Home » Articles posted by Lou Agosta (Page 6)
Author Archives: Lou Agosta
Empathy: Capitalist Tool (Part 2): “CEO” now means “Chief Empathy Officer”
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6nngUdemxAnCd2B2wfw6Q6
“CEO” no longer means “Chief Executive Officer,” but “Chief Empathy Officer.” This time one can hear the groans—from the executive suite, not the cubicles.
Empathy is one of those things that are hard to delegate. This role shows up like another job responsibility with which the CEO of the organization is tasked—along with everything else that she already has to do. As if she did not already have enough alligators snapping at various parts of her anatomy, one has to be nice about it, too? But of course empathy is not niceness, though it is not about being un-nice. It is about knowing what others are experiencing, because one has a vicarious experience and then processing that further to expand boundaries and exercise leadership.
This puts me in mind of a mini-case-history reported by Annie McKee in the Harvard Business Review (HBR).[i] In this case, an up and coming executive, Miguel (not his real name), goes from turning around many struggling divisions in a multi-divisional corporation to a kind of identity crisis about who he authentically is in relation to the possibility of empathy. Miguel is a wizard at finding profit and weeding out waste. Miguel goes from division to division (each big enough to be a separate company) working his financial wizardry. It seems to work.
If the case sounds like a thinly disguised version of the career of Jack Welch, who was CEO of the multi-divisional General Electric (GE) from 1981 to 2001, then so be it. Welch retired from GE with a package estimated at $417 million.[ii] According to some reports, Welch was nicknamed “Neutron Jack,” because, like the neutron bomb, he eliminated the people while leaving the buildings and the profits standing.
Welch innovated a management approach called “rank and yank,” now widely imitated. Each year, the bottom 10% of his managers, regardless of absolute performance, would be let go. Those in the top 20% were amply rewarded with bonuses and stock options, which were extended liberally from top executives to nearly one third of all GE employees.
Welch reportedly fought against, but did not solve, the chronic problem of Wall Street pressure to sacrifice the sustainability of long term growth for short term profit. Welch railed against the very system that he outfoxed brilliantly over a twenty year career as CEO, but, note well, only after he got his payout.
Regarding shareholder value, Welch said in a Financial Times interview on the global financial crisis of 2008–2009: “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy […] your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.”[iii]
Now you are going to expect me to say this method was the epitome of lack of empathy, and from the perspective of the employees whose jobs were eliminated, it definitely lands that way. Yet that is precisely what Welch was hired to do. Thus, the context.
Next act, quick scene change back to Miguel. In McKee’s HBR mini-case-history, his corporate superiors inform Miguel that those employees who survived his restructurings now hate their jobs, teams are dysfunctional, and the “by the numbers” culture has become toxic. (I believe this did not happen at GE.) Miguel is told “fix it” or he will never become CEO (which is apparently part of his agreement and expectation).
Miguel hires Professor McKee as his empathy consultant, and he is making slow, all-too-slow, progress working with her in expanding his empathy when another set-back occurs. Miguel’s wife throws down the gauntlet, pointing out that he is never available for her and the kids even when he is supposedly physically present. This hits home, literally. This inspires Miguel to expand his practice of empathy to a new level. He commits to learning how to listen, relate to others as a contribution, walk in their shoes, and respond empathically.
Thanks to Miguel’s renewed commitment—and McKee’s consulting and coaching—the empathy training works. Miguel expands his empathy in time. All live happily (and empathically) ever after, both at home and on the job, in this “just so” story.
However, in the real world, the Miguel and Welch narratives dramatically diverge—as do fiction and nonfiction. As a celebrity CEO, the dynamics of Jack Welch’s personal vicissitudes were played out in the public press, so they are readily available to the interested gossip—I mean reader—and the details of Welch’s three divorces will not be rehearsed further here. This speaks volumes to most ordinary humans. Thus, the lives of the rich and famous.
The empathy lesson? There is an cost and impact to every initiative and project. The cost and impact extend to empathy. Empathy is expanded or contracted. There is a cost and impact to “rank and yank,” even for those doing the ranking (though, of course, especially for those who are “yanked”).
No one needs to feel sorry for anyone, reportedly the “yanked” walked away with nice packages, but this is not for the faint of heart. On a happier note, Welch goes on to found a management school, the Jack Welch Institute, in an initiative designed to rationalize and replicate the business methods and financial “magic” that he developed at GE. Some thirty-five CEOs heading corporations today have been trained in his method (mostly at GE, not his theme-branded school). The principles Welch developed are also delivered at business schools such as MIT’s Sloan School of Management. With the case of Welch in the background, one realizes that the mini-case-history of Miguel really does indeed conceal an alternative point of view. However, “alternative” does not mean “inaccurate,” but a re-description of events that points to a hidden empathic breakdown.
Miguel was doing exactly what his corporate superiors asked him to do. If the financial results were not sustainable after his departure, this was so much “regression to the mean.” Even the average profitability of the companies identified by the celebrated In Search of Excellence by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman dropped sharply within a few years in the absence of sustained leadership. “Regression to the mean” means literally that when one performs above average now, get ready for one to perform below average later; when one performs below average now, get ready to perform above average later. The boss will predictably approve of the above-average performance and disapprove of the below-average one; but the subsequent performance is governed by “regression to the mean,” not the boss’ approval or disapproval.
For all the ambiguous comments made about Jack Welch such as “Neutron Jack,” he managed to create an entrepreneurial spirit in a giant, multi-divisional bureaucracy. Now that was both the good news and the bad news. For those employees looking to put in their time, performing routine tasks—and conforming—prior to collecting a pension, that was bad news. It demanded a way of relating to possibility that required innovation and transformation that was ultimately career ending for those individuals.
To his enduring credit, Welch inspired an approach to creating possibilities by his own example that he called “boundaryless.” In short, he broke down organizational silos by giving permission to cross boundaries between traditional functions in search of possibilities, i.e., innovations. The boundary crossing sounds like the skillful use of empathy in building and managing cross functional teams.
Welch formed cross-functional teams to brain storm and implement possibilities that had not previously been envisioned. He championed ideas and possibilities for improvement regardless of whether the ideas came from inside or outside the company. “This is the way things have always been done” became the wrong answer, or at least no longer the default reply. Note that “boundless” behavior should not be confused with boundary violations. Empathy is about crossing boundaries to give the other person the possibility of breakthrough contribution, doing so with respect and recognition, and in a way that preserves the integrity of the boundary.
Welch was in charge at GE for twenty years; he had sufficient time to train divisional leaders in sustaining his practices; and retain them in charge of the divisions he had restructured. During his tenure at GE, the company’s value reportedly rose some 4,000%.[iv] If that is not sustained value, I would not know it.
Meanwhile, Miguel’s bosses asked him to put relatively short term financial results ahead of team building, retaining the best people, entrepreneurial informality, and, like a good leader, he made it work—for a while. He made it work until the bosses decided they did not want him to do that anymore. Surprise! Then they told him, “Fix it or you’re gone!” Miguel’s listening—a key component of empathy—was operating at an advanced level. He listened well; and he gave his superiors back precisely what he got from them—and what they asked of him. It turns out his superiors didn’t like it as much as they thought they would.
It does put one in mind of the example of George M. Pullman, who is no longer the model for employer-employee relations. Pullman ordered the workers fired when they presented him with a petition in protest of a 25% reduction in wages.[v] Pullman as Miguel’s boss? Miguel’s superiors changed their minds, having gotten the benefits of the “rank and yank” approach. Boards are allowed to change their collective mind (and minds), and were now looking for a CEO more like Walt Disney, Marshall Fields, perhaps Warren Buffet or Sam Walton, after the latter had made their first billion dollars, and could afford to throttle back a notch, cultivating a kinder, gentler image.
My redescription of events? While it is accurate that Miguel was innovating with his own version of Neutron Jack, Miguel was also on the receiving end of the breakdown in empathy. He could not give what he did not get, and, by the time his corporate superiors figured out what they wanted, Miguel had perfected his version of the Roman invasion of Britain. The surviving Brits were reported to have said: “The Romans ‘make peace’ by creating a desert.” The Brits were not referring to an “empathy desert,” but the idea is similar. McKee’s case history is a nice narrative and a useful cautionary tale. However, the tale lacks credibility and confronts us with the next challenge, empathy: capitalist tool.
Empathy: Capitalist tool
“The Lone Ranger” is a vanishing breed in today’s corporation. Modern work, from the upper echelons of the corporate hierarchy to the bottom levels of the lowest cubicle, requires empathy.
Whether sales person, software developer, accountant, or business leader, one has got to be “a team player,” “willing to go above and beyond the call of duty,” spend long hours on business travel, and be cheerful about it. One has got to get in touch with one’s empathy; and use one’s empathy to satisfy customers, teammates, stake-holders, and superiors.
In short, empathy is now a capitalist tool. Managers need to apply ample empathic skills. Managers are required to keep workers contented so that the workers can be productive. Managers are now coaches, facilitating employees feeling valued, so employees are emotionally invested in contributing to the team, team spirit, and the long hours and frequently uninspiring routine work required as a project hits “crunch time.”
Both managers and line employees must be able to turn empathy “on” for customers; “on” for team work; “on” for co-workers; but “off” for the competition; “off” for efficiency and discipline; and “off” for compliance and rule following. This ability to turn empathy “on” and “off” implies an approach that this book has questioned in arguing that empathy is a dial or tuner rather than an “on-off” switch. However, even if, for the sake of argument, we imagine empathy as an “on-off” switch, this calls for a level of skill in regulating empathy in which most people lack practical skill.
Consider. Customers pay their good, hard earned money for products and services, and it is a low bar to say that customers are entitled to be listened to, treated with dignity, and responded to empathically by a corporation and its representatives. The empathic engagement with and treatment of customers is demonstrably a rewarding investment.
How about employees? As a person moves into the work force, he is empathic because those in authority advocate for it as a form of team building. It is important that one be empathic in addressing the issues and concerns of co-workers, customers, and stake-holders.
Employees who feel that they are “gotten as a possibility” by their company are emotionally invested in the success of the company. They are inspired to go the extra mile to deliver value on their agreements, make extra effort for the team, and see their personal contribution in terms of the big picture. They are not just stone cutters banging away at a rock with a hammer; they are building a cathedral.
Neither the employee nor the manager “above” him have been trained in empathy, and it is not a part of their job description, at least in any explicit way. Though there are dozens of training firms in everything from compliance to conflict resolution, the number of individuals and firms in North American and the European Union delivering empathy training can be counted on the fingers of one hand. While that may be changing, expecting CEO’s to give empathy when they are not in touch with their own empathy, makes no sense. Nor is it fair either to the leader or would-be recipient. Welcome to the age of Machiavellian empathy!
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was famous for saying that it would be best if the leader—the Prince, in his day—was loved, but it is essential that he be feared.
Machiavelli never actually said that the ruler, the Prince, must be perceived to be empathic, even as he ruthlessly wields power behind the scenes. But that is what he implied. In the context of politics, Machiavellian empathy refers to politicians who present themselves as being empathic while manipulating, spinning alternative facts, double dealing, and so on, behind the scenes. Machiavellian empathy shows up in business, too. If managers are not in touch with their empathic abilities, they are counseled to “fake it till you make it.” Many never “make it” and continue “faking it.”
Whether or not one authentically understands the experience of the other person is less relevant to the Machiavellian Empath than scoring points on a check list of concerned behavior.
Is this then the ultimate cynical moment? Is this the ultimate easy way out? Is this the reduction to absurdity of empathy? If empathy is about setting boundaries, where is the boundary? While not a complete response, one distinct limit to Machiavellian empathy is Lincoln’s famous saying, “You can’t fool all the people all the time.” Ask Travis Kapernick, Bernie Madoff, or Harvey Weinberg.[vi]
Strictly speaking, Machiavellian empathy takes nothing away from empathy’s intrinsic benefits and uses. Even if one wants to present the appearance of being empathic for propaganda (i.e., marketing) purposes, while continuing to operate with dubious business practices behind the scenes, reality has a way of catching up with appearances. Amazon said it was a wonderful place to work. Then the New York Times got some employees to comment on the record about “mean” behavior.[vii] Uber was disrupting the disrupters and creating the Gig Economy, which supposedly set us free. Then a driver, who was not in touch with that supposed freedom, unwittingly interviewed the CEO, Travis Kapernick, on camera.[viii]
So far as we can tell at this writing, neither of these breakdowns has resulted in breakthroughs. There is no guarantee that the Machiavellian Empath will slip up and document his or her own inauthenticity for us; it rarely happens rapidly enough; but it happens.
Empathy deserts grow: Woe to those that harbor empathy deserts!
Capitalism organizes empathy along with workers and production processes. Under capitalism, empathy is a means, not an end dedicated to the satisfaction of human needs, aspirations, and demands. (When the word “demand” is used, think “supply and demand” for products and services in a market.) Some workplaces are empathy deserts in spite of the appearance of mangers with published “open door” policies.[ix] Key term: empathy desert. After a day at the office, people often feel as if their personality had been erased. One’s humanity withers in the desert. So if you find yourself feeling dehumanized by your job, maybe you work in one of those, regardless of the prevailing rhetoric.
Instead of the industrial supervisor shouting orders to his workers, who curse under their breath and conform to the orders, today’s managers employ therapeutic strategies to create a convivial environment of trust, relatedness, sociality, loyalty, and care. Happy people sell. Happy people write more software code with fewer bugs. Happy people deliver projects on time, on budget. Value creation in the late capitalist economy is a function of the exchange of emotion and empathy.[x]
The way “empathy” is used in the business media today, it means that corporations innovate in providing benefits to their employees. Many of these benefits enable employees to get away from the job and restore aspects of their humanity that are hard to maintain in the “corporate jungle” (or desert). It means that firms return to their employees some of the revenues that the employees earn for the firm by providing services. Such a proliferation of meanings may be a phase that empathy has to go through before we can really grasp how it essentially makes a difference.
For example, Procter & Gamble offers a personal leave of absence, which the employee can use to engage in a “life project.” Up to three months off without pay—but with continued benefits—allows the employee to pursue a personal “life project,” and, P&G to retain valuable talent, since the employee returns to work after the sabbatical.[xi] Though Human Resources (HR) has to approve the project, the benefit can be used to: complete writing a PhD or masters thesis that requires dedicated time on task for writing and research; design and implement a database tracking system for a social justice issue for Amnesty International or Doctors Without Borders; trek to Nepal and attempt to climb an 8K meter high mountain; sail around the world.
At Google (Alphabet) parental leave is a benefit: Moms get up to 18 weeks of paid leave; Dads get six. The company also pays “baby bonding bucks” to help with initial expenses such as formula and diapers.
Prudential Financial is addressing the employee challenge of being a care-giver for a parent or relative by providing adult care in an employee or loved one’s home. The company provides referrals to geriatric care services as well as elder law and adult care-giving seminars.
IBM contracts with an educational firm to provide a “get into college coach” for its employees with children applying to college. They will not write the admissions essay for the children, but provide detailed guidance as to what different colleges are looking for, test scores, grade point average, and cultural preferences. All these are valuable in reducing parental (i.e., employee) stress. Note this is one corporate benefit that does not require the employee to leave work. Sensibly enough, the worker continues to work, presumably to pay college tuition, while “out sourcing” some of the elaborate, complex project planning needed by the student actually to get into college. Win-win all around.
While my work has repeatedly emphasized that there is enough empathy to go around, empathy is not uniformly distributed. How could it be? Executives who are talented at dealing empathically with customer issues may be less skilled at dealing empathically with employees; and those skilled at dealing empathically with employee issues may be less skilled at dealing empathically with union negotiations, the press, or business partners and competitors (who may be one and the same).
Arguably, empathy flows from those with more power towards those on the front line engaging with customers. However, if the customer is big enough, for example, contemplating buying a fleet of jets or a global enterprise software system, the ultimate sales person turns out precisely to be the CEO or her close colleagues. The executive suite is now on the front line. But who trained those leaders—or any one—in empathy? If we gave the executive (or front line help desk person) the kind of empathy exam described above by Leslie Jameson, in which an actor learns a script, portrays a client with a problem, in effect being a “secret shopper,” what would be the grade (see p. 121 above)? While we may never know for sure, I predict that the grade will be lower than if the executive fills out a self-assessment in which one can pick out the “right answer” based on common sense and an appreciation of kindness. Thus, the case for expanding empathy through training.
[i] McKee, Annie. (2016). If you can’t empathize with your employees, you’d better learn to, Harvard Business Review, November 16, 2016.
[ii] Anonymous Contributors. (nd). Jack Welch. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_ Welch [checked on June 30, 2017].
[iii] Ibid, Jack Welch, Wikipedia
[iv] Ibid, Jack Welch, Wikipedia
[v] Melvin Urovsky. (1998). Pullman strike, Britannica Online: https://www.britannica.com/event/ Pullman-Strike.
[vi] Meanwhile, more breaking news, as this book goes to press, some 49 men stand accused of sexual misconduct in various workplaces extending from Harvey Weinstein’s Hollywood production company (from which he was fired) through venture capital to restaurant businesses:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/10/us/men-accused-sexualmisconductweinstein.html?_r=0. The problem is that, while it is good that this abuse is finally coming out, it has been hidden in plain for years and years. See Harry Markopolis’ (2010) statement in a different context above, “no one would listen.” Where is Lord Acton when we need him? Lord Acton said: “Power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
[vii] Kantor and Streitfeld 2015..
[viii] Seyluk 2017.
[ix] Roman Krznaric (2104) quoted in Belinda Parmar (2014) The Empathy Era: Woman, Business and the New Pathway to Profit, London: Lady Geek: 91. Parmar does not cite a page in Krznaric.
[x] Tristam Vivian Adams. (2016). The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organises Empathy. London: Repeater Books: 56–77.
[xi] Matt Krumie. (2016). Ten companies putting empathy into action, Cornerstone On Demand: https://www.cornerstoneondemand.com/rework/10-companies-putting-empathy-action [checked on July 03, 2017].
