Tag Archives: Empathy

Those of Us Who Live for Emotion

Everyone in this world lives with emotion (well, maybe the psychopaths don’t, but most everyone else does). We laugh, we cry, we feel anger and despair, and for the most part, we learn as young adults to handle these emotions, to live with them, and – to one extent or another – integrate them into our lives in a way that doesn’t (usually) override our ability to function as human beings.

But not everyone truly feels emotions the same way. Some of us fall more into the logical spectrum, whilst others are run by their emotions, making decisions based entirely on ‘feel’, ‘gut reactions’ or instincts. And, of course, some of us find ways to defend ourselves from emotion, because we’ve been so deeply affected in the past.

Having worked in the same place for the past ten years, most of the people I know are of course work colleagues. I know many of them well, and most of them well enough to know – to some degree – what kind of an emotional person they are. There are private people and people who wear their hearts on their sleeves, but you can usually tell what kind of an emotional person someone is by the way they express themselves, the emotions they choose to show (or that they can’t control), and the way in which their decision-making process is influenced.

It’s likely you know people like this, too. Think of all the people you daily say “how’s it going” to. Then think about the ones that, without fail, will always answer “fine” – whether they’re fine or not. Then think about the ones that are actually more truthful – that will tell you when things aren’t fine.

There’s no right or wrong way to be, of course – these are just people at different points on the emotional spectrum. Personally I fall into the former category, but I know plenty of people who will gladly share their whims and woes if asked. An easy mistake to make with this, however, is to assume that those people who don’t easily show their emotions simply don’t feel them as strongly – or at all. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Using myself as an example, it’s been a really long time since I could say I’ve truly felt any deep emotion of any kind – joy or despair, laughing or crying, these things kind of just don’t happen to me. I tend to live life day in and day out by just sort of moving from task to task and place to place, making decisions in the moment based on whatever seems right at the time. If you were to ask me how I felt and I were to answer truthfully, the answer would probably actually just be, “I don’t really know.”

Of course, a large part of this is probably my bipolar medication, which is, well, literally supposed to diminish the extremes of emotion I feel day to day. Prior to being medicated, I do remember times of uncontainable rage, pits of black despair, mountains of eagerness to work, and bouts of inexplicable tears. But even then, these were the rarer instances, and most of the time I wouldn’t allow myself to truly feel anything.

And I think this is a telling perspective, in some ways. I think there are some of us who actually feel so deeply that we deliberately protect ourselves from such emotion, by either avoiding things that make us feel deeply, or simply not letting it in at all. This can be a positive thing, to some arguable extent (I’ve never cried at a funeral), but it can also be detrimental: when discussing the recent Black Lives Matter protests with others, I can see how worked up they get about it, how deeply, deeply hurt they are by the injustices suffered by black communities across the country. And whilst I can inarguably see just how terrible things really are, it doesn’t make me as sad or angry inside because I just can’t allow myself to be hurt so deeply. I sort of wish it did, but I don’t know how.

Sometimes I envy people who can simply allow themselves to feel. When presented with those things in life that absolutely should trigger deep emotions (deaths, births, successes and failures, tragedies and triumphs), I kind of just … don’t feel anything. I can look at the event and think that it’s good, or bad, or whatever, but I don’t really deeply feel it, and … it makes me sad, but (of course) not really enough.

There is one thing that this lack of deep emotion does for me, though, and it’s that it allows me to understand conflicting perspectives in a way that I often see others to struggle with. Take something very simple but very relevant: Trump supporters. Most of the people I know are pretty liberal, and many of them simply cannot fathom how anyone could still support someone like Donald Trump after the toxicity, outright lies and falsehoods, and total lack of care that have so far defined his presidency. Yet for me, despite not agreeing with these people, I find myself in a position where I can actually understand some of their rhetoric, their mentality and their decisions. Because I’m not clouded by my own emotions (most of the time), I can see others’, and understand (to some degree) why they feel they way they do.

In the end, although I envy those who feel deeply, I don’t think I’d trade it for how I am already; I like being able to identify with and understand a multiple of perspectives, even if it means that the true depth of others’ feelings fall into more of an intellectual and logical empathy than a true “I feel what you feel” kind of thing. It allows me to get along with more people than I might otherwise be able to, and of course, it means I very rarely feel deeply enough to hate.

