DogwoodTree
Still here...
[posting this here because my blog site is down for some reason...sorry!]
I think that, primarily, empathy is a myth.
I think most of us, NT or AS, can choose to treat people the way we want to be treated, and if we're doing that to a person who wants much the same thing we want, we come out looking pretty empathetic.
But if we're trying that same approach across a significant personality barrier (using "barrier" the same way it's used in the term "language barrier"), there's actually a huge disconnect. If, for example, an extrovert considers being dragged to a party when they're feeling down to be a good way to help them feel better, he might offer the same kind of "encouragement" to his friend regardless of whether the friend is an introvert or an extrovert. If the friend is an extrovert, then the dude doing the dragging gets accolades for a job well done when his friend feels better within an hour or so. But if the friend is an introvert, the dude's extroverted efforts come across as very harmful and insensitive...not empathetic at all.
As for the NT/AS barrier (again, using "barrier" as in "language barrier", not with the intent of condemning or judging either side), both sides attempt to do the best we know how with the way we understand what works or what doesn't. But both sides are fairly limited in being able to truly understand the other side and predict the needs of the other in any context other than our own...although we both can learn by trial and error, and we both have the option of giving people the benefit of the doubt just like you would when a foreigner says something really strange in your own language--you know they're coming from a different cultural paradigm, and that's okay.
Just as AS folks have to cognitively process what works and what doesn't with NT folks, and we have to memorize those rules because the rules NTs live by don't come naturally to us, so do NT folks, when trying to understand us, have to learn by trial and error and memorize the rules. Not saying either side is better or worse, just that we both face the same communication barrier when trying to connect with each other and live side by side. AS folks are in the minority, so this barrier becomes more deeply ingrained in our life experience, just as a language barrier would be a bigger deal to a non-native-speaking immigrant.
I'm facing much the same situation with my family. They're deeply enmeshed, with so very little understanding or acceptance of healthy boundaries that they can't even begin to wrap their minds around why we might choose not to attend a family gathering from time to time, or that we might prefer to do something just with us and the kids instead of inviting everyone along who can possibly make it.
Their underlying assumption about relationships is that "It is everyone else's responsibility to make sure that I feel loved." If someone in the family doesn't feel loved, despite honest, sincere, extensive efforts by the person they don't feel love from, then it is still that person's fault (not making this up--my sister stated this presumption clearly two days ago, several times in the course of one conversation).
For example, if my mom doesn't feel like I love her and respect her, regardless of all of my efforts to express my heartfelt love for her in authentic ways, then it is still my fault. That's what everyone in my family believes, and has said outright, over and over and over, even as recently as this past weekend. (Somehow, that situation is not reciprocated...that if I don't feel loved and respected, it's still my fault.) There is simply no sense that someone might have their own issues in being able to receive authentic love from someone who is very different from them, with different needs, priorities, and desires. So because I'm in the minority with my understanding of what love is (respect, freedom, honesty, responsibility, as opposed to theirs being obligation, enmeshment, always being nice, always feeling happy, no accountability for anything other than meeting their standards for love), I'm the one perceived as unloving.
The point is, they're living from a different standard, from a different underlying assumption about life and love. They have just as much difficulty understanding my actions as I have understanding theirs (except that I have come out of that, so I can still look back and see what the thought patterns and justifications were for me back then).
Among them, there seems to be a lot of empathy, because they all operate from the same premises. But their efforts to try to cross the barrier between us, or my efforts to try to cross the barrier back in the other direction...these messages always get warped and twisted. It never comes across as the originator intended.
However, when I talk with other people, people who have fought their way out of enmeshed family systems and embraced the entire concept of healthy boundaries, love based on freedom instead of obligation, those people hear me clearly, sometimes even more clearly than I hear myself. Suddenly, I see that it's not that I don't have empathy--it's that empathy is so very limited in its traditional use for the purposes of crossing certain boundaries.
Basically, it's not really empathy until we can each start to see life from the other person's standards and understanding, NOT just from what we would personally feel if we were in their position externally. Empathy requires connecting with their internal world, not just the external one.
So for example, this past week my mom has announced that she's angry at me for the way I did some work the past several months and feels I should have done it differently (even though I did what she asked for). My external empathy actually drove the way I did the work, thinking I was giving her what she wanted, asked for, and needed (and I still feel that way...I have emails to show this is what she asked for to the extent she explained what she wanted).
But internal empathy goes a step further and recognizes that she is reacting out of fear of losing control of the next project we're about to start. She has never had a safe relationship in which she was able to really depend on someone and still have things turn out well for her. She is acting out of fear, and the way I handle this situation has to take that into account...plus the fact that she can't admit she's acting out of fear and dysfunction. Her external empathy says, "Yes, I recognize that you were trying to do the best you knew how and that it was an act of love on your part." But her lack of internal empathy is actually communicating the message, "You're so stuck on acts of service as your expression of love, and your refusal to communicate love to me in the way I want (regardless of what I say I want) is leaving me feeling unloved and it's your fault."