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy: Capitalist Tool (Part 1): The Empathy Deficit in Business is Getting Attention
The empathy deficit in business is getting attention
Listen to podcast on Spotify or via Anchor: https://anchor.fm/lou-agosta-phd/episodes/Empathy-Capitalist-Tool-Part-1-The-Empathy-Deficit-in-Business-is-Getting-Attention-e18tlcn
Children and parents get it. Nurses and doctors get it. Teachers and students get it. Couples get it. Consultants and clients get it. Neighbors get it. What about business people? Do they “get it”—that empathy produces results? Practicing empathy is a neglected opportunity in business. The qualities, practices, and behaviors that help a person build a business sometimes work against expanding the person’s empathy.
An executive’s ego, opinion, expertise, and attachment to being right raise the bar on empathizing with others, who may have diverging mind sets. Hard charging entrepreneurs find it hard to let go of their status or set aside the lessons learned as they came up through the ranks. Executives and managers lose touch with the experiences, perceptions, and perspectives of customers, employees, and stake-holders.
The urgent drives out the important. Management effort and time are monopolized responding to competitive pressures, compliance issues, legal challenges, and solving technology problems.[i] For example, according to a report from Businessolver, a human resources and talent consultancy, some 60% of executives believe that their organizations are empathic, whereas 24% of their employees agree.[ii] An empathy deficit?
The stress of operating the business—deadlines, financial issues, staffing crises, software breakdowns, competition, litigation—drive out empathy and a deep appreciation that a commitment to empathy is good for business. The disconnect is substantial between perceptions in the executive suite and in the cubicles of workers and the front line, customer-facing staff.
Ironically, the empathic practices such as the receptive, interpretive, and responsive processes described in detail in this work (as opposed to compassion) are what are most urgently needed in dealing with customer demands, employee crises, negotiations with competitors, vendors, clients, and one’s own budgeting authorities and board, optimally resolving conflicts with reduced cost and impact.
When I ask business leaders what is their budget for empathy training, the response is often a blank stare. Zero. However, when I ask the person what is the budget for expanded teamwork, reduced conflict, enhanced productivity, commitment to organizational goals, taking ownership of outcomes, product and service innovations, then it turns out that budget exists after all. Empathy makes a difference in connecting the dots between business skills and performance. Empathy contributes to results in a powerful way by engaging the staff’s energies and commitments at a fundamental level.
While every business has its own distinct commitments, in many ways, the basic empathy training in business is the same as empathy training in every other context.
The training consists in surfacing and driving out the cynicism, denial, shame, implicit threats, and pressure that many business people experience in their communications. Empathy then spontaneously comes forth and expands the space of possibilities to do business. This does not mean that businesses do not have their own blind spots when it comes to empathy. They do. Therefore, let us take a step back and look at what it is going to take.
An appreciation of the value of empathy to promote breakthrough results often starts in sales. In business, the sales people get it. Developing empathy with customers is good for business.
Even the cynical sales person recognizes that putting oneself in another person’s shoes is a good method of selling them another pair.[iii] The sales person gives the prospect some empathy. Shazam! The customer calls you to close the deal. Wouldn’t it be nice?
Yet the basic idea is straightforward. When the customer appreciates that the sales person is interested in the customer’s requirements, that the sales person is listening, then the customer is likely to open up and candidly share what is stressing him—budget, deadlines, internal politics, market dynamics, or the competition.
When the prospective customer feels that the sales person has understood him, the chance is significantly expanded that he will prefer to purchase the product or service from the empathic representative. Once the customer feels the sales person is listening, the customer will share details about his needs, vulnerabilities, and shortcomings, including those about which he might otherwise be defensive, enabling the sales person to position the product or service as a solution to the perceived problem.
This is not “new news.” In 1964, in the Harvard Business Review—not exactly an obscure, backwater publication—David Mayer and Herbert M. Greenberg called out the two basic qualities that any good sales person must have: empathy and ego drive. These authors define “empathy” as the central ability to feel as other people feel in the context of selling them a product or service.
In Mayer and Greenberg’s article, the sales staff were trained to interrupt themselves when they found that they were reacting defensively to customer complaints, whether legitimate or not, whether solvable or not. Stop—hit the pause button before responding. Instead of reacting to the complaint, the sales person was trained to “get” the complaint and to communicate back to the customer that he “got it,” namely, that the customer was upset (or whatever the customer was self-expressed about).
The sales person was trained to acknowledge that a breakdown had occurred. Key term: breakdown. The sales person was trained to acknowledge the complaint by calling it out: “This is a break down!” Even if the customer is inaccurate or wrong in his complaint about some detail, the customer is always—the customer.
By definition, the breakdown in the product or service occurs against the expectation of customer satisfaction. The relationship between the buyer and seller is itself in breakdown against the expectation of satisfaction. This does not rule out the possibility that additional training is needed on the part of the customer about product features or the service level agreement; but such training is substantially different from a defensive reaction.
The next step is repairing, fixing, or at least managing the cause of the complaint: the respondent then solicits additional feedback and details as to the complaint, i.e., what went wrong. The empathic response includes what one is going to do about the breakdown and by when.
The committed listening, that is, empathy, creates a clearing for communication, improving the sales process, and restoring authenticity to the relationship when integrity has gone missing. While there are no guarantees, customers treated in such a way tend to stick. Repeat business, maximizing revenue over the lifetime of the relationship, is one of the outcomes. [iv]
The empathic leader meets “economic man”
Development Dimensions, Intl., (DDI) identifies empathy as one of the critical success factors in executive leadership. One of the leading talent development corporations in the market, DDI’s report on High Resolution Leadership identifies empathy as an emotional quotient (EQ) “anchor skill.”
Empathy provides the foundation for interpersonal leadership skills such as developing subordinates, building the consensus for action, encouraging engagement, supporting self-esteem, and taking responsibility.[v]
In the DDI study, listening and responding with empathy were demonstrated by 40% of executives profiled (as opposed to 71% whodemonstrated taking responsibility or 54% who demonstrated building agreement on actions to take).
The conclusion is that, as regards empathy, the majority of leaders have room for expanding their performance. The good news is that, using interventions designed to expand empathy, the empathy skills needed to drive business results are within reach. [vi]
Thus, the empathy deficit in business is getting attention. Empathy is moving to the foreground. The role and contribution of empathy to business results is penetrating the awareness of leaders, managers, staff, and stake-holders.
Closely related to the challenge of closing the empathy deficit in business is the challenge that “economic man” is significantly different than man as such. Let’s define our terms.
The person who conducts transactions in the market is defined in business school as economic man—homo economicus. The latter is significantly different than man, the human being as such. The person (man) in the economic theory is rational, selfish, and her or his tastes do not change.
Business practices assume the organization is engaging with customers, employees, stake-holders, and leaders who fit the model of economic man. Human beings, on the other hand, do not. Most people in business do not know anyone who fits the description of economic man. Why then are we so busy trying to do business with him when he does not even exist?
Unlike the person described in economics in business schools, humans are limited in their reasonableness. Humans are diverse and inconsistent in their preferences. Humans are even limited in their selfishness, being generous and compassionate in unpredictable ways.
The issue? Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker’s rational choice theory (preference theory) in economics has been extended to many other aspects of life. Becker’s rational choice theory has been extended to areas as diverse as marriage, crime, and discrimination.
Generalizations from rational choice theory to the social sciences at large have been a growth industry in the social sciences. From the rich mixture of inconsistencies and contradictions that most people really are in life, the human being was translated into a function of rational, self-interested, and allegedly consistent preferences. The human as such has been simplified and redescribed as a rational, calculating engine of human behavior.[vii]
People are supposed to be consistent in their preferences and tastes. People are supposed to be logical and consistently obey the rules. But finding counter-examples is easy.
For example, if a person prefers coffee to hot chocolate and the person prefers hot chocolate to tea, then, according to this logic, the person is supposed to prefer coffee to tea. [Think: coffee > hot chocolate > tea; therefore, coffee > tea, according to the transitive rule, in which “>” means “prefers.”] But, no, it doesn’t work that way. Given all these personal preferences as indicated, the person still chooses tea instead of coffee. The person just prefers tea to coffee. The individual is from London!
Nothing inherently illogical exists in preferring coffee to hot chocolate and tea to coffee while also preferring hot chocolate to tea. Nothing unless one insists on making a dynamic network into a transitive sequence. So much for rational choice theory.
The lesson? Empathy as well as logic are required to understand decision making. Without allowing for the possibility of empathy, economics produces some strange results. People are not natural born statisticians, logicians, or gamblers, though the discipline of economics sometimes seems to assume so.
Still, testing a person’s decisions and preferences using probabilities, bets, and lotteries is an engaging exercise, and nothing is wrong in doing so. However, unless one also adds empathy to the mixture of economics and logic one misses something essential—the person!
Now, I apologize in advance to the reader for the technical terms, but in economics the chance of winning a bet is expressed as an “expected utility.” “Expected utility” is technical talk for “satisfaction” or “happiness.” (But nothing more than arithmetic is needed to get this. )
For example, in economics the expected utility of a 10% chance of winning a million dollars is $100K [.10 x 1,000,000 = 100,000] [note: K = 1,000]. If Jack and Jill both end up with a million dollars, they should enjoy the same expected utility, no? Remember, Jack and Jill are supposed to be rational, selfish, and consistent in their preferences. Now consider a counter-example:
Today Jack and Jill each have a million dollars.
Yesterday Jack had zero and Jill had two million dollars.
Are they equally happy? (Do they have the same utility?)
You do not need an advanced degree to know that today Jack is very happy and Jill is in despair. Yesterday Jack had zero; now he has a million dollars. Hurrah! Yesterday Jill had two million dollars; now she has only one million. Ouch!
We must be able to put our ourselves in the shoes of Jack and Jill and get a sense of their expectations. Sounds familiar?
These expectations, in turn, constrain their experience of satisfaction (i.e., happiness). To grasp the outcome in terms of their individual experiences, we need an empathic anchor or reference point in their expectations from which they begin. Empathy gives us access to an anchor point in their respective experiences.
Our empathy shows that outcomes are linked to feelings about the changes of one’s wealth rather than to states of wealth. The experience of value depends on the history of one’s wealth, not only the current state of it.
Yet another bold empathy lesson: People are strongly influenced by hope and fear. Empathy indicates that people attach values to gains and losses, and these are weighted differently than logical probabilities in decision making. This is not just saying that people are irrational, though that may be true enough at times, too. This says that people (and their behavior) frequently do not conform to the pattern of rationality, selfishness, and consistency in preferences.
Still, the matter is not hopeless for those committed to pattern matching in economics. People are frequently surprising, but sometimes in predictable ways. People are sometimes inconsistent, but one can sometimes predict those inconsistencies if one learns one’s empathy lessons.[viii] For example:
(1) People are risk averse due to fear of disappointment and regret. The empathy lesson is that people try to avoid risks even in situations where taking a risk is a good bet. “A good bet” is determined according to the probability calculation.
Consider: if a person had a 90% probability of winning a million dollars, he ought to accept $900K as a “sure thing” settlement, which settlement is logically equivalent to a 90% probability of winning the million dollars [.9 x 1,000K = 900K]. The 10% probability of not winning is an unlikely outcome, but still possible. The “unlikely outcome” often determines the result.
For example, law suits in cases of accidents and contract disputes produce settlements in trial law indicating that people will “settle for” $800K or even $750K for the possibility of knowing the outcome with certainty. For most people that is still a lot of money, and the possibility of having to live with the regret of missing the pay-off due to an unlikely outcome gets most people out of their comfort zone. They decide to settle.
Empathic receptivity to the possibility of disappointment and regret may usefully “override” the rational, self-interested, and consistent preferences that the purely economic person brings to the negotiations.
(2) People are risk seeking in the hope of getting an even larger gain instead of accepting a modest settlement.
This is why people bet on the state lottery where the chance of winning is vanishingly small. Such a bet is illogical, but common. We need expanded empathy to get a clue what is going on here.
The empathy lesson indicates that people are not buying a chance to win a big pot of money. Rather people are buying a chance to dream of the possibility of winning the big jackpot. “We are such stuff as dreams are made of,” said Shakespeare. The value is in the dreaming, that is, precisely in the possibility of the big jackpot, not the jackpot itself. That such a dream would more likely be the dream of a poor person rather than an affluent one is a further problem that invites attention.
If one looked rationally at the odds, one would not buy the ticket. No way. Clearly lotteries are popular, especially with the poor and “have nots.” The possibility of escaping from poverty is being manipulated in a cynical way by the establishment, and we citizens have all become “addicted” to the revenue stream.
The lottery budget and effort would be better devoted to job training and instruction in basic financial management, except now lotteries have become a source of revenue for local government and education. This is a breakdown in empathic understanding, which gives us our possibilities. It is hard not to become a tad cynical in considering that the poor are paying for education through lottery revenue, though they are often unprepared to benefit from or hindered from accessing the educational opportunity.
(3) People are risk seeking in the hope of avoiding a loss in situations in which simply stopping a project altogether would enable cutting their losses (rather than incurring additional likely losses). Defeat is difficult to accept. The empathy lesson is that people are attached to an ideal, in this case a losing cause, for reasons extending from perseverance, egoism, greed, risk aversion, fear of the unknown, all the way to idealism, romance, blind hope, and just plain stubbornness.
People (and businesses) facing a bad outcome manage to turn a survivable (but painful) failure into a complete meltdown. Desperate gambles often make a bad situation worse in exchange for a small hope of avoiding the loss at all. Businesses, individuals, and even countries, continue to expend resources long after they should blow the bugle, lower the flag, and leave, implementing an orderly retreat. Instead people (and organizations) persist in a lost cause until a rout becomes inevitable.
Business accounting teaches the basic idea of a “sunk cost.” Suppose Octopus, Inc., (OI) is building a new software system for $100 million dollars. OI has already spent $150 million. The project is over-budget. It is estimated to take another $55 million to complete the job. Suppose further that evidence of a new, breakthrough technology really exists. It would enable OI to develop the system from scratch for $25 million. What should OI do? The money already spent is a “sunk cost.” It should not influence the decision. Given the evidence that the new technology really works, the OI project leader should throw away the over-budget system and build the new one from scratch, spending $25 million and saving $30 million against the projected completion cost of the project. However, that is not what most project leaders would do.
Due to a sense of ownership of the over-budget project and a fear of the unknown in engaging the new technology, many project leaders double down on the investment in a losing proposition. In a breakdown of empathic interpretation, they continue to project their hopes and fears onto the old technology and, as the saying goes, throw good money after bad.
(4) People are risk averse due to a fear of a large loss and may rationally and usefully bet on a small chance of (avoiding) a large loss. This is why people buy insurance. The empathy lesson is that people are not merely buying protection against an unlikely disaster; they are buying peace of mind, the ability to get a good night’s sleep. If the negative event would have catastrophic consequences, creating a risk pool, in which everyone participates, spreading the risk in a manageable way, makes compelling sense. Note that certain risks such as war and civil insurrection (or a giant asteroid hitting the earth) are uninsurable. Insurance is a calculation, not a gamble against undefined odds. In general, the insurable risk must relate to individuals or subgroups and the occurrence of the risk should not destroy the infrastructure of the entire community, which needs to be intact to cover the insured risk.
Insurance was a brilliant business innovation that emerged at about the time of the European Renaissance as traders in the Netherlands—those frugal Dutch—were sending valuable but fragile ships to fetch precious cargo in far away lands. The risks and rewards were great. How to even out the odds? Insurance was born.
In our own time, one can see the irrationality, the unempathic response, and gaming of the system by special interests in health insurance in the USA where attempts were made to exclude the sickest people from the insurance pool through penalties for preexisting illnesses, combined with charging monopoly rents to the healthiest participants.
Insurance is often a “good bet” when an outcome that is highly unlikely but catastrophic can be managed by everyone (or a large group) incurring a small cost to spread the risk. But how to get everyone at risk into the pool? When told that people have no health insurance, some politicians are supposed to have said: “Let them pay cash!” In another context, in one the most spectacular breakdowns in empathic responsiveness in modern European political history, the French Queen, Marie Antoinette, was told that the people had no bread, and she is supposed to have said: “Let them eat cake!” Same idea?
Saying that the purpose of business is to make money is like saying the purpose of life is to breathe. Keep breathing—and make money—by all means. But the purpose of life is to find satisfaction in one’s work, raise a family, write the great American novel (it’s good work if you can get it!), experience one’s efforts as contributing to the community and making a difference.
Likewise with business. Business is about delivering human value and satisfying human demands and goals, whether nutrition, housing, transportation, communication, waste disposal, health, risk management, education, entertainment, and so on. Even luxury and conspicuous consumption are human values, which show up as market demands.
In conclusion, business people “get it”—empathy is good for business. Profit is a result of business strategy, implementation, and operations, not “the why” that motivates commercial enterprise. And if profit shows up that way (as the “the why”), then you can be sure that, with the possible exception of index derivative hedging, it is a caricature of business and a limiting factor. Business prospers or fails based on its value chain and commitment to delivering value for clients and consumers. However, as noted, some of the things that make people good at business make people relatively poor empathizers.
Business leaders lose contact with what clients and consumers are experiencing as the leaders get entangled in solving legal issues, reacting to the competition, or implementing the technologies required to sustain operations. Yet empathy is never needed more than when it seems there is no time or place for it. This is a challenge to be engaged and overcome.
What to do about it? Practice expanded empathy. Empathy is on the critical path to serving customers, segmenting markets, positioning products (and substitutes), psyching out the competition—not exactly empathy but close enough?—building teams and being a leader who actually has followers. Empathy makes the difference for contributors to the enterprise at all levels between banging on a rock with a hammer and building a cathedral. The motions are the same. When the application of empathy exposes and strengthens the foundation of community, then expanding empathy becomes synonymous with expanding the business. Building customer communities, building stakeholder communities, building teams that work, are the basis for product innovation, brand loyalty, employee commitment, satisfied service level agreements, and sustained or growing market share. Can revenue be far behind? Sometimes leaders don’t need more data, leaders need expanded empathy, though ultimately both are on the path to satisfied buyers, employees, and stakeholders. If the product or service is wrappered in empathy, has an empathic component as part of the service level agreement, gets traction in the market, and beats the competition’s less empathic offering, then we have the ultimate validation of empathy. We do not just have empathy. We have empathy Capitalist Tool!