Of course, the reverse is that I rarely feel deeply enough to love, either … and that hurts.

How do you approach emotion? Are you a feeler, or a thinker? And do you find you have to feel what someone else does to empathize with them, or can you empathize from a logical perspective?

Imagine dying from traumatic asphyxiation. No, actually imagine it.

Cause of death: Cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.

Hennepin County Medical Examiner Press Release Report on the death of George Floyd

I want you to do an exercise with me. Trust me, it’ll be fun.

First, find your carotid artery. It should be easy – it’s where your gym teacher used to tell you to check your pulse after running around the track five times (you know, on the side of your neck just below your chin). Make sure you can feel your heartbeat. What you’re actually feeling is the carotid sinus, just before the artery branches to supply blood separately to the brain and the face.

Now, press gently into this nodule. You should feel your heartbeat a little stronger; you might feel a little uncomfortable. You’re starting to restrict blood flow to the brain and face now.

Try pressing a little harder; see how deep you’re willing to press into this artery before you can’t take it anymore. You might start to feel a pain in your chin as you affect nerves; you might start to feel a little light-headed, even.

Personally, I couldn’t take it for more than a few seconds.

Now imagine not a finger, but a knee, in that same spot. Imagine not a gentle pressure, but the weight of an adult male pressing into that artery. Try, if you can, imagining that this pressure is sustained for eight minutes. Imagine, if you can, the panic you might feel, the desperation, the utter despair as you realize that something is deeply, terribly wrong inside your body, as your sight narrows to a tunnel and eventually fades out, and yet you can still hear the people screaming around you to let you go.

There were two independent autopsies performed on the corpse of George Floyd; one by the county medical examiner, and one privately commissioned by his family. The above quote is the lighter of the two findings; the independent report found he “sustained pressure on the right side of Floyd’s carotid artery impeded blood flow to the brain, and weight on his back impeded his ability to breathe.” It also found he died at the scene, and not in the ER as the official report suggests.

With all that has happened since the death of George Floyd, the protests, the riots, the sustained militaristic police brutality and the despair that is sweeping the country, the one thing I haven’t to any great extent is a sense of compassion, of understanding, of the last eight minutes of George Floyd’s life.

You see, it’s easy to understand a dead person. They’re a corpse, a body, a bunch of dead flesh. They’re a thing. It’s also easy to understand a living person – we interact with them, they can speak, talk, love and laugh and cry.

But the in-between is glossed over. Nobody likes to think about the process of death, what it must feel like, what thoughts go through your head as you fade from the world. It’s a difficult thing to imagine, of course, because most people who pass through that experience don’t come back to tell us about it.

George Floyd didn’t come back. He died on the streets of Minneapolis in handcuffs with another man on his back, a knee in his neck. I wonder what he was thinking as he died. I wonder if he thought about his family, and whether he would ever see them again. I wonder if he thought to himself, I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe I’m dying.

But there’s one thing I don’t wonder about. I don’t wonder whether he saw himself dying with his face pressed into the pavement and his chest and throat crushed. I don’t wonder if he was at peace with his death. I don’t wonder if he would rather have died as an old man, in his bed, surrounded by his family and loved ones.

Please – I know it’s difficult, but try to imagine what his death must have felt like. Not to the bystanders – not to the living left. To him. He was a person, a human, a living life that was violently and slowly extinguished, and I can’t stop thinking about what his last moments in this world must have felt like.

No one deserves to die like that. No one should be treated so cruelly by another human being. But most of all, no black person should have to fear that this could happen to them for no other reason than because they are black. No black person should have these thoughts running through their heads simply because of the color of their skin.

George Floyd’s death is tragic, yes; but it is also a cruel, horrific, unimaginably painful way to die, and the person who caused his death might have been better served putting a bullet in his head. And the people responsible are far more than Derek Chauvin who killed him. They are the people who allowed this country to get to the point where such a thing could happen at all. They the leaders, the people in power who continuously turn a blind eye and tell us that they deserved to die, that they had it coming, that they shouldn’t have resisted … you know the story.

Not only did George Floyd not deserve to die, he most certainly did not deserve to die so horrifically. Please – celebrate his life, remember his death, and do anything and everything you can to ensure no black person ever suffers so cruel a death again.