She's not seeing the world from my perspective, despite all my efforts to explain my experience and reasoning and desires and needs to her. She can "accept" what I want to the degree that she feels obligated to try to give that to me, but she's not really hearing who I am through it all (she doesn't have to agree with me to do this...just understand my perspective well enough to truly accept ME as being different from her in some very fundamental ways).
She resents that I'm different from her. She wants me to see things her way so she can give me what she wants to give, which are the same things she wants in return, things that make her happy and that she wants these same things to make me happy.
The thing is, empathy isn't really about the things that we do or say, although those are expressions of empathy or a lack thereof. Empathy is about seeing into and trying to understand and accept another person's internal experience of the world. I'm not trying to change my mom. She can stay as enmeshed and codependent as she wants to...with other people. But if she understood empathy, real empathy, she wouldn't be so dead-set on condemning me for having a different internal experience of the world than she has. This is not judging her for her underlying assumption that other people are responsible for her feeling loved. She can believe that if she wants to. The problem comes when she thinks everyone else should believe that, too.
Expecting everyone else to process life the same way that I do...THAT is a lack of empathy. On the other end, demanding of myself that I make all of the adjustments and never expect anyone else to adjust to me, is also extremely unhealthy.
Understanding and accepting that other people process life very differently...and at least making an attempt to understand their internal worlds in order to find ways to connect through the communication barriers...THAT is true empathy.
At the same time, there must be balance...
I attempt to understand another person's internal world and connect with them in ways that matter to them, even if they're not ways that would work for me. But I'm still not fully responsible for seeing that communication occurs accurately, because they can still choose whether to receive what I managed to offer or not.
Empathy must be fully grounded in freedom, or it turns into nosiness, invalidation, intrusion, enmeshment, and codependency.
It has to go both ways to produce desirable results. Your freedom, AND mine. Your authenticity, AND mine. Your efforts, AND mine. When the demands are lopsided, when the standards are dysfunctional or weighted toward one party over the other...problems happen. And it's not really empathy.
Empathy is an effort I make toward you and offer you. But freedom is the only medium that makes the transmission of love possible.
I think that, primarily, empathy is a myth.
I think most of us, NT or AS, can choose to treat people the way we want to be treated, and if we're doing that to a person who wants much the same thing we want, we come out looking pretty empathetic.
But if we're trying that same approach across a significant personality barrier (using "barrier" the same way it's used in the term "language barrier"), there's actually a huge disconnect. If, for example, an extrovert considers being dragged to a party when they're feeling down to be a good way to help them feel better, he might offer the same kind of "encouragement" to his friend regardless of whether the friend is an introvert or an extrovert. If the friend is an extrovert, then the dude doing the dragging gets accolades for a job well done when his friend feels better within an hour or so. But if the friend is an introvert, the dude's extroverted efforts come across as very harmful and insensitive...not empathetic at all.
As for the NT/AS barrier (again, using "barrier" as in "language barrier", not with the intent of condemning or judging either side), both sides attempt to do the best we know how with the way we understand what works or what doesn't. But both sides are fairly limited in being able to truly understand the other side and predict the needs of the other in any context other than our own...although we both can learn by trial and error, and we both have the option of giving people the benefit of the doubt just like you would when a foreigner says something really strange in your own language--you know they're coming from a different cultural paradigm, and that's okay.
Just as AS folks have to cognitively process what works and what doesn't with NT folks, and we have to memorize those rules because the rules NTs live by don't come naturally to us, so do NT folks, when trying to understand us, have to learn by trial and error and memorize the rules. Not saying either side is better or worse, just that we both face the same communication barrier when trying to connect with each other and live side by side. AS folks are in the minority, so this barrier becomes more deeply ingrained in our life experience, just as a language barrier would be a bigger deal to a non-native-speaking immigrant.
I'm facing much the same situation with my family. They're deeply enmeshed, with so very little understanding or acceptance of healthy boundaries that they can't even begin to wrap their minds around why we might choose not to attend a family gathering from time to time, or that we might prefer to do something just with us and the kids instead of inviting everyone along who can possibly make it.
Their underlying assumption about relationships is that "It is everyone else's responsibility to make sure that I feel loved." If someone in the family doesn't feel loved, despite honest, sincere, extensive efforts by the person they don't feel love from, then it is still that person's fault (not making this up--my sister stated this presumption clearly two days ago, several times in the course of one conversation).