Notes
[i] Katja Battarbee, Jane Fulton Suri, and Suzanne Gibbs Howard. (2012). Empathy on the edge: Scaling and sustaining a human-centered approach in the evolving practice of design, IDEO:
http://liphtml5.com/gqbv/uknt/basic [checked on 03/31/2017].
[ii] William Gentry. (2016). Rewards multiply with workplace empathy, Businessolver: http:// http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/brand-connect/businessolver/rewards-multiply-with-workplace-empathy/ [checked on 03/31/2017].
[iii] Roman Krznaric. (2014). Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It. New York: Perigree Book (Penguin): 120.
[iv] C.W. Von Bergen, Jr. and Robert E. Shealy. (1982). How’s your empathy? Training and Development Journal, November 1982: 22–28: http://homepages.se.edu/cvonbergen/files/2012/11/Hows-Your-Empathy.pdf [checked on 03/31/2017].
[v] Research Staff. (2016). High Resolution Leadership, Data Dimensions, Intl.: http://insight. ddiworld.com/High-Resolution-Leadership [checked on 03/31/2017].
[vi] William Gentry, Todd J. Weber, Golnaz Sadri. (2007). Empathy in the workplace: A tool for effective leadership, http://www.ccl.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/EmpathyInTheWorkplace.pdf [checked on 03/31/2017].
[vii] Bernard E. Harcourt. (2015). Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[viii] Daniel Kahneman. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy and Literature: Transcript of Grand Rounds Talk (Oct 13, 2016)
This is a transcript of the talk.
The recommendation? Listen to the podcast: https://anchor.fm/lou-agosta-phd/episodes/Empathy-and-LIterature-Grand-Rounds-Presentation-at-Rush-Medical-University-October-13–2016-e177nvv
or watch the Youtube video: https://youtu.be/sYJvplP5cKo
Howard Kravitz, MD: Welcome to the partner psychiatry gran realms this morning is my pleasure to introduce the speaker dr. Lou Agosta got his PhD in philosophy at the University of Chicago with a dissertation entitled empathy and interpretation and running with that as his career scholarly activity ever since he’s an assistant professor of psychology at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology and Argosy University and instructor of philosophy at the University to call the Graham School of adult education and director of research at other gang psychotherapy services in Chicago he also as a psychotherapy practice in the Chicago community who specializes in making empathy present in his storytelling and listening – he’s committed to a gracious and generous listening based on empathy which I personally experienced a meeting with him this summer to talk about his idea for Grand Rounds – as an educator he teaches empathy in the history of and systems of psychology program at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology and Argosy University – he has published three scholarly academic books on empathy entitled – empathy in the context of philosophy – a rumor of empathy: rewriting empathy in the context of philosophy – and a rumor of empathy: narrative and recovery – he also undertook training as a psychodynamic therapist at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis – however did not complete the program when he was summarily dismissed for asking publicly “is anyone beside me aware of a lack of empathy?” – so with that I will turn the program over to him
Lou Agosta [LA]: Well thank you so much dr. Kravitz for that introduction – so the challenge is to make empathy present – will we be able to do that in the next 45 or 50 minutes? I begin by acknowledging your empathy – you all are going to be doing some listening and I appreciate that and recognize that and acknowledge it – and I want to be concise and allow time for questions in interaction at the back end – some logistics and housekeeping make sure you have the color handout – if you don’t it’s in the back on the left side – there it says how empathy functions – 2-sided copying ladies and gentlemen – and then how empathy breaks down – so sometimes we can create a breakthrough based on a break down – and one of the results of the conversation that we’re going to have today among others is a short history of the distinction empathy – in fact the secret underground history of empathy – we’re going to define empathy –
Lou Agosta [LA]: we’re going to look at some examples of empathy through literature – so rather than clinical examples I’m going to ask you to take it up a level – the guidance is and with all due respect don’t be too concrete don’t be too literal let’s get our metaphorical transference thinking caps on and look at empathy of [in] some examples of world literature and then I’m going to make time – I’m going to say a few things about how empathy is teachable trainable – in fact that’s so important i am going to give you the answer right up front – basically people are naturally empathic – if we remove the obstacles to empathy, then empathy shows up – in other words, the obstacles to empathy are the such things as: denial, resistance, cynicism, bullying, aggression, bad language –
LA: I have a great Dilbert cartoon here -[make sure you] don’t get inside of a Dilbert cartoon – [it is] hilariously funny – closely related to empathy – [drive out] denial, cynicism, guilt, shame, and the like – remove the obstacles to empathy and it [empathy] naturally comes forth – so that’s the answer – what’s the question? – how do we train everyone ? – so we’re gonna circle around and return to this at the back end – we’re going to begin with a short secret underground history of empathy – so this is going to be blazingly concise –
LA: this is the part which you may find somewhat academic [but important] and there as you look at it in the upper left hand corner a man named David Hume [ who published] A treatise of human nature 1739 – [in the year] 1739 the word empathy in the English language was not even invented [it was not invented] until 1895 when a Cornell University psychologist – a man named Edward Bradford Titchenner was translating some of the works of Vilhelm Vundt [Wilhem Wundt] – I have to get my best German accent on there – it comes across as empathy – he [Titchener] makes up the word [empathy] – okay – meanwhile […] that’s why we have a secret underground history of empathy – Hume is writing and has at least five different definitions of sympathy – I say close enough – you have the hand out – the complete deck is on the URL on the lower left hand corner [see the youtube video for the slides] – I’m not going to speak slowly enough for you to take notes –
I’m going to tell you what the five different definitions of sympathy – they’re there and you can go back and get them – he never a stickler for consistency – the philosopher Hume divides sympathy as (1) emotional contagion – he defines sympathy as (2) suggestibility – the power of suggestion – (3) he defines it in a somewhat technical way as a double representation of a vicarious experience of another person combined with the idea of the other that matches closely to a modern definition of empathy that we find in psychology (4) he also defines sympathy as a delicacy of sympathy and taste and this matter of substituting a certain kind of sympathy in the experience of the work of art – this is the secret underground history of empathy – we relate to other people on a good day as if they were works of art – that is without use value – without manipulation – without knowing something – without categories – without argument – and [on] a less good day we struggle like everybody else – and finally as (5) benevolence – he defines sympathy as compassion or benevolence –
LA: and so we’ve got all these definitions – what the heck is it [empathy] – what is this definition so I sent the class [I was teaching at the time] out [to do research by asking people on the street] – I have everybody in the class – several classes – each student asked five people what they think empathy is – not members of your family people – you know moderately well – not really close – you know – but people you might work with or run across at the club or at the gym or something – so there’s a trend – so sometimes I go around saying we don’t need more Data we need expanded empathy – I’ve been known to say that – and nevertheless we need both data and empathy […] -I say more empathy – it’s like there’s something missing rather than something wrong – let’s expand – the languaging is significant as well – this is in the realm of tips and techniques- okay – so anyway – so the people go out and ask them and so here’s the trend: most people think empathy is something like compassion – they tell the story about altruism – they tell a story about charity – they tell the story about doing good – they tell the story about making difference – they tell a story about being nice and heavens knows ladies and gentlemen, the world needs more niceness – [yet niceness] it is distinct from empathy – we’re going to say a little bit more about that but first I want to very concisely touch on – as you look at the picture in the upper right hand corner – Immanuel Kant – he died in 1804 – he had the distinction between putting oneself in the position of the other person – he said enlarged thinking – think as the other [people] think and feel – so that’s top down – in effect we take that as the folk psychology definition of empathy – we take a walk in the other person’s shoes – where does the shoe pinch – where does the moccasin chafe – and then he also he once again interestingly and controversial enough in the context of a theory of art and beautiful nature he talks about the communicability of feeling – art is impossible without the communicability of affect – feeling – that’s stage one of empathy – now if you stop, [then] there you get emotional contagion – you get suggestibility – you get a certain kind of shared mutual enthusiasm – and there’s nothing wrong with that if there’s further processing upstream and downstream that’s going to occur – nevertheless it’s right there and then [we are going] around the circle –
LA: and this is why this is the secret underground history: on the bottom left – a man named Theodore Lipps – remember the movie Amadeus ?where you know Mozart is slaving away and the most famous man of his day a musician named is Antonio Salieri who today except for the movie Amadeus nobody would have ever heard of Antonio Salieri – I mean he’s not played – or they’ll give attention occasionally now because of the movie – right – and today Mozart – everybody knows Mozart’s music is played widely and nobody’s ever heard of Salieri until you come across the movie – well Lipps is Salieri to Freud’s Mozart – Lipps wrote several volumes in which he gives currency in the German language to the word Einfühlung [empathy] – he [Lipps] in effect replaces the distinction aesthetic taste judgment of a feeling of pleasure or displeasure with Einfühlung [empathy] – and he [Lipps] is significant because seven volumes of Lipps work are in the Freud Library – Freud encountered empathy by reading Theodore Lipps –
and [Freud] footnotes Lipps explicitly in Freud’s works on jokes and the relation to the unconscious – and the number of his aesthetic works – so moving right along there are twenty-two mentions of empathy in 24 volumes of the Freud Library as Harry Trosman MD and Simmons – our colleagues over at the analytic Institute – have done the scholarly work – here’s the point – almost every one of them [references to empathy] is mistranslated – freud says in so many words in his 1913 [year published] recommendations for physicians beginning psycho analytic treatment: you will go wrong if you begin with any other method besides empathy – quote end quote – it’s there and that gets mistranslated as sympathetic understanding – the Strachies [translators] will have a few other devaluing things to say about the word empathy so that’s the secret […] – the rest is history which we’re not going to do in the necessary detail – we’re going to move right along –
so most people think that empathy is compassion – and heavens knows the world needs more compassion – yet [compassion] it is not empathy – so what then is it ? Well basically we’re gonna have about two or three different definitions but the main definition which you have in front of you is to the effect – I know what the other person is experiencing because I experienced it also – not as a merger but as a vicarious experience – note vicarious experience contains the word Vicar which means representative – the etymology right as it actually works in this case if that is the the bishops representative to the community – the Vicar of something or other – and in any case combined with the distinction Other – and so basically here’s the distinction – empathy tells me what the other person is experiencing – and my good upbringing, my morals, my values, tell me what to do about it – and so that’s the compassion part – it’s in and its distinct – so having said that now here’s the most controversial slide I want you to pick up on this because it could be a controversial –
and I want – to quote to Jodi Halpern and I’m gonna wave Jodi’s book at you [entitled From detached concern to empathy: humanizing medical practice – Jodi Halperin – this is [published] 2001 so this has been around for a while and you know if we’re gonna have lunch afterwards – if you want to take a picture of the cover – I’ll bring it [the book] along with me and you can check it out but basically she says – the field of medicine empathy is a mode of understanding that specifically involves emotional resonance so it’s not just top down – it’s also bottom up – I’m getting some kind of a vicarious experience – this may or may not be the case – this may or may not be the case […] and so you know nevertheless she puts a stake in the ground and she is actually a psychiatrist – she has some stories
and I turn now to the explicit definition of empathy which we’re going to work with here and there are four phases to it – and that’s the handout – […] you get the handout – it’s on the left there – in the back table – so you want to be on the side: how empathy functions – […] so we’re gonna go around in a circle – we’re gonna go around in the circle here that would be actually counterclockwise – I’m open to the other person – I’m receptive – I have mirror neurons – and here’s where one can insert the underlying physiology – the underlying neurology – that’s not visible – here us mammals – we seem to resonate together – something is going on – we’re attached – it’s a myth that we aren’t related – we are related – physiologic\ally, biologicall,y and so [that is] phase one […]
phase two that creates a potential space for interaction – what’s possible in the relationship – do I relate to the other person as a means or end – do I relate to the other person as a possibility as a potentiality – we’re going to see an example of that and then actually you have to jump across so that gives us empathic receptivity- empathic understanding and empathic interpretation is the third aspect of empathy and that is the folk psychology of empathy – I take a walk in the other person’s shoes – I imaginatively change places with you – now that’s easier said than done because I don’t know you and nine times out of ten if I don’t, [then] I’m going to attribute to you aspects of my own character traits – Who I am – what I’m up to and that’s the challenge – right? – that’s not going to be and it’s going to be a psychological mechanism called projection which has its uses and is of interest – nevertheless is once again not empathy – and so get a view from over there but that does especially when I come up short I don’t know who you are – where you came from – then I go to the cognitive imaginative projection – and that’s very useful – and finally empathy can be a tree that falls in the forest without anybody being there – does it make a sound? does it make a difference? I have to say something I have to do something – a gesture- an aspect of behavior to let the other person know whether or not I have gotten what their experience is and sometimes that’s called empathic listening – that’ll work – good gracious listening – that maybe it is self sufficient but sometimes it’s not especially if I don’t know the other person – it may we’re highly verbal – you know there’s a lot of words and sometimes it’s necessary for me and so empathic responsiveness – so we’ve got receptivity – understanding – interpretation – and responsiveness –
I take the other person’s experience and give it back to them in such a way in such a form that the other person recognizes the experience as their own – on a good day that’s how it works – that’s the aha moment – that’s what I was going through – it’s sometimes it could be the very words but often it’s not – often it’s I’ve got inside the movie of your life for a little while – now each of these [four moments of empathy] breaks down in an interesting way and we’re going to therefore look at the breakdown – so this summarizes something interesting and which I think I do want to say it’s always useful to know the order in which one has one slides but basically this is the matter of so we’re gonna, you know, this [talk] is front end loaded – I acknowledge this presentation is somewhat front and loaded because there are several important ideas I want to get into the space and on the table so that we can mix it up about it – but basically so this is the compassion fatigue the burn out moment – heavens knows, occupational hazards – professional challenges – if I may say so – here’s the guidance – this may be for the easier said than done but nevertheless it must both be said and done – and insofar as humanly possible: if I’m interacting with somebody who is suffering, it is highly probable that I am going to suffer – the recommendation, the guidance is, that I have a vicarious experience of that suffering – if I am suffering in such a way that I am in breakdown or upset, [then] I’m doing it wrong
That’s the easier said than done – if I’m overwhelmed by the suffering – as strange as it may say sound to say: I should suffer but not too much – and so this points to the matter of a granularity – to the receptivity – there’s a filter there – right – I mean this all hypothetical – interesting to engage – nevertheless I may want to make the filter more granular and do things to take a little distance so it is not an on/off switch – the takeaway here – not an on/off switch – more like a rheostat – more like a dimmer on a light switch and this is where training and practice make the difference – so I mean we may or may not come back to that – but I want that [statement] in the space so that we can work with it as we get to these examples we’re going to look at – so am I going in the right direction here […] I see we’re just on time –
we look at three or four examples – here I may cut this short because I want to say a little bit more about the training aspect but we’re going to look at Thomas Mass – Thomas Mann is a storyteller – this story got told on or about the year 1900 – it’s about a family the name of Buddenbrooks – they’re a business family – right – and the context is Thomas Buddenbrooks – so here’s the inside skinny – here’s the Birdseye low down on this Buddenbrooks caper – Thomas Buddenbrooks is an artistic type – he’s very artistic – and his father passes away in an untimely way and he – Thomas – goes into the family business to pay the bills – you know, one can understand why one would do this – he gives up his artistic career – his artistic aspirations – and instead of pursuing an artistic career, he marries one – her name is Gerda – she’s an artistic type – we’ll see a picture of her later – […] – she’s playing the violin – she’s a virtuoso violinist – playing passionate virtuoso violin duos with her talented father – it’s so great to have a great relationship […] it’s a very good thing and they have a son – Johann – Hanno, for short – he’s an artistic type – he’s portrayed by Mann as being on sickly – I mean, he’s got bad teeth – this is going to be an issue because this is 1900 – you know dental science – oh my god this has to be interesting –
LA: [ …] some people are already squirming in their seats – it’s working – the mirror neurons are going off even if they don’t exist – this might be a good point to digress – the myth of mirror neurons – professor – C[Jean] Decety – he’s got the MRI machine down at Gates Blake – he recommended this book by Gregory Hitchcock- there’s an underlying neurological mechanism, ladies and gentlemen – it does [or doesn’t] have to be mirror neurons – how about Association? – have you considered a good old-fashioned association? – there’s some implementation mechanism – it’s highly interesting and controversial – I’ll keep the book handy – it’s a scholarly academic debunking […] but what isn’t debunked is our physiological relatedness – even if they [mirror neurons] don’t exist, we’re physiologically related – that’s interesting so and not in the way you might have thought – okay – so anyway you know the dentist – we’re gonna have a trip to the dentist here thanks to Thomas Mass and I’m actually going to read it to you – the paragraph long quotation – so Hanno has bad teeth – in Mann bad teeth are a sign of artistic sensibility – in the case of Hanno he’s kind of sickly – kind of small – he gets bullied by the straggling Nordic types down at school – you know they push him around – it’s not a pretty picture – and his father becomes [a book camp dad] [the father, Thomas] he’s kind of badly compensated – I would say and he’s this hail-fellow-well-met – my son – give me your mathematical multiplication tables – and Hanno knows his tables – he just can’t perform – he breaks down – it’s pathetic – you know but he’s like seven years old – wa, was [crying sounds] – buck up my son – Thomas is boot camp dad and it’s not working – okay – so meanwhile there’s a bit of orality – you know, we can do the oral symbolism – Hanno needs to vigorously suck on the nipple of life and he’s really struggling to engage
[Meanwhile] – off to the dentist doctor – the dentist is already upon dr. brecht – a pun – it’s broken – so I’m gonna read you this slowly –
‘The bad thing about Dr. Brecht was he was nervous and dreaded the tortures he was obliged to inflict – we must proceed to extraction – he would say growing pale – Hanno himself was in a pale cold sweat with staring eyes incapable of protesting or running away – in short, in much the same condition as a condemned criminal – he saw dr brecht’s sleeve and the forceps bending over him and noticed that little beads were standing out on his bald brow and that his mouth was twisted – when it was all over and Hanno, pale and trembling, spat blood into the blue basin at his side dr brecht had to sit down and wipe his forehead and take a drink of water”