Wearing White Shoes

This post discusses subjects such as racism and misogyny.
If this triggers you … you probably ought to keep reading.

I read an article last week published in the New York Times by poet and essayist Claudia Rankine. With the provocative title of I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked., she discusses her experiences as a black woman traveling for work and observing frequent – and yet often unintentional – racial bias against her from white men. She recounts one instance in which two white men cut in front of her in line, only for one to comment to the other, “You never know who they’re letting into first class these days.” Another in which a group of white men again try to cut in line, and juxtaposes the actual response of both passengers and crew with the reader’s imagined response had that same group of men been women, or black.

Her article is well-written, thoughtful, and, I suspect, more carefully and deliberately worded than anything I could hope to achieve. Or would need to.

You see, I had never heard of Claudia Rankine. In fact, I originally started this article slightly differently: “… a poet named Claudia Rankine …” was how I was going to introduce her to my readers. I might have even published this post with this phrasing, had I not wanted to know if she had a doctorate or not. A very short Google search revealed more of you probably know of her than don’t. And after having read one essay of hers in the New York Times and spent all of three minutes looking her up, I’ve come to start to realize the extent of my whiteness. I probably will never fully grasp it.

… white privilege is … the simple fact that I don’t have to consider everything I do or say through the filter of my skin color.

You see, the very fact that I’ve never heard of a prize-winning, Yale-teaching poet is itself an aspect of this whiteness. Had she been white, or a man, might I have heard her name a little louder? Might I have inadvertently paid more attention?

Moreover, the fact that I can write and publish my own thoughts on prejudice without fearing insult or injury to my readers is symptomatic of the same thing. As I read Rankine’s article, it occurred to me that she was able to craft her language in such a way that sold a message – and sold it well – without once making me feel guilty – and therefore more likely to disengage. Engaged readers are the key to spreading a message, and I suspect – as she may do – that the New York Times has a lot of white readers.

Of note – although I didn’t spend more than about twenty minutes looking into it, I couldn’t find a demographic split for the New York Times by race; gender, income, age … but not race.

In a dextrous and subtle way, Rankine was able to open my eyes a little more to just what being black means – and to the fact that they’ll never really be fully open. In doing so, she helped me to recognize the way in which my own behaviors – both learned from and encouraged by (typically white) others – are affected by the simple fact that I’m white.

It also made me want to consider my own position on disparity and privilege, because as a white male it’s not something I often think about. My thoughts here are in no particular way well-educated, backed by research or experience, but they’re still my thoughts, so here goes.

Actually, back up a second. Read that last paragraph again.

What if I were black? How might readers’ opinion of my lack of evidence be different?

I believe I’m starting to understand that this is really what white privilege is. The simple fact that I don’t have to consider everything I do or say through the filter of my skin color. I just don’t have to worry.

But to really get it, to understand, it takes a good deal of empathy, and it’s incredibly hard to empathize with a feeling so alien that to you, it doesn’t even make sense. How can I ever understand what it’s like to live every waking moment being first and foremost judged by my skin color? How can I comprehend the conflict of wondering if my successes are going to be judged as leniency for the sake of political correctness, my failures as expected because I’m black?

I want to try something for a moment, and I’d like you to try it with me. I’d like you to close your eyes, clear your mind, and try to remember the scariest, most terrifying thing that’s ever happened to you personally. Try to picture it, remember it, and let that old feeling flow through you. It might not be comfortable, but hold on to that thought.

Got it?

What was it? Was it something physically harmful, like a car crash? Was it a painful accident you thought you might not recover from? Or was it a threat from another person – explicit or otherwise?

The Italian Dolomites, where my ten-year-old brain thought it was going to die.
Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Pexels.com

My answer came to me easily: climbing in the Dolomite Mountains in northern Italy, hanging on to a rope and nearly falling off a cliff. I’ll never forget just how close I felt to death – the surge of adrenaline, the churn of my stomach, the powdery dryness of my hands.

This experience reeks of privilege, when I think about it. The privilege of money. The privilege of travel. The privilege of being able to have such an experience in the first place. And the odds are, if I weren’t white, I probably wouldn’t have had that opportunity.

But what about you, reader? If you’re black, or asian, or female … what was your most terrifying experience? I wonder if it involves someone threatening or hurting you for your perceived identity – your appearance, as it were.

