be able to feel their pain for them (yeah, I’ve exhibited martyr-esque tendencies since a young age). I even managed to convince myself that by feeling another person’s pain, I thus lessen it by taking on a part of it from them. This kind of thinking may be permissible in a child, but unfortunately a variation of it is a subconscious belief shared by a good number of adults - that there’s a certain degree of nobility (substitute for your own sentiment) in feeling the pain of others.

Empathy is actually not the best approach for an interaction in which the other person is in distress. It can lead to our enmeshment in the emotions of this person, thus exacerbating the situation, because suddenly we’re not there to provide space for their experience and feelings - no, instead, by leaning predominantly into empathy, we feel their pain, they in turn likely feel our pain from their pain, and focus of the interaction shifts. Sometimes so much, that the person we’re there to support ends up comforting us.

And we also probably all have people in our lives that get emotional on our behalf - when we share with them experiences in which we are sad or angry (or even happy), they tend to become more sad/angry/happy, so that all of a sudden it’s less about sharing our feelings and more about containing theirs. And it’s not the fairest shift in an exchange that was intended to hold space for us. So, feeling someone’s pain often becomes a substitute for doing anything about it.

Additionally, that much focus on feeling the suffering of another person (instead of keeping ourselves separate from them) can lead to empathy burnout, numbening of reactions, and simply inaction as driven by overwhelm and feeling like it’s all useless - there’s too much pain and suffering out there for us to make a difference.

Yes, unchecked empathy can also lead to desensitization (diminished emotional response to recurring stimuli). That is, the more we’re exposed to pain and suffering, the less we respond to them - part of it is the empathy equivalent of hedonic adaptation (because our brains will normalize anything that is repeated enough), and part of it is the protective mechanism that allows us to function even in extreme circumstances. Because when we see homeless people every other block, when our social media are overflowing with horrific images and videos of wars and devastation, when video ads tell us about suffering and dying children all over the world, there’s no action that feels sufficient, no action that feels like it can make a change. So, we shut down, and we try to escape that feeling of guilt and self-perception as an unfeeling monster

Empathy was never intended as a solution. It’s not. Not when we’re talking about active problem-solving.

Most people will not respond to horrors, or to being guilted by them into an action. They will subconsciously strive to protect their empathy, their self-image. Nobody wants to feel like an unsympathetic monster, so when that self-image is under attack regularly, the brain learns to ignore the attacks by reducing the emotional weight associated with them. Additionally, guilt-provoking messages tend to be perceived as manipulative and thus more easily/justifiably ignored. Empathy doesn’t have to be exploited for pain - it can be an instrument for spreading hope. When the message is more hopeful, to act on it tends to feel more like a choice rather than an emotional extortion. And in my view, that’s a more humanistic approach that takes at least some responsibility for not adding to our emotional burdens.

6. Cognitive vs emotional empathy

“If you don’t actually feel it, it’s not empathy.”

You’ve probably heard that there are two commonly acknowledged types of empathy: cognitive (the perspective-taking) and emotional (the emotion-feeling), with the latter being often viewed as the more pure (honest) form of empathy (feeding into the narrative of its moral superiority). One of the reasons for that view is that cognitive empathy is usually the only type of empathy available to psychopaths - because having reduced capacity for feeling another’s emotions, people afflicted with psychopathy have to learn to understand people around them through perspective-taking and observation.

Emotional empathy is rooted in mirror neurons. When we’re observing other people (including in movies), these are the neurons in our brain that “light up” the parts of the brain that correlate to what we’re observing. So if we’re watching someone break a leg or kiss passionately, the part of our brain that would be activated were we actually experiencing those things ourselves tend to light up ever so slightly in response to the mere observation thereof. There’s been a bit of controversy in the area of mirror neurons, but the field remains understudied and I continue to hold a hypothesis that mirror neurons are responsible (in large part) for our ability to “try on” another’s experience. So the claim of the superiority of emotional empathy becomes that much more amusing because in the end it stems from a certain predisposition in our biology and physiology, which is also responsible for psychopathy.