LA: So what’s going on here is a breakdown – this is a breakdown in dr. Brecht’s empathic receptivity – he’s overly empathic – one might argue – compare and contrast – the description itself gives us access to the phenomenon – right – both both are sweating – brecht’s mouth is twisted – interesting, the mirror neurons are going off – [brecht’s] his mouth is twisted [so the mirror neurons are going off] – so what’s the recommendation? this is the time for a bad joke – right – he should have gone into ophthalmology – forgive me – okay so back that one out – okay pause for laugh – but anyway it’s a serious insignificant group here – so here’s the breakdown and so what’s the recommendation? – given that empathic receptivity is breaking down on the part of dr. brecht […] – to get some distance from the tortures he inflates – given what is 1900 Dental Science – oh my god – it’s hard to think right and so he has to increase the granularity of the filter – easier said than done but practice practice practice practice what does that look like because he’s providing a useful service – […] I mean, it’s like it’s misery – there’s all kinds of mystery – okay – so you know I pause for breath at this at this point – I would ever take questions even at this point about the example – you know it’s not like this is a quiz and I don’t you know you’re eager for me to move along but don’t be shy raise your hand – okay, so we will move to the next example and that if you think of anything we can circle back around – so remember the set up – Thomas Buddenbrooks gives up his artistic career and he marries someone who is very artistic – Gerda – and she is artistic and she has to move and locate because the Buddenbrookss live in a different town than her father – so she’s no longer playing violin duo’s with her father – she’s got nobody to play with – one might say – so she meets this lieutenant who happens to be a talented violinist in addition to his military aspirations – so they’re upstairs playing passionate violin duo’s and Thomas’s office is downstairs and he’s listening to the violin music – and that’s not the problem – there’s nothing wrong with that – then the music stops – then there’s silence – there’s more silence – there’s even more silence – Thomas is going crazy – Is he going to become the caricature of a jealous husband? – that would be to throw the guy [lieutenant] out – that would be a scandal – that would indeed be a caricature – right – so he’s wandering around pacing back and forth – so he is pacing back and forth and he runs into Hanno in the hallway next quotation –
“His father did not seem to be listening – he held Hannes free hand and played with it absently, consciously fingering the slim fingers and then Hanno heard something that had nothing to do with the lesson at all – his father’s voice in a tone he had never heard before – low distressed almost imploring – Hanno, the lieutenant has been more than two hours with Mama – little Hanno opened wide his golden brown eyes at the sound and they looked as never before clear large and loving straight into his father’s face with his red and eyelids under the light brows its white puffy cheeks and long stiff moustaches – God knows how much he understood – but one thing they both felt in the long second when their eyes met – all constrained coldness in this understanding melted away – Hanno might fail his father in all that demanded vitality energy and strength but where fear and suffering were in question, there they were as one empathic understanding –
Hanno [saw] something that he had not previously perceived – this father was boot camp dad – multiplication tables right – the time goes by – Oh God now he sees – so what’s the word? vulnerability – that’s one possible description – this bootcamp dad is vulnerable – he’s suffering- Hanno does not get it – what does it mean – playing violin duos and then silence -Hanno’s seven or eight years old – right? – so their eyes meet – that is the moment of empathic receptivity embedded in empathic understanding – the father who was so inaccessible in his hail-fellow-well-met and boot camp-style cross-examination of Hanno about his lessons becomes vulnerable and accessible in his suffering – Hanno gets it – his father’s suffering is a possibility – the possibility of his humanity – they share a human moment – the possibility of relatedness emerges in which both are human beings and an emotional connection with one another – this had not been available to Hanno before – for whom his father was this strong demanding taskmaster – now he sees his father’s vulnerability and it humanizes both of them – this is also an example of empathic understanding that works to an extent but ultimately the father remains [in] the role and the story goes along […] What you want to get here is just a picture of the lieutenant and Gerda – they are practicing the violin – she’s giving a master class in practicing the violin – and so let’s do a reality check here – I want to leave both enough time for questions and answers and say something about a little bit more about training
So I’m going to fast-forward through interpretation – if you get the deck you can get some detail and move on to the Glass Menagerie [by] Tennessee Williams who is a formidable psychologist – so the story in brief: Amanda is the mom – Laura is the frail, fragile keeper of The Glass Menagerie – she lives in the back room – she is the daughter – she has a brother, Tom, who has a friend, Jim – Amanda, the mother, had many gentleman callers in her youth – she was popular – we could do with the song from Wicked [the broadway play] at this point but perhaps we won’t – we can we splice that in later – but as she was popular – now she’s fading – the bloom is off the rose – off the flower in the years nineteen fifties – and she so badly wants a date for Laura – to get a date – she wants her to have a gentleman caller caller so she pressures her son, Laura’s brother, Tom, to bring somebody from down at the factory and finally Tom invites Jim, his friend – there’s other information asymmetries in the story – Jim’s already engaged – get ready – you don’t necessarily know that at this point [in the story] but look is to follow along so the invitation is accepted – at last a gentleman caller! – the problem is Jim thinks it’s just a casual dinner with his friend Tom but in fact he then meets Laura who know Jim from grammar school – they went to grammar school together! – it’s small world and Jim sees her and and he says two words: blue roses – blue roses – and Laura is taken aback – she had many childhood illnesses including pleurisy – fluorosis – and when the teacher this was the day when the teacher would say why you weren’t in school well she’s got fluorosis or pleurisy – nobody knew what that meant anyway but Jim hears that as “blue roses” so here’s the part we’ll cut to the chase – Laura also has another childhood disease which leaves one of her legs slightly shorter than the other – polio- and as she walks down the aisle her experience of herself as that she’s making this enormous clomp clomp thumb clomp clomp as she walks down the aisle that everybody must know about it –
of course Jim didn’t even perceive it [it is so soft] and so we have here an example of what amounts to empathic responsiveness – he [Jim] gives her back his experience of who she is for him – for Jim, Laura is “blue roses” – something beautiful even if kind of melancholy – she’s got this melancholy aspect to her which makes her all the more attractive of course – […] and whereas she experienced herself as clunk clunk clunk thunk – the asymmetry there is very powerful – it’s very nice – I think Williams is a brilliant psychologist – I mean – and unfortunately – I mean – he’s also pretty depressed himself and it ends badly – nevertheless we’re going to enjoy the moment – the emotional devastation [is powerful art] – okay, so having so you know that’s three out of four examples – now we’re just on time
I’m going to talk and to tell you about an exercise rather than do the exercise – I call this exercise: I can’t hear you because my opinion of what you are saying is so loud – I’m going to be disarmingly with candid – so you know there I am walking down the street – and I am ashamed of myself – the author of three books on empathy – [and i am thinking devaluing thoughts] – how did that person get to be that way – I’m judging and evaluating – there’s these thoughts – what happened to you man? – wherever it comes, from it’s not authentically Who I am – you want to take this and apply it as appropriate and to yourself: there I can’t hear you because the opinion of what you are saying is so loud in my own thinking – so this is an exercise, not how to listen better, but how to expand one’s listening – right – stop and so actually this is where the the [Dilbert] cartoon comes in handy –
[…] there’s an exercise here that this is how to train for empathy – what does it mean to train empathy – remove the obstacles such as cynicism, categorizing people, labeling, pigeon holing, and so on – I’ll read this to you just so some of you are picking up on it – [in the Dilbert cartoon]: now so there’s the pointy headed boss [and he says] “from now on all teams will be formed on the basis of myers-briggs personality test types” “if you do not have a personality, one will be assigned to you by Human Resources [dept]” – okay, laughter at this point, [this] is deeply cynical […] this is what not to do – right? – and then the final [statement of the cartoon] “we need a quiet dumb guy to pair with an extroverted thinker” – well here the cynicism is what gets in the way of empathy – now that is not to say that it is not abroad in the land of the corporation [and it] goes off the rails – so what I invite – what the exercise consists of doing is going inward and realizing that if one goes inward far enough, one encounters the other – so we actually are going to take literally a half a minute and do the exercise –
So I’m going to ask you to be quiet and listen to yourself […] now there may be papers going off so just include that because this is after all a hospital – […] but listen to what is there – okay are you ready – any questions before they do the exercise? – it is it clear what I’m asking you to do ? please say if it’s not clear […] so you’re just gonna listen to whatever is there okay ready set go
[pause for thirty seconds]
Okay – that’s 30 seconds […] now you might have heard something like “what is he talking about?” “where did this guy come from?” “What voice?” “What conversation?” That’s the one – that’s the one [we are talking about]! – it’s not who I authentically am – and [yet] that is a source of empathic understanding -I am in relationship with the other and I’m going to have judgments, opinions, evaluations, philosophical arguments, categorizations, labels and so on – there isn’t anything wrong with those – those thoughts occur – they are inevitable – you can’t – ladies and gentlemen, you can’t stop thinking those – you can’t prevent it – what you want to do is get some distance from it and realize when it’s useful and when it’s less useful and so with that said we’re going to have some time for questions –
The one final thought I leave you with – and it’s a direct consequence of this little exercise – to listen to oneself, when all the labels are removed, when all the categories are removed, when all the philosophical arguments are removed, when all the cynicism, hostility, affectation, even compassion, sadness, fear, guilt, shame – when all these things are removed, [then] empathy consists in being in the presence of another human being
LA: what are your questions?
LA: The lady in the back – I’ll repeat the question – go ahead –
Do you think you can teach empathy?
LA: The short answer is yes […] so I’m going to repeat the answer – I just [asserted] we’re naturally empathic – remove the cynicism, denial, shame, guilt, and empathy naturally shows up – train the trainer now that’s not considered the possibility […] there other tips and techniques – this is the realm of tips and techniques: my reaction to you tells me something about both of us and a lot about myself which I then parlay forward to understand the relationship
[….] The challenge to create a context in which empathy can show up – right that’s not a trivial things – it’s a lot of work – and of course teaching is information transfer – I put information in your bucket – you bring a bucket or a basket and the teacher puts information in it – there’s nothing wrong with that – we need that – […] the world doesn’t work without information and there’s also the other aspects – dimensions – especially to our humanity and what happens in the context of a conversation – so you know there’s some work to be done on creating [possibility] and that’s what I think [why] literature has its uses in creating a context for a conversation that’s why I find it useful other questions? so I mean feel free to challenme
Individuals have been in some tough spots in the trenches for a while and become hardened – I think you use that word and how does one recover from that? – so I would also put on the list compassion fatigue – burnout – this is a significant occupational hazard – I mean – take some time off for self-care – this is the case for self-care – that one has to find some things where one can restore one’s emotional energies if you will – that we have something like emotional energy – and because being burned out – being compassion fatigued – I ain’t doing nobody any good much less myself – right? – so sometimes one has to get some supervision – I mean now leaving aside matters of such as vacation and that is where I find humor which is closely related to empathy – this Dilbert is deeply cynical right? – but –
in both empathy and humor one traverses a boundary – in the case of humor, one can say look at the boss is an idiot and it’s funny – Human Resources says a personality will be assigned to you – it’s hilarious, right? […] it’s the reduction to absurdly right? – so philosophically, it’s a reduction to absurdity – so one can use humor […] so this is the case for one’s own psychotherapy – I mean that the therapist him or herself may usefully encounter at some point in their development something like whatever this thing is – therapy h- aving a conversation with oneself – journaling – it may become a self-sustaining process – I get a lot out of journaling – I mean some people do and some people don’t – the world is not generous in the matter of certain things such as empathy – put it on the list with compassion as well right? – and so one has to find some resources to recharge one’s empathy – oftentimes it’s family – speaking personally, coming up, I experienced the lack of empathy so I actually started writing about it – and that was how I approached it and I kind of symbolically created something for myself […] – one final question…
LA: we are out of time – one final question?
what is the triad that sustains the therapeutic process? Warmth, accessibility, what else?
LA: okay well the concise answer is the Triad is – empathy empathy and empathy and warm and accessible is also useful – on a good day the other individual will show you who she or he is – if I am present without categories, distinctions, labels – on a good day they’ll reveal their soul – on a less good day we will struggle like everyone else – thank you so much
I heard there was some lunch – I don’t know if there is – I heard it was are up on six – I’m gonna go up there and check it out
(C) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy versus bullying: Part 3: Recommendations for students, parents, teachers and administrators
Listen to podcast on Spotify (via Anchor): https://anchor.fm/lou-agosta-phd/episodes/Empathy-versus-Bullying-Part-3-Recommendations-for-students–parents–and-educators-e17j1ts
Bullying: Recommendations for students
If one is being bullied, some guidelines are useful.; though no single, easy answer is available.
[Note: even though these recommendations directly address the “student,” they are intended to provide guidance to the parent or responsible adult on how he or she is to address the student regarding bullying. They are intended to inform the grown up, adult’s speaking and listening in the matter of bullying as the grown up engages with their student.]
First, these recommendations are about getting back your power—or at least some of your power—in the face of bullying. Sometimes that looks like making a tactical retreat, much as one might dislike doing so, in order to reestablish boundaries and integrity. The idea is to de-escalate the potential confrontation. What de-escalation looks like is different according to the situation.
Second, this is not happening to you—the target of bullying—because you did anything wrong. Stop the negative self-talk (devaluing comments directed at oneself) about being to blame for the bad behavior of bullies. Such negative self-talk results in two problems, the bullying and your own negative self-talk.
Previously there was only one problem, the bullying. Now two problems exist, the bulling and the negative self-talk. Reduce the problems by 50%; stop the negative self-talk. If you cannot seem to stop the negative self-talk, then get help from a parent or professional with doing so.
Many different kinds of bullies exist—see the above typology—and it is not your job to be the bully’s therapist or policeman.
There is probably no reply to the bully that is so powerful that the bully cannot transform it by using a sing-song, condescending tone of voice.
Even if one says: “Thank you for respecting my privacy,” a statement that makes a great quotation in any subsequent police or administrative report, the risk is that the reply is going to come back at you like yet another confrontation. It might be worth a try, but no guarantees.
The bully is behaving the way he does to “get a rise” out of the target. The intention is to make the target upset. That is a “pay off” for the bully. That is not to say that one should not shout back if shouted at or push back if one is pushed. That is a judgment call based on the situation and one’s sense that fighting back—otherwise know as “self defense”—may make a positive difference in establishing or maintaining a boundary.
However, if one is out-numbered or the bully is physically larger and one’s power is diminished, engaging the bully in a back-and-forth exchange is not going to work. If one can maintain some measure of composure or equilibrium, then the process of escalation on the part of the bully may be short-circuited or at least moderated. The bully is “getting off” on upsetting the target, so, tactically speaking, being boring to the bully is a valid defense. You will be “less fun” for the bully, and he will move on to the next target.
Another thing that is done—and is potentially life saving—is to keep a “bully log,” noting in writing, once one escapes, the occasion on which one was bullied and what exactly was said or done. In the case of cyber bullying, this includes print outs, with URLs and time stamps, or screen shots of devaluing comments from email, Facebook, social media, or text messages.
I know, I know. The last thing that a kid stressed out by bullying wants to think about is documenting what is happening precisely so that one can escalate and get one’s power back. But that is what is required. One may prefer to forget about it all, but keeping a log with dates and times and names (or descriptions if one does not know the name) and what exactly was said or done, is going to be an important part of getting one’s power back in the face of bullying.
Civic and spiritual leaders such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King have famously pointed out that “no one can diminish you without your consent.” That remains true; and it is always a good reminder to oneself in the face of bullying. However, King and his followers actively trained and role-played non-violent resistance prior to engaging in demonstrations, civic actions, marches, protests, and sits-ins, in which they confronted bullying, hostility, and out-and-out violence.
Civil rights activists practiced with colleagues, who pretended to be racists, hurling insults and ketchup at the would-be demonstrators in role playing. In turn, the would-be demonstrators practiced not responding with counter-aggression; and all this prior to their actually engaging in anti-segregation sit ins, public protests, civil disobedience, and so on.
One should not have to undertake training in non-violent resistance in order to survive the ride on the bus to school or the school lunch room, and the fact that we are now discussing such a scenario means that something has already gone seriously off the rails. Attempting to transform a culture of segregation and colonialism as King and Gandhi did—or a culture of bullying—is not for the faint of heart.
A group of middle or high school kids are not the KKK or the British Empire (though they may seem like it at times), and such kids cannot be forced to include an “outsider” when they really decide not to be inclusive. Thus, the coaching to the outsider is to keep looking for a group that is welcoming. Once again, it takes courage—and a support system—and is always easier said than done.
People need friends, and, for people in middle and high school, relating to friends is an important part of the fun. It is a part of growing up and the non-academic learning that occurs. If you are with a group of people—also called one’s “peers”—and their behavior and speech towards you leaves you feeling “less than” or “upset,” then you may need to look at your understanding of what is a friend. If your inquiry to your “friends” as to what is really going on seems to elicit more of the same upsetting and “less than” behavior—then you need to re-examine their status as “friends.” I hope you will not shoot the messenger: it is time to move on and seek friendlier friends.
One bullied LGBT teen made a difference by trying to join a Gay-Straight Alliance group activity at his high school. But there was one catch. Before he could join the alliance, he had to create it. It became a significant project, and a path to engagement for him and numerous fellow students both gay and straight. Never underestimate the power of one person with the courage to stand up and say “Enough—there’s got to be a better way!”