For example, if my mom doesn't feel like I love her and respect her, regardless of all of my efforts to express my heartfelt love for her in authentic ways, then it is still my fault. That's what everyone in my family believes, and has said outright, over and over and over, even as recently as this past weekend. (Somehow, that situation is not reciprocated...that if I don't feel loved and respected, it's still my fault.) There is simply no sense that someone might have their own issues in being able to receive authentic love from someone who is very different from them, with different needs, priorities, and desires. So because I'm in the minority with my understanding of what love is (respect, freedom, honesty, responsibility, as opposed to theirs being obligation, enmeshment, always being nice, always feeling happy, no accountability for anything other than meeting their standards for love), I'm the one perceived as unloving.
The point is, they're living from a different standard, from a different underlying assumption about life and love. They have just as much difficulty understanding my actions as I have understanding theirs (except that I have come out of that, so I can still look back and see what the thought patterns and justifications were for me back then).
Among them, there seems to be a lot of empathy, because they all operate from the same premises. But their efforts to try to cross the barrier between us, or my efforts to try to cross the barrier back in the other direction...these messages always get warped and twisted. It never comes across as the originator intended.
However, when I talk with other people, people who have fought their way out of enmeshed family systems and embraced the entire concept of healthy boundaries, love based on freedom instead of obligation, those people hear me clearly, sometimes even more clearly than I hear myself. Suddenly, I see that it's not that I don't have empathy--it's that empathy is so very limited in its traditional use for the purposes of crossing certain boundaries.
Basically, it's not really empathy until we can each start to see life from the other person's standards and understanding, NOT just from what we would personally feel if we were in their position externally. Empathy requires connecting with their internal world, not just the external one.
So for example, this past week my mom has announced that she's angry at me for the way I did some work the past several months and feels I should have done it differently (even though I did what she asked for). My external empathy actually drove the way I did the work, thinking I was giving her what she wanted, asked for, and needed (and I still feel that way...I have emails to show this is what she asked for to the extent she explained what she wanted).
But internal empathy goes a step further and recognizes that she is reacting out of fear of losing control of the next project we're about to start. She has never had a safe relationship in which she was able to really depend on someone and still have things turn out well for her. She is acting out of fear, and the way I handle this situation has to take that into account...plus the fact that she can't admit she's acting out of fear and dysfunction. Her external empathy says, "Yes, I recognize that you were trying to do the best you knew how and that it was an act of love on your part." But her lack of internal empathy is actually communicating the message, "You're so stuck on acts of service as your expression of love, and your refusal to communicate love to me in the way I want (regardless of what I say I want) is leaving me feeling unloved and it's your fault."
She's not seeing the world from my perspective, despite all my efforts to explain my experience and reasoning and desires and needs to her. She can "accept" what I want to the degree that she feels obligated to try to give that to me, but she's not really hearing who I am through it all (she doesn't have to agree with me to do this...just understand my perspective well enough to truly accept ME as being different from her in some very fundamental ways).
She resents that I'm different from her. She wants me to see things her way so she can give me what she wants to give, which are the same things she wants in return, things that make her happy and that she wants these same things to make me happy.
The thing is, empathy isn't really about the things that we do or say, although those are expressions of empathy or a lack thereof. Empathy is about seeing into and trying to understand and accept another person's internal experience of the world. I'm not trying to change my mom. She can stay as enmeshed and codependent as she wants to...with other people. But if she understood empathy, real empathy, she wouldn't be so dead-set on condemning me for having a different internal experience of the world than she has. This is not judging her for her underlying assumption that other people are responsible for her feeling loved. She can believe that if she wants to. The problem comes when she thinks everyone else should believe that, too.
Expecting everyone else to process life the same way that I do...THAT is a lack of empathy. On the other end, demanding of myself that I make all of the adjustments and never expect anyone else to adjust to me, is also extremely unhealthy.
Understanding and accepting that other people process life very differently...and at least making an attempt to understand their internal worlds in order to find ways to connect through the communication barriers...THAT is true empathy.
At the same time, there must be balance...
I attempt to understand another person's internal world and connect with them in ways that matter to them, even if they're not ways that would work for me. But I'm still not fully responsible for seeing that communication occurs accurately, because they can still choose whether to receive what I managed to offer or not.
Empathy must be fully grounded in freedom, or it turns into nosiness, invalidation, intrusion, enmeshment, and codependency.
- There's the freedom for you to tell me only the parts you choose to tell me about your inner world, and the understanding from you that I can only act on what you've shared with me. That is, I can't read your mind.
- There's the freedom for me to respond how I choose to respond, in ways that are authentic to me, from a place of caring and not obligation.
- There's the freedom for you to receive what I offer or to turn it away if you decide it won't be helpful to you...without repercussions from me being offended.
It has to go both ways to produce desirable results. Your freedom, AND mine. Your authenticity, AND mine. Your efforts, AND mine. When the demands are lopsided, when the standards are dysfunctional or weighted toward one party over the other...problems happen. And it's not really empathy.
Empathy is an effort I make toward you and offer you. But freedom is the only medium that makes the transmission of love possible.