Another common reason for looking down on cognitive empathy is because one might be tempted to assume that cognitive empathy would be more subjective to personal biases, and of course it is (especially the personality-permanence one as noted above). But emotional empathy is not better (might even be worse due to the inconspicuous nature of the bias). This has been shown in numerous experiments - mostly where the neural activity (empathy/mirroring) is measured in the person who observes how hands with different labels (indicating in/out-of-group-ness relative to the observer, such as political, religious, ethnic, and other affiliations) get pricked by a needle. What happens is that there is actually less/reduced empathetic response (neural/mirroring activity) when observing the pricking of an out-of-group hand. You know, the whole reinforcement of us vs them mentality. We literally feel less empathy when observing the pain of someone whom we view as not part of our group.

I’m of the opinion that true empathy contains both of these - cognitive and emotional - components, which enables it to be an effective skill rather than a passive capacity for one.

7. Empathy as an excuse for self-abandonment

“I’m just a very empathetic and supportive person, I can’t help it.”

This one came up in a few of my coaching sessions (both where I was a coach and where I was a coachee). I was surprised to realize that we occasionally use empathy as a rationalization for self-abandonment. It’s almost an excuse for embodied powerlessness - “There’s nothing I can do about it, I just feel so much.” What do I mean by that? You can kind of hear/see it in one’s refusal to prioritize one’s needs or establish boundaries, where the real reason for the refusal is often the fear of rejection. Yet the more noble rationalization that we use as a front for that fear is that we just can’t help but empathize with another’s suffering, so how/why would we force a boundary then?

“They’re going through a lot, so my needs can wait.”

“They need me more than I need me right now.”

“If I set a boundary, I’ll hurt them.”

“I understand why they hurt me.”

“I cannot tolerate the internal consequences of choosing myself over another.”

Things like that. You know, martyrdom. As someone put it - a moral alibi for self-rejection.

Well, in essence self-sacrifice is self-rejection is self-abandonment. So, if you feel a constant call to self-sacrifice that you can’t say no to, do ask yourself something like this:

• Why do I regularly choose to abandon myself? What drives me to justify that self-abandonment?

• What would I have to face if I stripped empathy as my rationalization for self-sacrifice?

• What would happen if I tried to be empathetic towards myself as much as I am towards others?

And in what ways are you using empathy as rationalization for self-abandonment?

8. Outro

Alright, so what’s now? Well, if you remember, it was never my intention to dismantle empathy - I do believe empathy is important and useful, it just needs to be paired with a bit of critical thinking and maybe a bit more curiosity - as some say, genuine curiosity with the objective of bettering one’s understanding might be the highest form of empathy.

P.S. The image is from my illustrated poetry book “Ode to Hope and Despair.”

AI disclosure: ChatGPT was leveraged to pull up some definitions and research details (it’s been a while since I read about some of those experiments I mentioned) and check for spelling/punctuation.

A literary example of somebody who is regarded as empathetic but kind of in a wrong way is Anne of Green Gables. Everybody (in the books/movies) makes a point of her great sense of empathy, and yet she exhibits these two rather contradictory traits that must speak to either the author’s general oversight or her lack of understanding of what empathy really means. For instance, Anne gets emotional very easily, and she has an admirable amount of appreciation for the beauty around her in addition to feeling very strongly for animals and their well-being. However, at the very same time, she is rather oblivious to other people’s feelings; she takes each life as a fascinating story, where the suffering of the main character is rather “romantically tragical,” and she doesn’t seem to often connect that there are true human beings behind her impressions of the characters, and that to them, their suffering is anything but romantical. She appears to be oblivious to other people’s deep emotional reactions that are hidden from the surface - what she sees is all there is to her, and she fails to even attempt to anticipate what her words or actions might signify to others, how they may be interpreted, and what effect they may have on other people. She exhibits a lot of selfish traits which are too often overlooked or even masked by her superior empathy, which is more proclaimed than demonstrated. So, my general conclusion is a matter of definitions: Anne is a rather sympathetic person, as she is pretty good at exhibiting sympathy where such is openly warranted by someone’s miserable situation (sometimes after their challenging circumstances are explained to her), but she is by no means exceptionally empathetic, for true empathy would imply her proactive understanding of another’s circumstance and anticipation of the person’s feelings and reactions, and she consistently fails to do that.