Friends may argue. Friends may disagree. Friends may engage in drama over boy or girl friends. Friends may even decide to stop being friends and go their separate ways. But if one finds so-called “friends” treating one like an outsider, using de-valuing language towards one, or being mischievous in ways that are cruel, mean, or aggressive, then it is time to find new friends. If one’s peer group lets one down, then it is time to seek a new peer group. Once again, this is not easy to do when one is struggling against bullying. However, if one is unable to take action in the direction of finding new relationships because one is so paralyzed by the upset, then it may be because one is anxious or depressed, and the intervention of a caring third party is warranted. But where to turn?
If you have a good relationship with one or both parents, that is a good place to start. Here “good relationship” means that you can talk with him or her. It means the parent has the ability to empathize with your predicament and listen to your concerns. It also means you are not going to come away from the conversation feeling bullied. Older siblings can also be useful if one has a good relationship.
The idea is not to have a grown up “fix” the problem for you, but to find a “trusted advisor” to work with you on what can be done to get back your power—or at least some of it—in the face of bullying. Though the analogy is imperfect, this is a tad like getting tutoring in geometry or science. Do not expect the tutor to do your homework for you; but together you work to acquire the skills, so you can not only survive the lunchroom or school bus ride, but also even have fun and prosper.
If you do not have the kind of empathic relationship with a parent that makes you think the parent can help to improve the situation, then look for a trusted teacher at school with whom one has a relationship. (But see the caution below about teachers and staff being school-bullying-mandated reporters.) Once again, this should be someone who you believe will listen to you—use her or his empathy to appreciate you—and work with you to improve the situation. If neither your parents nor a trusted teacher at school can be mobilized to intervene, then you should look for someone in the community such as a coach at the art or sports center, a pastor at church, or coordinator of the LGBT group in the community with whom you enjoy a relationship of empathy and trust.
If you are being harassed online, request that the web site take down the content, since the harassing comments violent the rules of most web sites. If the site is Facebook, report the abuse immediately via the dropdown item “this picture is of me and I don’t like it” [or words to that effect]. Facebook says that it is committed to taking the word of the reporter (you) about harassing comments. Print out the cruel or mean content or make a screen shot. Put all such stuff in a folder. You need to show others in authority what is happening. It is almost never useful to respond to the perpetrator. If you find yourself compulsively checking back for mean content, take a time out. Power down. Pull the plug. It is not worth it. It might be better to give online activity a break and drop out for awhile. Good friends will be able to reach you by phone or in person.
Another word of caution is needed. If you approach someone in school—a teacher or member of the staff—then this person may be required by law to report the bullying to the school administration. This might be okay if the school has a program in place to deal with bullying. This is also where your written record detailing bullying that has occurred over the past period can be useful. I wish I could say that this would not result in further bullying with accusations of being a “snitch” occurring. But the risk of escalation is real and must be considered prior to taking action.
If the reputation of the school is one of having a culture that seems to permit a certain amount of aggression and discourtesy, whether towards teachers or one’s fellow students, then the risk expands. Retaliation on the part of bullies for complaints about their bullying can become as significant an issue as the bullying itself.
Once the school administration is involved, the process can take on a life of its own. The administration must (is mandated to) open an investigation, and the requirement to gather evidence of bullying can make you feel like you are inside the “hall of mirrors” at the carnival without, however, anyone having any fun.
Grown ups are notoriously unable to distinguish adolescent drama from out-and-out bullying. This is sometimes due to grown ups’ lack of empathy, but not always. If the tweens and adolescents cannot tell these apart, why should the grown ups necessarily be able to? What seemed open-and-shut to the target of bullying can take on disturbing nuances once people are interviewed “on the record.”
Trying to sort out a bullying report can become an exercise in forensic investigation with conflicting testimony full of “he said” and “she said.” Are witnesses denying an alleged episode of bullying—note the legalese “alleged” shows up—because they don’t want to be regarded as “snitches” or because the episode never occurred?
The school system itself—no matter how empathic and well-intentioned—can seem to work unwittingly to punish all participants—or at least use all the time and effort of all implicated in a given incident in filling out forms, processes, procedures, and attending meetings. The process of determining what happened = x has now become something to survive—a potential breakdown in empathy and a breakdown in community. Ready or not, one has matriculated in the “college of hard knocks.”
However, if the student is being physically assaulted or harassed to the point where the student’s school work is suffering (grades and so on), then it is best to “bite the bullet,” fill out the formal report—including the police report if appropriate—try to take charge of the escalation, share the suffering, and learn the lesson in community building.
No one should have to suffer in isolation in the face of bullying. Part of the abuse consists precisely in the bully’s attempt to isolate the target. So the best outcomes are those in which one is able to take action to break out of one’s isolation: finding new and welcoming friends, martial arts lessons, founding a gay-straight alliance at the school, chess or science club, and so on. Once again, this is easier said than done, but it must be both said and done.
If you are someone who is caught up in drama and you are tempted to bully someone, it is time to take a time out. Take a look at your own behavior. Do you really want to be known as someone who is mean or a bully? While “put downs” or “one liners” might seem like auditioning for a role in a reality television show, hit the pause button. There are better ways of getting into show business. Go out for theatre or sign up for an improvisation class. All the world is a stage, and an important part of the training for theatre—and for success in life—is role playing. Indeed acting is precisely role playing. Try taking a walk in the other person’s shoes. There are other, better shoes—and choices—than to bully or be bullied.
Bullying: Recommendations for parents
If your child comes to you with an upset about bullying or you see that she or he is upset about something and the story sounds like bullying, then what should a parent do?
This is where empathy goes a long way. Start by listening. Your job as a parent is to support your child and to help your child regulate the child’s feelings and behavior. Your job is to help the child regain an emotional equilibrium in the face of life’s vicissitudes, including bullying.
Parenting is about setting boundaries. Empathy is about navigating boundaries, and bullying about violating boundaries. Therefore, empathy is about restoring boundaries in the face of bullying.
Be empathically receptive and responsive: “That’s really gotta be a concern.” “Try to tell me exactly what happened.” “Then what happened?” “Say more about that.” “Okay, but help me understand.” “He said what?!” Ask about the details in a concerned, empathic way. “Johnny is a jerk” may be true; but it is an interpretation. That Johnny said “You are a loser” while pointing at his forehead with his fingers in the shape of an “L” is a report of a devaluing comment. Do not be dismissive. It’s not “nothing.” Note it. Be concerned. Avoid finger wagging or moralizing. Though you are obviously “on the side” of your child, do not assume she or he is an angel. Likewise, if the child is known to have a “devilish” streak, do not assume he or she is the devil. A single example is not bullying in itself, but repeated instances start to form a pattern of concern.
One word of caution to parents at this point. One issue that should not be overlooked is how the adult is inevitably confronted with his or her own fate as a child in the face of bullying. In short, if you had a bad experience in bullying that is still unintegrated as an adult, it is going to be there when your child comes to you. If you have unresolved issues around bullying in your own history, when your child comes to you about bullying, a challenging situation becomes all the more challenging for you. You have to distinguish the child’s problem from your own in order to do your job. As a parent, your priority is to solve the child’s problem, not your own.
Now this does not mean the parent has precipitously to go back into therapy (though nothing is wrong with that as such), but that one must be prepared to identify and use one’s own experiences around bullying as a resource. These experiences, long past, will come up. Promise. This is where parental peer support can be essential. Consult with other parents with whom you have a relationship of empathy and trust. It is crucial this be a person to whom one can relate without moralizing or finger pointing.
If one does have an unresolved issue around bullying, then acknowledge it, so that one can gain some distance and objectivity about bullying today. In a deep sense, bullying and human aggression have not changed, though they now have online technology at their disposal; but parenting norms, schools, school administrators, and community standards have shifted significantly since Baby Boomers and even Gen-Xers have struggled with bullying in a different world.
If, when you were a kid, the guidance from your parent was “just hit him back,” and it worked, then you are going to be inclined to provide such guidance. If, when you were a kid, you told his mom about his bullying behavior, and it worked (as unlikely as that may seem), then your initial inclination is going to be to provide such advice. Even if you wished that you had “just hit him back,” but were not able to do so, you are also going to be inclined to provide such guidance. You see the dilemma?
Our empathy for our children in the here and now is a function of our own fate as a child in what was (and is) not always the most empathic of worlds. If one is at a party for five year olds, tweens, or adolescents, then one is inevitably going to be present to one’s own experiences as a five year old, tween, or adolescent. That is a risk and an opportunity. Such experiences from one’s own childhood or teen years can be a useful resource and should not be overlooked. However, such experiences of surviving bullying are most likely to make a positive difference within the context of an empathic listening to the child currently being bullied, not the context the parent had to overcome long ago. [i]
The point is to appreciate the distinction between your own experiences and those of your child. An outgoing or extroverted parent may have a shy or introverted child—or vice versa. Yes, certain kinds of bullying are such that a child may properly be expected to handle them on his or her own. However, if the child who used to enjoy school now dreads it, if grades are suffering, or if a once flourishing child is now floundering, and it is not clear what is going on, then intervention is required.
A substantial part of the challenge for the parent is to re-create the context on the school bus, at school, in the lunchroom, or on the sports field. What seems at first to be an open-and-shut case of meanness or cruelty can turn out to be a complex example of drama, pseudo-sibling rivalry, or bad manners. Debates quickly emerge about “Who started it!?” or “he said” and “she said.” Try to determine who said what to whom and then what happened. You may quickly find yourself asking, “Is there a single fact here?” This, however, does not mean that bullying did not occur. As a parent, you want to document what you have learned, and you want to keep open the lines of communication with your child. Is there a pattern?
In order to be useful in supporting your child, you must have a thorough grasp of what is going on. Get the entire narrative. If what is happening really is bullying, you will want to be as specific as possible in order to make a report to the authorities if the problem persists.
This is where the difference between handing the child a fish and teaching him or her how to fish is the lesson. Even if the student is an adolescent, the student’s request may be to “fix” the problem and make the bully go away. Wouldn’t it be nice? Rarely is that practical. If the bullying is occurring on the way to or from school, and if one can take a different bus or route, by all means, do so. Band-Aids have their uses. Tourniquets are essential. Buy some time to figure out what is really happening.
The tough job of parenting occurs at four levels: (1) providing guidance to one’s student on how to fend for oneself; (2) providing explicit training in self-defense or assertiveness if the student can be enrolled in the value of doing so; (3) reaching out to the parents of the alleged bully if there is any chance they are responsive people, who are able to have a civil conversation; (4) intervening with school authorities (or law enforcement) as a last resort if no other solution can be found.
(1) Share with the student the above-cited coaching in “Recommendations for Students” about the dynamics of bullying. Even if you have reason to believe that your child has been provocative and is engaging in drama, begin by asking, “What happened?” “Who said what to whom?” “What happened next?“ Do not begin by asking, “What did you do to cause this?” That can seem like blaming the victim. Do not be dismissive. Trust—but verify empathically.
Providing empathy means that one should provide examples of proper behavior on the part of “friends” and peers; friends do not use devaluing, hurtful, bad language or engage in aggression against one another; and broach the difficult subject that maybe one needs to find new friends or a suitable, different, extra-curricular activity if one is being harassed. One should provide assurances to the child, who is blaming himself, that the child did not do anything to deserve such treatment.
(2) Time was when “bullying” meant physical aggression. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” We now know that devaluing names, too, are hurtful. This is especially so when the name calling occurs persistently across different environments—at school, on the bus, online after school, and so on. I know—I know. Why is it that parenting usually seems to require ever-increasing commitments rather than less? Yet intervention on the part of the grown ups is important., especially if the meanness is escalating.
If a student, who is being physically assaulted, sees value in boxing or Asian martial arts lessons, the parent may pick up the extra expense and effort of chauffeuring him or her. It may be worth it. Self defense remains a fundamental right.
However, if the individual is up against a group or the size differential is substantial, such lessons might be good for one’s self-esteem (and the value of such a contribution is not to be underestimated), but it is of limited practical value in surviving an altercation. For some shy or socially awkward kids explicit training in social assertiveness is useful.
(3) If one is part of a community where one has communications with other parents, then it may be worth the risk to reach out to the other parents. It is important to do so in a way that does not land like an incoming accusation or reproach. That such a conversation would initially be uncomfortable is no reason not to try.
If you can work with the other parents, it provides an example to all the children of how to resolve conflict in a mature, adult way that benefits all involved. Such a lesson is worth its weight in gold—or at least an associate’s degree in counseling. However, if the parent turns out to be troubled or a part of the problem, then one has perhaps discovered the source of the bully’s misbehavior. One has to move on. Encourage one’s child to leave alone a “friend” who is making his life miserable.
(4) If one has exhausted individual coaching to the child or outreach to other parents, and one still has concerns about the child’s safety or the impact of bullying on a child’s academic results, then it is necessary to approach the school authorities. Remember that these may be harried individuals.
School authorities already have a long list of academic, administrative, and educational responsibilities. The state legislature has just mandated compliance with rules that schools take on the task of managing and improving a situation in which 10% of a school population (say) of 1,000 students is either a bully or a target of bullying over a given period of time. A budget increase to support the mandate is still pending, meaning doing more with less is again demanded.
A parent may have a right to stand up in a school board meeting and express concern or even accuse officials of being indifferent to bullying.
However, it does put one in mind of Dale Carnegie’s dictum: if you want to gather honey, do not kick over the bee’s nest.
Rather identify an educator or administrator who has the empathy to hear your concern about your child’s emotional and academic well-being and its urgency. In a time sensitive situation, specific steps can be taken such as allowing the child to keep a cell phone with him at all times to call for help; a designated safe room (say next to the nurse’s office) that the child can go to in case he feels unsafe; a special hall pass or permission to arrive two minutes before class to avoid the bully; or assigning a grown up to accompany her or him through the hallway. It is important that all the relevant teachers and staff know about this or it will just become another breakdown, punishing the victim as the phone gets confiscated, and so on.
In the case of cyber-bullying of tweens, parents may appropriately have access to the online passwords. Parents may usefully know what sites the children are visiting. Even if one has a phobia for technology, it is imperative for the parents of kids using computers to have a minimum of computer literacy to supervise the kids’ involvement with electronic media. It is a tad stealthy—but I would not rule it out—to have the child train you with her email or Facebook account, and then use what you have learned to monitor theirs.
You would not simply give the kids the car keys and tell them, “Hey, keep in touch!” Funny. The Internet is different than the open road, but hazards and risks exist in abundance in cyberspace, too. Since no parent has enough time to monitor the totality of anyone’s online activity—it would be crazy to try—start out like the wise teacher who begins with strictness but eases up thereafter based on proper behavior and feedback.
Manage by exception. Trust but verify. If spending time engaging online becomes an upset to the child, then an empathic inquiry as to what is happening is needed. Expectations for online behavior should be made clear: Just as one would not use devaluing language, ethnic or racial insults in person, so too one should not do so online. If one is the target of such behavior, then it must be documented, monitored, and neutralized through appropriate interventions.
Why is it that people forget you can turn off the computer or not go to certain sites? Parents’ good examples of laying aside electronic devices and relating in person to other persons speak volumes to kids. So does any behavior that demonstrates a parent’s commitment to drama or using social media to drive personal conflicts. Business people and politicians now have a rule about email and comments on social networks (even if they do not always follow their own good guidance): Write every electronic comment or communication so that it could be published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal without creating an embarrassment. The reason? Because the communication will eventually migrate there! This is an essential rule of thumb going forward.
Such is especially the case after the US election of 2016 where a seemingly endless stream of hacked emails—containing ambiguous and devaluing comments about the sender’s colleagues—got published periodically. In some cases, no hacking was required, since the candidate published the comments intentionally using Twitter.
As this book is being published, reports are emerging that Russia—you know, the sovereign state or a clandestine unit thereof—has attempted to influence the US 2016 election by purchasing ads on social media that attempted to aggravate racial, social, and economic divisions, thereby driving voters towards one Presidential candidate rather than the other.[ii] A lesson for us all? The ability to think critically and for oneself has always been an essential foundation of any democracy or any middle school kid’s emotional well-being. Now more than ever.
There is also a rule—at the level of Sir Isaac Newton’s ironclad Laws of Motion—that naked or compromising photos taken by a person migrate inevitably in the direction of social media. So don’t take any; and delete any that might already exist now—before it’s too late!
The expectations of privacy are such that online communications can no longer reasonably be expected to be private. Perhaps they ought to be private. Perhaps the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution against unreasonable search and seizure still holds sway in courts and halls of justice in the USA. I hope it does. I believe it does. But cyberspace just does not work that way any more. Facebook is designed so that people are given incentives to broadcast their personal and private data. As Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, is supposed to have said: “Privacy is no longer the norm,” implying rather that publicity is. Here take my personal data—please! Here—see what I am eating, who I am befriending, who I am dating, what I am wearing (or not), what I am reading, where I am checking in geographically, what I like, what I don’t like, what I am thinking—and at all times. [iii]
If you really need to have a private communication, send a letter by US Mail. It does put one in mind of Miranda Lambert’s country western song: “If you had something to say—you’d write it on a piece of paper—then you put a stamp on it—and they’d get it three days later—before everything became—automatic.” Words to live by.
This may sound a tad nostalgic; and I am not sure that I could explain it to an eleven year old. So, if your eleven year old is citing the 4th Amendment to you as reason for not handing over his password, congratulations! You have a Clarence Darrow for the defense in the making. I hope you can afford law school. But you then get to explain that “probable cause” creates an exception—and a parental search warrant. Hand the password over, buddy—or hand over the device!
Bullying: Recommendations for teachers and administrators
The media provide sensational, even tragic, reports about bullying, but they less frequently provide useful guidance or actionable information. We have to separate bullying from conflict and “drama” between peers of roughly equal power. Attention grabbing headlines have provided a “call to action” for educators in middle and high schools (and for state legislatures), who had been distracted by other priorities and looking the other way.
A few dramatic, high profile suicides, and many low profile emotional breakdowns, not to mention major litigation from outraged parents, have persuaded school administrators of the importance of intervening on behalf of the most vulnerable, bullied members of the community.
