Frontiers Friday #55. Empathy (Part IV)
Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development
Frontiers Friday #55. The Darkside of Empathy (Part IV)
Can there be a downside to empathy? That's what we'd be looking at in this week's missive.
In case you missed it, here's the previous 15 recommendations on Empathy, , and .
📕Bookworm: Against Empathy
Much of my thinking about the flipsides of empathy stems from Paul Bloom's work. He says "empathy is innumerate." In other words, we are likely to care more about a single story of a child in poverty, than a statistic about the suffering of many children. Instead, he argues for more rationale compassion.
Semantics? Or is there more to this?
👓 Wed-Read: The surprising downsides of empathy
This BBC article does a good summary on the downsides of empathy. Excerpts:'A final downside of empathy is sometimes-incapacitating emotional impact. The philosopher Susanne Langer once called empathy an “involuntary breach of individual separateness” – and this seems to apply particularly when we observe someone suffering, such as a loved one.
..We ought to start making a clearer distinction between empathy and its apparent synonym: “compassion”. If empathy is about stepping into someone’s shoes, compassion is instead “a feeling of concern for another person’s suffering which is accompanied by the motivation to help”, according to Singer and Klimecki. To be compassionate, it does not mean you have to share somebody’s feelings. It is more about the idea of extending kindness towards others.Bloom uses the example of an adult comforting a child who is terrified of a small, barking dog. The adult doesn’t need to feel the child’s fear to help. “There can be compassion for the child, a desire to make his or her distress go away, without any shared experience or empathic distress,” he writes.'
🎧 Listen: No Stupid Questions Podcast
I love the conversations between Stephen Dubner (famed Freakonomics author) and Angela Duckworth (yeah, the Grit researcher).
Take a listen to episode: 44. Is Empathy in Fact Immoral?, as they delve into this topic of the downsides to empathy.
I like their take on this:
Empathy is a good first, bottom-up step towards compassion.
(In the second part of this podcast, Dubner and Duckworth talks about why people like to take personality tests. Reminded me of Annie Murphy Paul's book The Cult of Personality Tests.)
👓 Web-Read: Dark Sides of Empathy
This NPR article features an author of the book, The Dark Sides of Empathy. Fritz Breithaupt . This book sits on my shelf and is taunting me.
A snippet from the interview with Breithaupt:Interviewer: In your book you talk about something you call "vampiristic empathy." What do you mean by that?
Breithaupt: Vampiristic empathy is a form of empathy where people want to manipulate the people they empathize with so that they can, through them, experience the world in such a way that they really enjoy it.
An extreme case of this is helicopter parenting. Helicopter parents are constantly trying to steer their kids in the directions they think are the right directions. Of course they want the best for their children. Very understandable; I have kids and I want what's best for them too.
But I think there's something else seeping in. There's this sort of living along with the kids, imagining how it must be like to have a life that's marked by successes, where obstacles disappear and life can be enjoyed. But that also means that the parents are co-experiencing that life, so they start taking over ... they basically want to use the child almost as a pawn.
In a sense, extreme helicopter parents are robbing their kids of a selfhood so that they can basically project their own self into these kids. [emphasis mine]
⏸ Words Worth Contemplating:
"It's not that empathy itself automatically leads to kindness. Rather, empathy has to connect to kindness that already exists.”. ~ Paul Bloom, developmental psychologist.
Reflection:
Looking back, has there been times when empathy didn't serve you well?
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