Here’s the thing: I wonder if segregation might almost be impossibly connected to how humans perceive each other. It’s really, really difficult to comprehend that we share the planet with eight billion other individuals, without finding some way to distinguish between them. The first, simplest way is gender – penis or vagina, two choices. Suddenly you’ve just eliminated half the world as people you have to identify with. Next up – skin color. Man, it’s so easy to just ignore everyone who isn’t the same color as me

Human society is built on these premises – despite promises of equality for all, humans are not all equal. There are rich humans, poor humans, white and black humans, gay humans and bisexual humans and hip-hop humans and death metal humans. We pretty much have to break down society into digestible numbers in order to have one at all.

The problem, perhaps, arises when one group begins to dominate the others. When men dominate women, white people dominate black people; even able-bodied people dominating disabled people. To truly live in a fair and equal world, we need to understand that we are different – but that those differences can’t continue to be leveraged to control or manipulate our positions in society.

There have been times when I, as a white male, have walked through predominantly non-white neighborhoods and felt afraid. I felt out of place, a minority, and in danger because of the color of my skin. I’ve experienced a little taste of this. But I knew that I’d soon be in a place where I would certainly feel much safer: somewhere surrounded by white people.

But this little taste helps me understand that some people in the world feel that way everywhere. I get a little scared when I get pulled over by a cop. I have a little taste of what it might feel like to be black and get pulled over by a cop. I get a little scared walking to my car at night. I have a little taste of what it might feel like to be a woman walking to her car at night. My female colleagues carry their keys between their fingers every night, and we don’t even work in (to me) a particularly unsafe area.

How do we teach our children to understand each other?
Photo by Bess Hamiti on Pexels.com

When we teach children about empathy, we often tell them to ‘walk in another’s shoes’. But I don’t know if I’m terribly fond of that analogy; the only shoes that really fit you are yours. Instead, I think we should teach children to ask questions: why does this person feel this way? What might make me feel the same? And most importantly, how can I tell them that whilst I can’t know how they feel, I understand that they do.

At the end of Rankine’s New York Times article, it struck me that, in writing about her experiences with confronting racial bias, she didn’t really come to a conclusion as to what could be done to solve it. I wondered if she’d had to edit it for length, or if she simply didn’t have a solution.

But now it dawns on me that perhaps there isn’t a fix. Perhaps society isn’t broken, just … off-balance. I once witnessed gender bias first hand at work. Afterward, I was talking to the woman who had been essentially dismissed by a male colleague and she voiced her frustration about it.

I don’t know why she thought to share it with me specifically; perhaps she needed to vent, or perhaps she thought she could trust me. But when she was done, I realized that as she’d been speaking, I’d already begun building defenses for our male colleague. I’d started thinking up reasons other than gender bias for his behavior. And somehow in a moment I realized that none of that mattered, because she still felt slighted as a woman. He could have had the best intentions in the world for interrupting and dismissing her, but he was only able to do it at all because he was a man.

So I just said, “That must really suck.”

I realize it isn’t terribly eloquent, but I’ll never forget her reaction: all she said was, “Thank you.”

Empathy isn’t about feeling the same as someone else; it’s about acknowledging that they feel that way in the first place. It’s about understanding your part in how they feel, intenional or otherwise. I believe empathy is a sorely-needed key to unraveling racial, gender, and all other forms of bias, because it allows to realize that understanding others comes not from shared experiences, but from shared emotions.

Of course, none of this changes who I am. I’m still a middle-class white male in rural northern New Jersey, and I will continue to benefit from that identity for the rest of my life. I will benefit from it not because I want to, but because society will offer me help in ways that it simply doesn’t to others. I will get fewer speeding tickets; I will make more money; I will never wonder if I was endorsed for or denied a promotion because I’m not white. All of this will happen whether I ask for it or not, unless we start to recognize what equality really means.

Equality does not mean women should be paid more because they are women; it means they shouldn’t be paid less for equal work. Equality does not mean colleges accepting lower grades for minorities to boost their campus diversity; it means accepting students based on the merits of their work and individuality, and not their skin color.

I don’t know if we’ll ever live in a truly equal world. I doubt I can do a whole lot to change that. But if I can recognize my own biases and privileges, and not shy away from it under the guise of white guilt, then at least I can understand my part in the world’s inequality – and maybe make the world better for just a few people.