Yet it is also important to realize that grown ups are not the only source of relief from tween and adolescent bullying. In no way is it blaming the victim that the targets of bullying sometimes need to take crucial actions on their own behalf to improve the outcomes of unwanted assaults.
The first empathy lesson for administrators is that empathy is on a spectrum that extends from being firm about boundaries all the way to “tough love.” As every administrator knows, education is impossible if a school that is “out of control” surrounds the class room. A school is a system, and the hallways and class room must be calm in order for education to work. Before we turn to the details of how empathy plays in this context, some background is useful.
In December 1982 three elementary school students (10 to 14 years old) killed themselves near Tromsø, Norway. All three had been bullied. For example, one had been called a “leper” because of his measles scars, an insult, frankly, that I had not previously heard. These tragedies galvanized Norway.
Previously, bullying had been regarded as something that kids had to work out for themselves on the street. These tragedies provided evidence that the most vulnerable members of the community required intervention.
Dan Olweus, who had studied bullying extensively in nearby Sweden, but who was without popular support there for his research recommendations, was invited to come next door to Norway to help out. He surveyed 130,000 students. Some 15% were involved in bullying either as perpetrators or targets.[iv]
Olweus’ research challenged many assumptions. It challenged the assumptions that upper class high school students were less frequent bullies than their underclass peers or that urban kids were more likely to bully than their countryside fellows. Bullying was an equal opportunity issue. The targets of bullying were significantly weaker physically and more vulnerable to anxiety; but, for the most part, they did not look or dress significantly differently than others in the group. Space does not permit a comprehensive review of Olweus’ bullying prevention program; but its focus is on transforming the culture of the entire school, providing authoritative and positive role models, improved overall supervision, and intervention in individual cases. In the initial pilot, eight months after the program was introduced, there was 50% less bullying; but also significantly less vandalism and theft.
Olweus’ approach anticipated the crime fighting approach of reducing major crimes by fixing the broken windows in abandoned buildings and arresting the petty turn-style jumpers on public transit. These are individuals who might escalate to more serious offenses, if they are allowed to get away with mirror ones. They are halted early in the course of their boundary-violating careers. Their relatively minor criminal behaviors get cut short before they can advance to more serious misdeeds.
Norway devoted significant resources to the issue of bullying. Here in the USA legislative compliance mandates ordering schools to solve the problem of bullying without providing resources or money are taking the easy way out. And mandates to comply often do not work—precisely because a mandate without resources is at best a well-intentioned, but empty, gesture. To be sure, the indifference of some school administrators has been a cause for concern regardless of the (in)action of state legislatures. But the commitment of many, if not most, administrators is a cause for hope—and engagement.
Emily Bazelon reports on a case study—a school, Old Mill North, that had a reputation for roughness and was demonstrably spiraling downward. But it was pulled back from the brink and turned around by a program inspired by Olweus. This is not a one size fits all narrative, but numerous lessons exist that can be generalized.
No matter how inspiring or talented the individual teacher, education is impossible if a school that is out of control surrounds the class room. The hallways and class rooms must be calm in order for the process of education to get the traction it requires to produce educated students.
Bullies are put on notice that teachers and administrators are decidedly not happy about their behavior. Such individuals have been poorly socialized, and it is going to catch up with them. They need to get in touch with their inner jerk—have a conversation for possibility about recognizing one’s peers as peers—and learn how to respect boundaries. They can do better. If one can get the peer group to validate the language of respect for boundaries, courtesy, an optimum measure of toleration, and empathy, then their behavior eventually catches up with the rhetoric of respect and improves.
As noted, empathy is on a spectrum that extends from being firm about boundaries, but nice about it, all the way to “tough love.” Some students are not interested in respecting the boundaries that mark a commitment to education, and they really do not belong in school. Some 52 kids were expelled from Old Mill North. Likewise, the teachers were assessed. If they were not committed to transforming the culture of the school in the direction of excellence in education, they were encouraged to seek positions at other schools in the system. They were not expelled, but were counseled out. Some 22 out of 66 left the school.
How shall I put it delicately? This was no longer business as usual. At Old North, a significant minority of the student body was still more than a tad rough around the edges by the time they got to middle school. Some students literally did not know what to do when one student bumped into another student passing in the hallway. They needed to be taught to say, “Excuse me!” or “Pardon me,” instead of telling the other person, “Drop dead, loser!” Similarly, with common courtesy in the cafeteria. At Old North a broad intervention with the students provided explicit guidance in what was expected of them by way of behavior. Thus, the students were drilled in social skills such as acknowledging the feelings of others, making eye contact, and conflict management skills such as making a request, saying “no,” or agreeing to disagree. In short, they were trained in empathy.
Some bullies are indeed thugs, and need to be removed from the community to protect the community from them; but other bullies are themselves survivors of abusive situations (e.g., at home). They exhibit mental health issues, have a diagnosable cognitive impairment, and require intervention.
That is no excuse—there is never an excuse for bullying behavior. However, it does mean that to prevent repetition of the bullying after a suspension has been served, these individuals need guidance. Many need treatment. Whether such treatment is full-blown dynamic talk therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy, bullies may usefully undertake an inquiry into their own abusive behavior in order to shift out of a pattern that is creating misery around them. It is worth repeating: If it’s mean, intervene.
However, intervention is not the same as automatic discipline. Suspension and expulsion should be used only when the immediate concern is safety; and followed up with evaluation for the individual for depression, anxiety, conduct disorder, other emotional issues, or problems at home. Extrinsic motivation was also applied at Old North.
Using Positive Behavior-Based Interventions and Support (PBIS), along with the Pledge of Allegiance, the school day began with reciting the school commitment: “Be respectful, responsible, and on task.” That means: say “please” and “thank you”; do your homework; and participate in class.
An internal currency of courtesy was introduced. “Patriot passports” were blue slips that teachers handed out when students were identified as doing something well. The teacher meant it as a recognition and statement: “I liked the way you did that.”
A gimmick? Perhaps, but the underlying value was in building a positive relationship between student and teacher. Instead of handing out detention slips, getting into an adversarial role, teachers were in a friendly role of recognizing students for a job well done. Those teachers who used up all their blue slips got a gold star on their door—and more slips. The slips could be redeemed for PTA sponsored school supplies, ice cream at the social, a school movie, or getting to the head of the line in the cafeteria.
One word of caution. Peer mediation is not a good method for dealing with bullying. Peer mediation makes sense when the two kids are of roughly equal power. However, putting a bully and a target in the same room together is a bad idea. This is so even if a grown up is present to help mediate. Bullies are skilled at saying the right thing in the moment, and then retaliating later. If the students are roughly equal in power, and the infraction involved drama (not bullying), then peer mediation may perhaps make sense. But otherwise, it is just putting the fox to guard the chickens. Things are not going to go well.
Once a measure of calm was restored to the hallways at Old North, then those students who continued to be disrupters tended to stand out. They could be provided with the services they required to gain control over their behavior and emotions instead of missing even more academics by being sent to the principal’s office or suspended.
Instead of being given a suspension and sent home, the disrupters were given confidential psychological assessments for depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and self-esteem. They were required to watch videos about bullying, and consider their own behavior in relation to what they saw. Teachers who were chronic yellers were trained in other methods of de-escalating conflict with students who were disrespectful or difficult. This was not a two week effort.
Six years into the program, scores on standardized achievement tests had improved enough for the school to introduce the International Baccalaureate Program to further drive academic excellence. Reducing bullying is good for academics.
In summary, schools that support such efforts find that bullying of all kinds is reduced, not merely that directed at kids who are eccentric, socially awkward, new to the community, or LGBT. Of course, if the school’s grown ups are still struggling ineffectively with their own homophobic issues, then survivors must look for alternative communities outside of school. These alternatives outside of school run the gamut from sports to book clubs. It is not blaming the survivor to say, “Hey, it’s gonna take something from you, too, in building a community that works for everyone.” Martial arts and boxing are powerful compensatory activities for people who tend to be shy; but such people have to overcome their own introverted tendencies even to sign up. The very behavior that is stopping them is also part of the behavior that is leaving them vulnerable to bullying. The breakthrough is already present in stopping procrastinating and taking action to get such training.
In conclusion, the lesson is that empathy builds community; and communities demonstrate empathy by being inclusive. Yet rare is theindividual who transforms the authenticity and integrity of an entire community in order to join a community with integrity and authenticity. What would an anti-bullying club even look like? It might look like a LGBT alliance; but it might also look like a jogging, biking, or history club. Don’t just be “anti,” as proper as that is in the case of bullying; but be “pro” engagement, inclusion, and community.
As Daniel Burnham said in different context: “Make no small plans.” Empathy is the foundation of no small community.
[i] Christine Olden. (1953). On adult empathy with children, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 8: 111–126.
[ii] See “The Facebook Files: A Wall Street Journal Investigation,” https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039 [checked on Sept 27, 2021]; see also (now “ancient” history): Mike Isaac and Scott Shane. (2017). Facebook’s Russia-linked ads came in many disguises, The New York Times, Oct 2, 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/technology/facebook-russia-ads-.html [checked on Oct 15, 2017].
[iii] Bernard E. Harcourt. (2015). Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 90–93.
[iv] Olweus 1973/1993 in Bazelon 2012. Dan Olweus. (1973/1993). Bullying in School: What We Know and What We Can Do. London: Wiley/Blackwell; Emily Bazelon. (2012). Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy. New York: Random House. This post and the corresponding chapter in Empathy Lessons rely significantly on Bazelon’s journalistic synthesis of the literature and her incisive interviews; see also James Garbarino and Ellen deLara. (2002). And Words Can Hurt Forever: How to Protect Adolescents from Bullying, Harassment, and Emotional Violence. New York: the Free Press (Simon and Shuster).
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy versus bullying: Part 2: Online bullying and what to do about it
Listen as a podcast on Spotify (via Anchor): https://anchor.fm/lou-agosta-phd/episodes/Empathy-versus-bullying-Part-2-Online-bullying-and-what-to-do-about-it-e17hj9j
The cyber bully: The rule of thumb is that whatever a person does in life offline, the person does online, too. Whatever the person does in the non-electronic world of personal encounters, the person also does online in social networking. Therefore, people who are mean in person, will be mean online. People who are cruel in person will be cruel online. However, the impersonality of the online milieu can amplify the tendency. The lack of context of the online environment can intensify the upset and impact all around.
Prior to social media such as Facebook, bullied kids could find a haven from a heartless world at home. Now the kid who is the target of the bullying, having survived the day at school, survived the ride home on the bus, gets home, naively turns on the computer and (wham!) experiences additional, hurtful boundary violations. The unsophisticated kid, who does not know when to “power down” and hit the off button for her or his own mental health, can become quasi-hypnotically obsessed with checking and rechecking for devaluing comments.
No, the mere passage of time does not cause insulting online comments to go away. Social media make it possible for people to “pile on” and accumulate more “likes” for a hurtful remark. Furthermore, cyber-bullying can be perpetrated relatively anonymously with pseudonyms.
Fake accounts on Google or Facebook eventually get unmasked and deleted; but it takes time; and new fakes seem to spring up just as fast as the old ones get identified and deleted. If giant corporations, supposedly sophisticated politicians and business persons, major law enforcement organizations, the US government, and the US population at large, can be “faked out” by faked identities and misleading “news,” pity the middle school kid in the face of anonymous, hurtful language directed at her or him.
As the latest debunking of the pretensions of Facebook unfolds on the front page of the Wall Street Journal [no progressive rag, that publication!], the susceptibility of online platforms to fake everything is taking its place among the unintended (and deeply disturbing) consequences of technology that will live on.[i]
Figuring out who is doing what to whom online and when they are doing it requires a forensic inquiry of significant subtlety, time, and effort. School administrators are flummoxed, because the bullying is initiated off-campus.
How is it then that the school resources, already stretched thin, now must be marshaled to establish responsibility for policing such misbehavior? The target of the bullying may be asked to demonstrate that the abuse is affecting her or his school work. More blaming the victim?
Of course bullying is not a logical process. An ultimatum from a bully to her or his minion is itself a form of bullying: Call some prepubertal girl a “slut” or we won’t be friends anymore. Hello? If this were a logical process, then the would-be minion would already know that the friendship ended with the very request, since friendship is not conditional on hurtful (and unethical) words or behavior.
To many kids “friendship” means something quite different than “share wholesome experiences.” It means laugh at my jokes even if they are not funny, say my hair looks great even if it doesn’t, sit with me in the cafeteria at lunch, and do not flirt with the boy in whom I am interested this week. These young people do not know that book Nine of Aristotle’s Ethics is on friendship. The expectation that such an explanation would elicit any response from the young person other than eye rolling is doubtful. Still, it may be worth a try.
Given that cyber bullying has exploded as a form of online pathology, let us take a look at proper online conduct even in the absence of bullying.
The genie is out of the bottle—the genie is social networking
Social networking is not going away. Humans invented computers and smart interfaces. Let’s be smart is using them. When the child is interacting through Internet video with a family member living on another continent, then such an interaction is a boundary expanding and richly rewarding experience. When a parent and child are playing a game together using a computer screen, the benefit is in the parent-child interaction as such. The rich computer graphics are a bonus.
The paradox is the anti-social nature of social networking. The computer screen isolates the person even as the person is trying to connect. The contrary is also the case. The screen connects the person when the person wants to be alone, rudely announcing an incoming message by beeping, demanding one’s attention. Sometimes the screen brings out the anti-social tendencies instead of the pro-social ones, enabling one to be inauthentic, hiding behind a false self. [ii]
It is perhaps a symptom of the broader issue that the online world even calls forth innovations in punishment. Taken to its logical conclusion, the savvy, harried parent steals a march on the technology. The ultimate method of grounding? Take away the child’s electricity, thereby having a “time out” on the use of electronic devices. However, during the time out do something positive. Read a book! Play a board game with your sister. If the latter seems too much like a punishment, paint a picture or go for a bike ride.
The challenge is to find a balance that allows our humanity its due.
The rule of thumb is easy to say but hard to do: Seek balance in time and emotional equilibrium between online and offline engagement. Trial and error is a part of the process. By the time you get it just right, the kids will be going off to college, and they will have the skills they need to manage the online jungle on their own.
As the New Yorker cartoon famously observed about a dog sitting at a computer, “on the Internet no one knows you are a dog.” People who have issues with their self-esteem are both attracted and entrapped by the lure of being whatever they want to be online. Nothing wrong with fantasy as such. Many of us build castles in the sky. But only a few of us try to move into them; and those that do so are headed for trouble for so many reasons.
Children have to be 13 years or older to sign up for Facebook, and it is on that platform that we will concentrate here. The risks to children of all ages are real: online “cyber bulling,” vulnerability to predatory adults, sharing too much information, identity theft, and exposure to age-inappropriate content from advertisers, news, or stranger danger. The possibilities of getting paranoid about stranger danger are very real, but, as has been noted repeatedly, just because you are paranoid does not mean that they are not out to get ya.
As regards the age limit, I am grateful for it, and I see it as a useful reason to deny access to children of tender age, who lack readiness for the risks of the online world: “I did not make the rule, and it seems sensible to me.” Unless the child is actually working on a project with NASA, I see no reason to make an exception for children under 13. “But Susie’s mom lied to help her get an account!” As my mother used to say when I wanted to play in traffic like the other kids: “Yes, everybody is doing it; but you shall not!” The challenge is to figure out where is the boundary and how to navigate it.
A word of caution to policy makers: Do not make a rule prohibiting that which you cannot enforce. A heavy hand is counter-productive.
For example, thousands of adults did not even know they were interested in drinking alcohol until the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution prohibited it in 1919. Then drinking alcohol suddenly became strangely attractive. Likewise, Susie did not even want to get online until someone told her that she could not do so. The prohibition creates the desire.
To make matters even more challenging, the boundary lines keep changing. Such is the case with social networking. Computers, tablets, and smart phones are widely available, and unless you are planning on moving the family “off the grid,” youngsters need to be taught how to use social networking sensibly, safely, to have fun, and be productive with it.
To err is human, really to mess up requires an Internet connection.
Imperfect but empathic human beings try to navigate unempathic, imperfect social networks. This in itself is the business case for empathy-centered design of human and system relatedness. This is sometimes called “usability” testing. The computer system must be useable by error prone human beings. This points to another parental rule of thumb: if one’s experience of the computer is not useful or productive or if it is not fun, then a “time out” is in order. Say three words. Not “I love you,” but “Pull the plug.” Same idea.
Empathy lessons for parents of kids going online
What are the empathy lessons for parents around screen time, devices, and the relationships of kids with personal technology? Closely related to this question about how much time online is too much, is the issue of how best to manage the time children do in fact spend engaging with computer devices.
Children are great imitators. They want to be just like the adults, who seem constantly to have their noses buried in their electronic devices or a phone glued to their ear. Even when parents are at home, they are not fully present. Think about it. Grown up behavior speaks volumes to the children.
The good example parents set in laying aside electronic devices and relating in person to other persons speaks volume to the children. So does any behavior that demonstrates a parent’s commitment to drama or using social media to drive personal conflicts.
The authority with which a phone call, text, or email arrives from work, and the parent drops what she or he is doing to attend to it, says everything to the child. The rest is just a lecture that lands like “blah, blah, blah.”
On the spectrum of guidance extending from empathy all the way to tough love, here is the tough love for parents regarding the amount of time spent online, on screens: Look at your own example.
If you interrupt your conversation with your child to attend to a call, email, or text, you are an enabler. You were perhaps expecting the child to behave otherwise? You have demonstrated, clearly nothing is more important than attending to beeping, barking electronic appliances. The text or call is more important than your child. Your empathy is in break down. Ouch! Clean up your act.
A recurring theme of these lessons is that authenticity is the foundation of the work we are doing on empathy, and so before talking to the children about their use of electronics, come clean about your own electronic inauthenticities.
