Systematic empathy

Compassion is a great virtue which helps us connect with other people. Self-compassion helps us avoid injuries and saves us from misery. Lack of compassion in ourselves and in others poses several serious challenges. Fortunately, compassion can be systematically learned and developed. This post was inspired by reading this, this, this, and this articles. Disclaimer: I practiced only some of the ideas discussed in the article, and cannot be considered an expert in any of the practices involved.

Mirror neurons

We can feel empathy due to so-called mirror neurons. These neurons have been relatively recently discovered and they mimic the neural patterns of other people. Basically, we have a dedicated mechanism in our brain to visualize whatever happens to other people. Like any dedicated device, mirror neurons are highly effective but slightly quirky. We cannot really get into the brain of another person, and the way we feel his feelings cannot be fully accurate.

Arguably the accuracy of the mirror neurons can be trained via proper feedback and simulations of interpersonal dynamics. The training includes reading and interpretating faces, poses and other behavioral clues, personal history and motivation, common cognitive and behavioral patterns. Emotional accuracy training reshapes the brains and different areas start to get activated in functional MRI imaging.

Suppose we can accurately read another person. Will we feel his pain? Surprisingly the pain we feel is very different from the empathy to the pain of others: different brain areas are activated, and we react differently. While our own patterns are very primary and largely unaccessable, We can build new more mature and instrumental reaction patterns to pain of other people. Our own pain often triggers fight or flight response, empathy enables us to help other people in thoughtful and creative ways.

Loving thoughts

Many compassion practices include sending loving thoughts to everybody: 1) Family and friends. 2) Someone with whom you have tension or a conflict. 3) Strangers around the world who are suffering. 4) Self-compassion, forgiveness and self-love to yourself. Notice that self-compassion is probably the hardest part of the skill. It is easy to love someone we love. We can modify a strong feeling into an opposite feeling. We need to invest a lot of effort into generating a new feeling. With respect to ourself we need to visualize ourself from outside perspective, which is abstract and complex.

Sending loving thoughts or expressing gratitude we modify the way we feel about people and events. At the beginning the whole process feels very unnatural, like forcing ourself to smile when we do not want to smile. Eventually we start to embrace the fake feeling, and it may become a part of us.

The induced love is instrumental at generating true interest in other people and ourselves. If we do not like something or someone, we will do a lot to avoid that person or memory. This is a smart thing to do if we want to preserve our mental energy. This is not something we can always afford. Occasionally we will need to read a book we dislike, understand and represent ideas we hate, work with problematic people. To activate our mirror neurons we need to feel empathy to other person, and fake love helps generate this rapport.

Self-awareness

It is hard to be compassionate to yourself. There is this zen question: who is the one being compassionate, and who is the other one? Both parts are within us, with access to the same memories and abilities, the whole concept of duality here is an illusion. This illusion helps us activate our mirror nurons.

We can think of ourselves like we would think about another person, with all things that make us unique. Then we start to think how such a person should feel and how we as observers could react. We compare these projected thoughts with our own though, slowly synchronizing them. The process is a long one. At the end we change both the way we feel, and the way we feel about our feelings.

Next we notice our thoughts and feelings that we did not notice before. Once we generate true empathy towards ourselves we are less quick to discard finer clues from our soul and body.

Using mentors

Not sure “mentor” is the right definition for the people that help us analize what we feel. We can use paid psychologists, coaches, family members, friends. Once we can generate a true emotional connection we can describe what we feel in a language the other can understand. Then we basically ask the other person how can someone act if he has these feeling.

Basically this is a creativity exercise. Different people have different thought paterns. Occasionally we are so locked in our patterns we cannot imagine possibility of a different response. By facing different responses we become emotionally creative, we can generate further and more advanced responses. If we find a response we like we can adapt it.

Adapting a new emotional response requires authority. Otherwise our mind would simply reject or dismiss it. We use the authority of the mentor in our eyes as a justification to accept the new response. We can do something because our mentor thinks we can do it!

We can also function as mentors to other people. We do not need to be smarter or more emotionally developed than the person we work with, we need to avoid the emotional traps and blindfolds that limit the person we work with. Some sort of authority will help – it can be a coaching or mediation course, a degree in psychology or vast life experience in the subjects discussed.

Toxic people

Not all people respect our empathy. Some will use it against us, trying to entangle us into some sort of imaginary plot they devise. It is best simply to avoid such people when they exhibit manipulative or aggressive behavior. Toxic people tend to see victims and predators everywhere, which is an unhealthy illusion. Their illusions are very convincing and they are convinced in their truth, they often ask for binary “yes” or “no” responses and generate strong emotions. It takes a lot of effort not to get sucked into the emotional turmoils of toxic people.

Can we love toxic people? Nobody is pure good or pure evil. We can love some of the things they represent, enough to communicate with them. If we are creative we can generate non-destructive communication channels and enjoy the other side of the person. The communication may be very good, this is no reason to drop our guards since the other sides of the person are still there.

Over-forgiveness

Quite often we tend to be over-forgiving especially to ourselves. Just like we need to respect boundaries with our kids, we need to respect boundaries to the people we are empathic with.

If we do not feel we want to do something, if something is hard, if we want to delay it a bit more – should we allow ourselves to do it? The context is very important. It is OK to give in occasionally. If this sort of avoidance becomes a pattern, we need to react. A possible reaction is this simple formula (1) acknowledge the feeling and give it place (2) emphasize the need and the context (3) start from something small (4) have a clear plan (5) reassure and reward progress.

The reward

I do not really know how rewarding systematic empathy can be. There seam to be many levels of the reward.

• Generate and maintain deep and meaningful communication with other people.
• Ability to think and communicate (including write and read) using logical and emotional layers of content and several layers in-between.
• Lower risk to our own health and happiness through self-awareness.
• Potentially a blissful state of radical acception.

Summary

We have neurons dedicated for empathy, so we should train them and use them. Training emotional accuracy is not enough, we need to generate an interest in another person. We need to be creative to avoid destructive patterns.