Factual Dispatch #50: Hacking Empathy

I had an entire non-political Dispatch ready to go, delving into the ways empathy can be abused by people and organizations, then the only October surprise worthy of 2020 dropped.

Between Wednesday & Thursday, Trump and a dozen other members of the Small Council of Stupid managed to catch COVID-19, despite the best efforts of the unified American military, healthcare & security apparatus. The super spreader event was identified as the Rose Garden announcement of Ginsburg’s totally not-norm-breaking successor, Judge Totally-Not-Handmaid. As you can see, this event was the apex of good epidemiological practices:

Since his positive test, Trump has been given every drug you heard of this year, except hydroxychlorofraglistic. Are some of the drugs for people who have very serious COVID? Yes. Would one or two maybe make a healthy/mild case worse? You betcha. So, take all of what we’re hearing with a grain of salt. VIP treatment and doctors bending to Trump’s will not withstanding, nobody actually wants to be the Japanese hand surgeon from The Office:

As Discourse Blog said in response to all of this “LOL OK!” The best interview I’ve seen on the situation is Isaac Chotiner’s interview of Maggie Haberman. All of the facts of the situation will probably be out of date by the time you read this, even after I held it for two days.

Unlike Discourse Blog and your shitposting friends, others have been calling for empathy and good wishes. Yes, empathy is important, even when we’re not being asked to use it performatively. While some think it’s a thing you just have or you don’t (the fabled “I’m an empath”) most of modern social work, counseling, and therapeutic degree work involves cultivating empathy. Also, one overlooked aspects of therapy, is the fact that your therapist has a therapist, to help them with their batteries. Not to complain about you, but to help them process the exhaustion that comes with being empathetic. This is a skill/muscle, it can be taught and grown.

Before I go any further, empathy is not sympathy. Full Stop. Sympathy is a feeling of pity or sorrow for someone else’s misfortunes, Empathy is a practice where you try to understand how someone else is feeling. If you’re really into acronyms and have no idea how to start empathizing, here’s a great breakdown that is also very useful for children with autism or emotional processing disorders:

• E - Eye Contact: Some eye contact makes people feel seen.

• M - Muscles in Face: Look at the muscles in people’s faces when they tell you they’re happy. Humans mirror those sometimes without thinking.

• P - Posture: Crossing arms & legs communicates closedness, leaning in and out, face toward the person you’re interacting with, all help communicate interest/focus.

• A - Affect: Name feelings and emotional tones. The easier they are to identify, the easier it will be to replicate them to communicate trust.

• T - Tone: Yell loving words at a small dog if you’re unsure how this works.

• H - Hearing: If you ask questions related to what they’ve been saying, they know you’ve been listening.

• Y - Your response: You communicate whether you care with every part of your being, it’s just very hard to notice.

For those of us who have already taken the 101 level class, at a higher level, it’s all about cultivating curiosity about and with strangers, challenging one’s own prejudices, and directly connecting with other people’s life experiences.

• Learn Active Listening: Most people consider listening “time you wait around for your turn to speak” so they spend all of it thinking of what they’re going to say. Active Listening includes a bunch of specific physical and mental practices to focus on the other person, ensure they see you’re focusing on them, and questioning practices to help you retain what you’re listening to.

• Use “EMP Mindfulness”: When you’re engaging in a mundane interaction with someone, notice things about their outward expression. Do they seem happy? How is their energy level? Are they distracted, pre-occupied? Do they make eye contact? Constantly bringing something about their life up? These are markers of how people feel.

• Ask people how they feel, not how they’re doing: Small talk invites shallow analysis. Honest questioning, paired with active listening, encourages deep work. But like, don’t ask if you’re not prepared to listen if they tell you.

• Share Vulnerability: It’s hard, but showing weakness first is very powerful.

• Signal Curiosity: Open ended questions, enthusiastic responses, and authentic excitement about a story someone is telling goes a very long way.

• Eyebrows & Smiles: It is much harder to fake a smile that makes your eyes crinkle/gives you little crow’s feet than you think. Eyebrows move genuinely in response to surprise, fear, or worry. Or if ya smell what The Rock is cookin’

Like with all things, empathy has a significant dark side. It’s easy to open one’s emotional iris, or adjust your lens to absorb more and more about the emotional states of those around you. This can be the equivalent of standing in front of a firehose and asking them to turn it on. Especially if you’ve not been trained in the mental & emotional self defense practices that help you close the iris when needed. A few of the practices I’ve seen that help restore/rejuvenate:

• Differentiate professional empathy needs from personal ones.

• Differentiate between emotional empathy (vicariously catching someone else’s feelings) and cognitive empathy (thinking about how they feel intellectually)

• Understand your own emotional limits and energy levels. If a conversation or experience would force you to react strongly, avoid it. (This is the original use of “trigger warnings” related to veterans who might not be able to control hyperarousal responses that came with their PTSD)

• Do not play the “if I just absorb a little bit, they’ll like me more” game. People will usually be ok with not unloading on you if you are clear and honest about not having the bandwidth for it.

• If you find yourself judging either your behavior or the emotions/person you’re empathizing with, take a step back before reacting. “I want to think about this a little bit, so I don’t get it wrong” is a very powerful phrase. As is “can you say more about this part of it?”

• Straight up refusing to emotionally engage with people, especially abusers, repeat gaslighters, or people who fight using emotions.

While some are very strict about their empathetic time, others are committed to responding presently and emotionally to everyone. Those are the Namaste people, whatever level of functionality you encountered them at Burning Man.

And this isn’t even taking into account people who willfully keep their iris open, react badly, and become everyone else’s problem over and over again. Those who wear the label “empath” as an excuse to act out can cut the deepest, because they react to emotional expression. At the last level, you have the disingenuous calls for empathy and unity when a single side suffers an injury…which brings us back to current events.

I do need to stress one thing, they do not give a single solitary fuck about you, your family, your home, your livelihood, or your future. The empathy you might be perceiving from the White House & GOP is purely performative & sociopathic at this point. 210,000 people have died to this disease, with the president actively exposing Secret Service members yesterday because he wanted to take a ride in the car and wave to the nice people.

It’s easy to see those with everything be able to retain their compassion, but to ask it of others truly burning in this moment is obnoxious. Don’t demand people drain their batteries performatively to satisfy your concerns. You have no idea what else they might need that mana/MP for later in the day. Fight on, my friends, victory is in sight.

(Editor’s Note: Watch Fog Hill of Five Elements)

Song of the Dispatch: Egyptian trance legends remind you of the truth, that someone out there loves you, just the way you are.

They do. Even if you can’t see it right now.

Yours,T

P.S. Here is some more hope in the form of a Mushroom from Cat L.