The empathy lesson? Set boundaries. Look for balance. Be responsible. Own it. Manage the amount of time children and young people spend on their screen by empathic parenting. Children of all ages are sensitive to any discrepancies between what grown ups say and what they do. Empathic parenting is about boundary setting. With older children, “first you do your homework, then you go to the mall (or play a computer game).” Children of all ages will inevitably test the boundaries, so have an explanation that privileges what you value about community, healthy personal relations, and friendship.
With electronic devices, rather than set an arbitrary number of hours that probably cannot be enforced, begin by creating an electronic device free zone. Start with dinner if your family is able to eat together or perhaps designate a time on the clock such as 8 to 9 pm to quiesce the electronics. This is good sleep hygiene too.
Rather than be negative, think positively. It is not just turn off the computers; but, especially for children of tender age, turn off the computer and let’s read a story book together. Turn off the computer and let’s play blocks. Turn off the computer and let’s play catch (weather permitting). Visit with friends in person. For older kids, dance lessons, gymnastics, science club, chess club (where you sit across from a real person), organized sports, hobbies, or arts and crafts. This will surface the parent’s ultimate inauthenticity. Just as in the days of old, when the parent used to sit the kid in front of the TV as a form of baby sitting, likewise with computer games.
Nothing is wrong as such with harried parents pushed down into survival occasionally using screens as baby sitters. Just be aware that something is missing from the virtual reality milieu—the first person relatedness of a human being with another human being. Within limits, nothing is wrong, but something is missing—empathy. I doubt that virtual reality is like the “good enough” parent. When virtual reality crowds out real reality—authentic human presence, then the time has come to call a “time out” on the use of devices.
For young people who are teenagers, the idea is similar. Don’t be negative; rather substitute something positive—and then turn off the device. Sports? Dance lessons? Cooking lessons? Tai Chi? Jogging? Volunteering at the Jaycees? An ice cream social? Window shopping in person? The opportunity is to teach social skills that require relating to another human being who is present at hand in person.
The mirage of popularity migrates online, too, especially as children enter middle and high school. The details differ, but the psychology of puberty does not. The influence of peer groups, which are emotionally (though not financially) more important to the teenager than family, is a standard part of the developmental process of separating from parents and leaving home to contribute to the community at large. The volatility of emotions due to hormones combines with experimentation, resulting in a high level of stress (for all): “I hate you! Drop me off at the mall?” This too shall pass.
Teenagers are experimenting with identity, emerging sexuality, and boundaries of all kinds. Why should they not experiment with online boundaries, too? The guidance is the same: “Check in! Don’t hurt yourself.”
At least prior to going away to college, the 13–17 year old group continues to require guidance and limit setting. If the teenager is involved in after school activities, is attentive in doing her or his homework, and has some friends who periodically show up in person, then the teenager is developing in a wholesome way. There is limited time for online networking and online misadventures.
The isolated individual, the socially awkward teen, for whom being online is a substitute for getting out of her or his comfort zone, is the concern. Perhaps the individual has experienced shaming or bullying. Or the individual is so sensitive that thoughtless statements that bounce off of most kids are experienced as hurtful. Here the amount of time spent online is the symptom of a problem, not the cause. I repeat: the symptom, not the cause.
When the child clings to his device and cannot be separated from it as if it were the beloved teddy bear, then, speaking personally, I start associating to the disturbing experiments with severely deprived macaque monkeys of Harry Harlow.[iii] Separated from their biological birth mothers, these monkeys clung desperately to the piece of cloth on the wire surrogate mother, even though it did not have a nipple. They would rather go hungry than forego contact with the cloth, surrogate mother. Heart breaking.
Restricting online access when that may be the main thing holding the teenager’s shaky sense of self together is likely to cause more conflicts, breakdowns in relatedness, withdrawal, and expanding isolation, not emotional equilibrium or empathy. Restricting online access does not provide the longed for balance. Further upsets and disagreements are predictable.
The challenge is that the teen is precisely at risk of re-enacting online an emotional upset similar to that with which he is struggling offline. What then provides the emotional equilibrium and deescalates the conflict?
If the parent has a relationship with the teenager, it is time for a heart-to-heart conversation—actually a series of them. Something is troubling the teen, and a grown up needs to find out what it is and take corrective action. Trouble at school with academics? With peers? If it is trouble at home—serious illness in the family, pending divorce, or financial setbacks—then these have to be surfaced, called out, and acknowledged. If the teenager is still unresponsive to parental overtures, then professional intervention may be required.
So much for the tough love. Now for the empathy. For children, especially of tender age, play is serious business. Group activities—whether play dates for younger children or organized clubs for older ones—activate and develop social skills, including empathy, whereas screens tend to isolate. That is so even if the screen is networked to include other players, who, however, do not necessarily show up as anything other than a function of the computer system.
The child’s job is to develop her emotional and cognitive abilities through the productive imagination activated in play. In so far as computer games and explorations can promote play and be integrated into play, all well and good. Yet the screen is intrinsically limiting, appealing to the reproductive, repetitive imagination. Still, many kinds of play do not require a screen.
For example, the graphics and images of the Magic School Bus are engaging, especially for children of tender age. The school bus becomes a space ship (or submarine or time machine and so on) voyaging out to explore the planets in the solar system, undersea world, or the inside of the human body.
However, every kid knows how to play at being a rocket ship or air plane without electronics: you stick out your arms, make a rocket motor noise, and run around the dining room table—to a neighboring solar system. The child’s entire body is fully engaged in motion. The child’s mind is fully engaged in fantasy. The child’s full self is active. The child’s mind is expanded. My only concern is that the child does not think that one needs an electronic device to fly. Make believe does the job very nicely, thank you. The productive imagination knows no limits of screen size.
Do not underestimate the power of a large cardboard box such as one might use to deliver a washing machine or refrigerator. Cut a couple of holes in it, and it becomes a space ship or the bridge of the RMS Titanic. Given some crayons or felt tip pens, it can be decorated with the markings of NASA or a personally invented team. Cut another hole in it, and it becomes the castle in which Sleeping Beauty is a prisoner or it becomes the Spirit of Saint Louis making the first solo transatlantic flight. If the computer game promotes imagination and innovation, then take the game and act it out by playing “make believe” with an actual cardboard box that Carmen the Explorer can use as a motor boat to sail up the River Nile. Bon voyage!
How to understand the child’s and the teen’s relationships with technology?
How should parents understand the relationship that children have with their devices in terms of empathy or lack thereof? Just as a teenager would not be allowed to drive a car without lessons and passing a test, access to the fun features of social networking comes with responsibilities. In both cases, one can hurt oneself and others. I am not advocating licensing online users—which would be an unconstitutional restriction of free speech (we can’t go there now!). However, new privileges imply new responsibilities. For teenagers and emerging adults, “Don’t hurt yourself (or others)!” remains essential guidance at all times.
The teenager needs to understand that there are some people “out there” in cyberspace who are not only not nice but dangerous in rather unpleasant ways. Do not click on communications that seem to arrive with authority from an unknown source or supposedly from a friend, but something just doesn’t seem right. What to do? Ask a grown up? Find someone who is computer savvy. The Help Desk should tell you: “Don’t click. Delete. If it’s important, they will pick up the phone or send a letter.”
As with any privilege, teenagers test limits. Recommend the Golden Rule: Treat others as you yourself want to be treated online and off. If it seems mean, do not do it. That means no devaluing language, no being mean to those who may be struggling with family or school issues, and speaking with integrity.
Kids immediately get it that “on the Internet no one knows if you are a dog.” Why is the creation of fantasy (i.e., fake) identities online any different from when kids used to brag, “I got more stuff from Santa Claus than you did!”? It is harder to get caught? Perhaps. Even if parents have their children’s passwords and access to their online resources, no one has time to monitor all the back-and-forth drama to which teenage life is prone. No one aspires to operate a mini-NSA (one of the spy agencies). Rather trust—but verify. Verify empathically. Spot check. Listen empathically for signs of upset or devaluing language. Watch for unexplained changes of mood and so on.
I repeat: trust—but verify empathically. Manage by exception—and if an exception shows up, then express concern and ask for her or his side of the story. Give a warning that the unacceptable behavior must stop—if the child is the perpetrator—whether cyber bullying or cheating or spending hours gossiping. If the questionable behavior does not stop, then see above—pull the plug. Confiscate the electronic appliance for a specific time period and until a commitment is forthcoming to change the behavior.
However, what if the electronic device is a smart phone and the child needs it to “check in” or coordinate pick up after school? If the family is affluent enough for the child to have a smart phone, then the family is affluent enough for the parent to swap out the smart phone for a flip phone or dumb device that enables a simple phone call. Take the SIM card out of the one and put it in the “dumb” phone. I wish there was an easier way, and, yes, it has come to that! Take away the teenager’s electricity, the ultimate form of “being grounded.”
Now after this significant digression into cyberspace and its challenges, we take the conversation back up a level, returning to the work of expanding empathy in the world of authentic human interactions, of which none are more important than those with our children. Many adults and teenagers will benefit from these recommendations, but they are initially for children of tender age.
Empathy lessons with children
(1) Lead by example: When parents demonstrate the ability to take the point of view of other people in solving problems, children learn by example. When parents demonstrate emotional drama and complaining, children learn by example. Be the role model that you want to see your children imitate. Be an example of the change you want to see.[iv]
(2) Speak in the first person: Use “I” as a way of establishing a firm boundary between self and other. “I don’t like it when you that word ‘x’. It hurts my feelings. Please stop it.”
(3) Validate the feelings of other people: “Sally is feeling angry because you took her ball. Please give Sally her ball back and then pick another one to play with.” In other cases, validation does not necessarily mean agreement; but it means recognizing that the other person does indeed feel the way she feels. Validate by finding the grain of truth in the other person’s perception.
(4) Use play to get access to how other’s feel: Talk with children of tender age about feelings and empathy as you play. For example, you might have your child’s stuffed dog say that he does not want to take turns with his friend, the stuffed tiger. Then ask your child: “How do you think tiger feels? What should we tell this silly dog?”
(5) Empathize with your child: As a parent you are a significant source of insight into what your child is experiencing. “Are you feeling sad that Sally cannot come over and play? That is a disappointment. She wanted to come; but she got sick and has to stay home. She can come next Friday. In the meantime, we can call your friend Jane and see what she is up to.”
(6) Suggest how children can be empathic: “Let’s make Sally a ‘Get well soon card’ and send it to her in the mail.”
(7) Validate your child’s upsetting emotions: Help the child understand what he or she is experiencing. Instead of immediately trying to substitute a positive emotion for anger, sadness, or fear, acknowledge that feelings can be upsetting. Identifying and validating upsetting feelings helps children to manage them: “You are really angry that I turned off the computer. I understand. You were playing your race car game. It’s okay to feel angry. When you are done being angry, you can join me fixing a sandwich for lunch.” Thus, children learn that feelings are important, but feelings do not have to run our lives. Feelings make us human and show us interesting things too.
(8) Be responsible for one’s actions and the consequences: Instead of rushing to have the child of tender age say “I’m sorry” when he has hurt another child, hit the pause button. Many children do not even know the meaning of the words “I’m sorry.” Rather invite the child to look at the consequences for the other child’s feelings and well-being. “Jane, why do you think Sally is crying? What happened? She skinned her knee when you pushed her. Let’s see if she is okay. Let’s get her some first aid. Here is some petroleum jelly and a bandage.” Sometimes the consequences of our actions escape from us. Help the child make the connection between the action (pushing) and the consequences (a skinned knee and crying).
(9) Be patient: Practice patience if a toddler or a child of tender age does not get it right the first time out. The parent may not even know whether or not the child of tender age literally understands what is being said. Be prepared to wait before judging and assessing based on ongoing, future behavior. Indeed throughout many of these examples, the cynical take away may be: “Hey, these parents seem to have time to relate to their children. Wouldn’t it be nice?” Empathy is never needed more than when it seems there is no time for it.
(10) Teach the child to identify feelings and emotions: Provide guidance in how to recognize emotions in others. We try to teach a child, who fusses and bangs on his high chair because he wants more milk, to say the words: “More milk, please!” The words are not a description of his feeling of hunger or impatience; rather the words substitute for the expression of hunger or impatience. Likewise, the word “pain” is not a description of the sensation of throbbing when the child has jammed his toe, it is an articulation in human speech that expresses upset and provides an alternative to screaming.
We teach our child well to use sentences like “I hurt my toe!” as a substitute for crying in pain. Shouts of distress are the natural expression of pain, but are notoriously unhelpful in determining the particulars. We substitute expressions such as “my toe hurts” for natural expressions as tears or cries of pain.
Given the nuances of human experiences and emotions, and the relative lack of explicit training in expressing them, it is not surprising that many people lack skill in identifying and communicating feelings and emotions.
Simultaneously, we work with children on recognizing such experiences in others. It is often easier to see that Sally is in distress, crying due to a scraped knee, than when that happens to the child himself (who is then preoccupied with his own “owie”). We work from both the outside in and from the inside out, and eventually meet in the middle, being able to communicate our experiences and emotions to others and ourselves. Meanwhile, when relationships have become weaponized, as in bullying then the issue has to be how to implement a disarmament plan. The issue is how to de-weaponize relationships. In the following and third post in this series, I directly address students, parents, and teachers/administrators with recommendations.
[i] September 18, 2021: “The Facebook Files: A Wall Street Journal Investigation,” Jeff Horwitz, Keach Hagey, Newley Purnell, Sam Schechner, Emily Glazer: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039?mod=hp_lead_pos7 See also: Mike Isaac and Scott Shane. (2017). Facebook’s Russia-linked ads came in many disguises, The New York Times, Oct 2, 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/technology/facebook-russia-ads-.html [checked on Oct 15, 2017].
[ii] I express my thanks to Firas Nakshabandi, MD, for conversations, ideas, and input on social networking and raising children. Very thoughtful; very empathic.
[iii] Harry F. Harlow. (1958). The nature of love, American Psychologist, 13, 673– 685.
[iv] These recommendations, liberally adapted with acknowledgement and thanks to Claire Lerner and Rebecca Parlakian. (2016). How to help your child develop empathy, Zero to Three: Early Connections Last a Lifetime: https://www.zerotothree.org/resources/5-how-to-help-your-child-develop-empathy [checked on June 26, 2017].
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy versus bullying: The biggest bully in my life
[This is the first in a series on bullying and empathy.]
Listen to this podcast on Spotify (via Anchor): https://anchor.fm/lou-agosta-phd/episodes/Empathy-versus-bullying-The-biggest-bully-in-my-life-e16v57j
The biggest bully in my life
The biggest bully in my life was a member of my family, my father. Most of the time, he was a nice guy, a good neighbor with a lot of social skills. However, he had a nasty temper that would go off unpredictably.
Dad would lose his tempter in unpredictable times and unpredictable ways about three times a year, and then there was hell to pay. I would get hit, pushed, knocked down, and called devaluing names. Over a period of ten years, between seven and seventeen years old, that adds up. A bold statement of the obvious: it was unpleasant.
Persons (and therapists) who later heard about my struggles would ask: “Did he drink?” No, he just had a nasty temper that got triggered by what he (and apparently only he) perceived as narcissistic slights or injuries. His bad behavior satisfied the criteria of bullying in that it was verbal and physical aggression, occurring repeatedly, and in a context where the individuals were significantly unequal in power.
I have documented the recovery process without describing my father’s behavior explicitly as bullying in an earlier book, A Rumor of Empathy (2015). As part of my recovery, I even published a book chapter on empathy and the treatment of domestic violence.[i]
The new information disclosed here is that Dad’s behavior improved significantly when, at the age of seventeen, having finally grown up physically, I hit him back. Just one punch. Well placed, it gave him a bloody lip. A technical “knock out.” It had a calming effect on him, and I never got hit again. The fight was called in my favor, by mutual agreement. However, do not make too much of it. I was heading out the door and off to college, never to look back, with my academic scholarships.
Dad only bullied members of his own family. To the neighbors and his colleagues at work he was a friendly, even wonderful guy. In years of dynamic psychotherapy beginning when I escaped to college, I explored a process of treatment that included recovery from domestic violence.
I now believe that the triggers to Dad’s bullying outbursts were some slight provocations—real or imagined—to his narcissism. This means that he was not your typical school yard bully. The school bully may “go off” if one bumps into him in the play ground, but the school yard bully is both strategic and opportunistic in his aggression. With my Dad, he seemed to lack emotional regulation once his sense of self was knocked out of kilter—dis-equilibrated—by a real or imagined narcissistic injury. Dad was at the effect of his rage. He did not seem to be having fun. The people around him were definitely not having fun.
Dad had a narrative about teaching me a lesson as he lashed out and described me with devaluing names. This was a self-serving narrative at best. Whatever distorted lessons might have been intended, they were not empathy lessons. His bad behavior was in the service of venting his emotions and restoring his own equilibrium. Everyone else around him was dis-equilibrated. As a boy, I was trying not to cry any more in order not to be given more of “something to cry about.”
In those days, a college student on summer vacation could still get a relatively well paying job in a factory or working construction, and I never returned home. Dad and I patched things up years later. However, the years of misbehavior had taken their toll. There was neither a sentimental reconciliation nor a truth and reconciliation commission to frame the encounter between perpetrator and survivor. Dad never thought of asking for forgiveness and, near as I could tell, he never told the truth about how violently he had behaved. It seemed not to occur to him.
Forgiveness is over-rated, thought I, at the time; though I eventually came to endorse Desmond Tutu’s approach and bought Tutu’s book based on its title alone—No Future Without Forgiveness. It is about a formal truth and reconciliation commission. The perpetrators have to stand up, face the survivor(s), and tell the truth about what they did to the victims (who did not survive) and to the survivors (who did) in such a way that they agree it is the truth. The perpetrators have to acknowledge what happened in such a way that the survivors recognize it. The process creates a set up—provides a clearing—to build a case for forgiveness. The survivor then gets to say whether he or she accepts the representation of what happened and whether the survivor chooses to grant forgiveness.[ii]
Self-forgiveness is an entirely different matter. Sometimes the hasty forgiving of others is a clumsy way for survivors to get to self-forgiveness, which is a worthy goal. The survivor may usefully forgive himself for incorporating the devaluing descriptions of the bully into the survivor’s low self-esteem. This is an important step, which, speaking personally, years of therapy helped me to attain. The benefit is to empower the survivor to put the past back in the past and create a clearing for positive possibilities going forward into the future.
In comparison to Dad, any school bullies that I encountered were “boy scouts” (with apologies to the Boy Scouts). Any bullies that I encountered at school were more like jumping in reverse back from the fire into the relative coolness of the frying pan. They were physically bigger, but I had other sources of power including humor, a rapier wit, a sharp tongue, and, most importantly, an ability to run amazingly fast over short distances. It worked well enough.
I was still physically small in middle school; and I had potential as a target of bullying. However, I would speak out of turn in class, playing the class clown, so the tough kids were amused, even entertained.
The tough guys saw that I spoke truth to power—or at least was not afraid to get an occasional punishment exercise from the teacher for trying to be funny.
I gained a certain kind of reputation—not exactly popular, unless you consider the notorious outlaw Jesse James to have been popular. Think of “Wanted Dead or Alive” posters at the post office. So the tough kids—and there definitely were some in my pubic middle school—didn’t mess with me. By the time I got to high school proper, I was still below average in size for my age, but it was a private, all boys school. That was the main challenge.
Virtually without exception every kid at my high school was so afraid of the teachers, who were mostly Jesuits, that even the meanest of one’s fellow students seemed like an alter boy in comparison. There was no talking in the corridors between classes; and if one did talk, a teacher, who had been lurking quietly behind you out of sight, would suddenly emerge and bang your head against the lockers, which lined the hallways, making a formidable hollow sound. The locker, not the head, that is.
Most classes in my high school would begin with the Our Father (the prayer)—nothing wrong with that—but you knew that The Lord—along with big brother (those were the Jesuits who were not formally ordained as priests)—were watching. If the tactics were to put the fear of The Lord into everyone’s head, creating an atmosphere similar to boot camp in the armed forces, then it seemed to have worked. This raises the delicate question whether the teachers were actually the bullies; and I am sorry to report that, yes, some were.
Sadly, it was not empathy but a common oppressor (the teachers) that helped to build solidarity among the student body. I hasten to add that the majority of the teachers were humane and caring, indeed many were talented educators, creative and engaging. Many had a sense of humor, which sometimes extended to sadistic hijinks. Most would simply give one a week’s worth of detention for daring to talk out of turn.
The boot camp atmosphere had a tendency to displace the bullying from school itself onto the school bus or the athletic field. I did see a couple of kids bullied on the school bus, and I am ashamed to say, I was not enough in touch with my courage to intervene. Indeed at one point a couple of the mean boys seemed to notice me, and hurled a couple of insults in my direction. I was anticipating a rough time; but then, without explanation, the bus route was changed, and the bullies simply disappeared—to another bus.
Thinking back, I now believe that the rambunctious kids were motivated by the draconian atmosphere in the school to express their extra adolescent energies by participating in sports (which was perhaps the intention); or going home and raiding their well-to-do parents well-stocked liquor cabinets (not an option for me—Dad did not drink, he was just a bully); or seeking solace for their lack of social skills in their studies. The last was my favored approach. I did find someone to hang out with in the cafeteria—the food was so unpalatable that I further stunted my growth by not eating lunch for four years, though I ended up being an average height.
After reviewing the research on bullying in depth, I have reached the conclusion that if kids have enough time for interpersonal drama and conflict, the latter often as practice for out-and-out bullying, then the kids have too much time on their hands. They are not nearly busy enough. They would benefit from more homework and extra-curricular activities. Note, however, that this implies the school has the resources to offer the extra-curricular activities, which is not always the case. Unlike Hollywood films of the depression era with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, many schools do not have the resources or organizational skills to say “Hey, let’s put on a play to raise money for the orphanage!” The kids are already the “orphans.”
Empathy is the antithesis of bullying
Empathy is the antithesis of bullying. Where empathy lives, bullying is rare. Where empathy lives, bullying has no home.
In environments where empathy is taught and practiced, bullying does not get traction. Situations in which empathy is valued are situations in which bullying is devalued. One might say exactly the same thing about common courtesy.
In communities—whether middle school or high school or, for that matter, the US Armed Forces—where common courtesy gives way to disrespect in relationships, bullying expands and spreads; but where common courtesy holds sway in relationships, bullies head for the exit or at least hold their (lack of) peace.
The point? Empathy and courtesy have in common a careful treatment of boundaries in relationships. What empathy and common courtesy share is recognition and respect for the boundaries between individuals in relationships.
Another bold statement of the obvious: every bulling remark is a breakdown of courtesy—and of empathy. Every bullying gesture is some kind of a boundary violation. We have to be careful with words like “every,” “all,” or “never,” but in this instance they fit. “Please” and “thank you” and requesting permission are discarded. Pushing, shoving, and devaluing language are front and center.
Empathy is about moving back and forth across the boundary between self and other in relating to other persons, and doing so in such a way that the boundary is treated with integrity. In contrast, in bullying, the boundary between persons is violated, and, so are the space and integrity of the target of the bullying. In bullying, the boundary between persons is crushed, and so is the emotional integrity of the intended target.
The response of empathy to bullying is to engage in a process of reestablishing the boundary between persons in such a way that people are left authentic and whole. As we shall see, this is different than being nice or even trying to induce empathy in the bully.
Bullying defined
Before we say any more—and there is a lot more to be said—let us define our terms. We rely on the definition provided by the pioneer of bullying research, Dan Olweus, whose ground breaking studies in his homeland, Sweden (and Norway), have provided a rich source of further research.[iii] Olweus was thorough in his research interviewing some 1,000 children as well as their teachers and parents. He administered projective imaging tests (the “ink blot” Rorschach) to those he had identified as bullies or the targets of bullying.
Olweus defines bullying as (1) aggression (either verbal or physical abuse) towards a person; (2) that occurs towards the person more than once over time; and (3) is between persons of unequal power (whether physical or social rank or both). [iv] The special thing about bullying is that kids do it especially when the targets seem helpless. Kicking someone when they are down is precisely an identifying feature of bullying.
According to Olweus, what is most distressing about bullying to its targets is repeated domination to inflect pain. If the aggression happens only one time, it is aggression; and that is not good; but it is not bullying. If the people are of equal power or almost equal power, then the behavior is conflict, drama, or a fight, not bullying.
The distinction between bullying and drama (conflict) is not always easy to determine, so look at physical size (height and weight), formal rank in school or professional status, and job roles. When someone who has power, whether formal or physical, over another is treating the other in such as way as to violate their dignity, that is a strong candidate for bullying.
Olweus found that about 5% of the boys in his studies were bullies and about 5% were the targets of bullying, “whipping boys” as Olweus called them.
What the latter had in common was they were physically weaker and anxious. Olweus studied only boys. The discovery of the “mean girl” phenomena still lay in the future. We now know that among girls, physical strength is less of a factor, and girls have been known to bully by indirect means.
When relationships become weaponized
When cruelty relies on what one knows about the other person or can plausibly attribute to them, then it is as if the relationship itself becomes weaponized. Insults, injuries, slights, discourtesies, racial and ethnic slurs, are used to deliver pain and suffering to the target.
Since the bullying is a boundary violation, the way to reestablish empathy and order (where “order” means common courtesy) is to reestablish the boundary between persons.
A word of caution upfront. Let’s say one is the adult hall prefect at a high school, and an act of bullying is perpetrated in full view in one’s presence. It is tempting to attempt to induce empathy in the bully by asking: “How would you feel if that (aggression) were done to you?” Ultimately such an intervention may be useful, however, not here. If Jack is calling Jill “Fatso!” it is precisely to make her feel bad; it is likely that he knows it; and that is exactly why he is doing it.
One says to Jack in a loud voice: “Stop! I don’t like what you are doing.” Or “That behavior is unacceptable. Cut it out!” Jack replies: “But Jill doesn’t mind.” An obvious lie—or maybe Jill is so depressed that, in the moment, she is just numb. One clarifies: “I don’t care how Jill feels—I don’t like it. We do not talk to our fellow students that way. It is disrespectful.” Or words to that effect.
There are numerous scenarios here. If kids are whispering in the presence of another kid such that the target is supposed to imagine devaluing things are being said, the response is similar: “It is impolite to whisper in the presence of others—stop it—it is discourteous” (said in a loud, authoritative voice). The point is to reestablish the boundary in the relatedness, so that even if people do not want to be empathic, they can at least be courteous. It may sound paradoxical, but that is the most empathic response one can provide.
If the relationship between the bully and the intended target includes hurling insults, then the bystander establishes a “no fly zone” in one’s presence. The metaphor is telling. Stop the insults from flying around. Shoot them down.
The bullying approach to relating is de-weaponized—at least in one’s presence. The bully may also be better off, at least indirectly, since he (or she) may be trying to use bullying to regulate his own de-regulated emotions. Think of the intervention as regulating the dis-regulated emotions that the bully is experiencing, but which, if only the bully had some interpersonal skills, he would be able to regulate for himself. While there is no silver bullet here, the intervention itself provides the regulation—in the form of a firm boundary to help the bully contain himself and regain an emotional composure without hurting anyone.
If we use empathy as a method of data gathering about bullies, we may be surprised to learn that bullies are a diverse group of people:[v]
(1) The stereotypical bully: The stereotype really does capture features of the real world. Think of Bill Sikes (see Figure 5) from Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Bill Sikes beats his dog and his girl friend. The relationships of power are one-sided and physical violence is prominent.
Other examples of classic bullies include Carrie’s schoolmates in the revenge movie of the same name; Nelson in the Simpsons; Malfoy in Harry Potter.
One person who reports in great detail on bullying, Emily Bazelon, calls the stereotypical bullies “thugs in training.”[vi] These bullies rely on superior physical strength. They trip you in the corridor, and steal your lunch. They exemplify the descriptions that bullies do poorly academically (except perhaps for Malfoy, who is all the more sinister for being smart and psychopathic). These bullies habitually cause conflict with others, Bazelon reports, and are 4 times more likely to become criminals.
Figure 5: Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist, bullying his dog
According to Olweus, to whom Bazelon is indebted for the definition of bullying, 60% of childhood bullies have at least one conviction from breaking the law; 35% have three or more encounters with the police. These are the kids who may satisfy criteria for conduct disorder such as cruelty to animals, damage to property, casual disrespect in addressing others—along with bullying behavior.
Many of these kids, stereotypical bullies, feel miserable, and, are attempting to regulate their disregulated emotions by making others suffer. Yet these bullies would not necessarily agree or endorse the judgment that they are unhappy. This is because they are out of touch with their feelings. They would have to be taught how to feel their feelings prior to asking them, hypothetically, how they would feel if something similar was done to them. If they are out of touch with their own feelings, it is likely that they are unable to get in touch with the feeling of others. They are out of touch with the grain of empathy, which we generously attribute to them.
In most bullies, the bully’s conscience developmentally lags behind his age cohort. That is especially the case with these individuals. Even if they have a capacity for empathy, empathy is not effective in appealing to their conscience. The conscience is stunted or they dismiss its influence. They may have a trace or sense of empathy, even though undeveloped, but it is often misused to increase the suffering of the targets.
Instead of tactically trying to induce empathy, external surveillance and behavioral incentives are likely to be most effective in reducing their bullying behavior. If they could find a positive role model to admire and imitate—someone who is not a member of a street gang or “bad boy” rap star—then they could get guidance from him or her. Admiration for a role model would allow the person to acquire ideals and ambitions, contributing to their integration into the community. It just might save their lives.
(2) The clueless bully: The aggression of this kind of bully does plenty of damage. Yet, at another level, these bullies just don’t get it. He may be socially awkward, or even fall on the autistic spectrum. One kid who fell into this group called his targets “stupid.” He hurt the feelings of many, and, made some kids cry; but in the process he became extremely unpopular. If he thought bullying was a way to get ahead with his peers, it didn’t work. His status plummeted.
Our empathy suggests that the empty wagon makes the most noise, and this kind of bully is one of those. He is not filled with sadism and malice, but definitely lacking social skills. This is small consolation to those whose days he wrecked, yet it does give one pause. This is the kind of bullying for which the adult’s advice to “fight back” makes the most sense. This is not easy to do. Taking “assertiveness training” or “boxing lessons” assumes the target of bullying lacks skill in one of these areas, and has incentive to develop it.
The target has been selected precisely because this is someone who does not like to fight. The problem is that prior to assertiveness training, and so on, most targets of bullying are unable to act effectively on their own behalf—or assertively. Lack of experience and skill in dealing with hostility as well as out-and-out fear rarely improve the judgment of the person who is the target of bullying.
The target of bullying ends up being a deer in the headlights when it comes to fighting. When the power equation is out of balance and a hostile environment exists due to physical size or social conditions (e.g., apartheid (“legal” segregation), anti-Semitism, etc.), fighting back can become a suicidal gesture, literally if not emotionally. Rarely does any benefit exist in getting into a back-and-forth with the bully.
Still, this is precisely the scenario where the possibility of the would-be victim fighting back in self defense makes the most sense. In many bullying scenarios one may need to beat a tactical retreat or call for backup prior to engaging, since the power equation is so unfavorable. However, in this case, the idea of attempting to set one’s own boundaries by pushing back and confronting the clueless bully is potentially useful and self-empowering. No guarantees, but it might work.
(3) The bully who is also a target: These bullies are vulnerable to peer pressure. They succumb to peer pressure to abuse others. Nor are they good at protecting themselves from bullying. Unlike the first group, who may satisfy criteria for conduct disorders (which used to be called “juvenile delinquency”), these kids do not feel okay about themselves. They do not subscribe to the philosopher Socrates’ maxim that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it. These kids experience the worst of both worlds, but it feels less bad to bully than to be bullied.
These bullies are relatively more in touch with their feelings than the first two groups, and here is a chance that an “empathy induction” might bear fruit. “How would you feel if this were done to you?” These kids are depressed or anxious or both. They experience a conflict between the fear of being bullied and the “easy way out” of succumbing to peer pressure and becoming a bully.
Instead of intervening with a suspension from school for the bully, punishment has to be supplemented with treatment, rehabilitation, or guidance. With treatment such as counseling or therapy a possibility exists of improving the behavior once the student returns to the school community after the suspension. A continuum of interventions from online training to individual counseling to working with parents can produce positive outcomes.
(4) The bully who is a “popular” kid: These individuals score high on social skills. They are good at reading the emotions of others. They have empathy skills, though often they lack the basic foundation of authenticity and integrity needed to use the skills to benefit others or build community. They find relating to other people is relatively easy, and they know how to say just the right things to make friends or placate the grown ups. If the reader is expecting me to say that they are secretly insecure or wracked by self-doubt, that is simply not so. On the contrary, these kids are popular and mostly happy with their lives. Often their parents are well off. The kids get gear and stuff. Yet something is amiss and missing.
Here bullying occurs as a play for power and social status. A pecking hierarchy exists in which the most popular kid gets a minion to perpetrate the “dirty work,” the bullying. This is the Machiavellian moment. It is best for the Prince—I mean, bully—to be loved; but it is essential to be feared. Likewise for the Princess. When perpetrating wrong doing, one should nevertheless be perceived as being gracious and generous. What is the point of having power or status unless one is able to exercise it?
Boys provide numerous examples of popular kids who can be mean—see McFly in the Back to the Future series of films—but this is where “mean girls” come into their own.[vii]
When relationships get “weaponized,” the discussion cuts across gender lines, though girls have provided the “poster child” for meanness in the popular press. While boys bully both boys and girls, girls mostly bully girls, bringing a sublimated aggression to the act.
Up until the age of four, girls grab toys, hit, push, play rough, and shout as much as boys do. At some point, social expectations from parents, extended family, biological programming, school teachers, and so on, drive such behavior underground.
Conforming to community standards, whether helpful or hurtful, about “sugar and spice and everything nice” requires that girls become stealthy in their aggression. Fisticuffs are out. Queen Bees are in. One definition of a “Queen Bee” is a popular girl, who collects various “minions” around her. The minions, in turn, conform to her expectations in behavior, dress, language, and bullying.
Girls use threats, blackmail, gossip, rumors, attacking reputations, whispering in provocative ways, the silent treatment, or non-verbal gesturing. Opening up in relationships can leave one vulnerable to aggression from those one has trusted. Following the bad example of the grown ups, cliques of kids will “vote someone off the island.” Nor is it progress that, in some subcultures, girls are becoming almost as ready to throw a punch as the boys.
This is where empathy may be misused to increase the misery of the target of bullying. Social skills enable the would-be bully to “get inside the heads” of their intended targets to inflict the maximum upset.
One can find many, diverse examples in which the bully takes the perspective of the intended target, thinks about what would be most shaming or hurtful, and goes about implementing it. The bully has a sense of what the target is experiencing through a refined empathic receptivity.
What one cannot find is an example in which calling someone devaluing names or giving them “the silent treatment” is an example of empathic responsiveness. While the point is controversial, I am calling this out as a breakdown, indeed a “pathology,” of empathic responsiveness.
The description of empathy is crucial here. For advocates of empathy as a fundamentally “pro social” attitude, simply “getting” someone else’s feelings and perspective and then using this verbally to bully them isn’t really empathy. An empathic individual would recognize and anticipate the potential hurt, and, therefore, would not respond to the other person in a devaluing way.
The empathy lessons developed in this work takes account of the possibility that empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, and empathic interpretation can be misused to hurt people. But empathy without empathic responsiveness falls short of the definition of full functioning empathy. Such an approach fails and breaks down when empathic responsiveness is tested. One does not give back to the other person that person’s own experience in such a way that he recognizes it as his own. Instead one bullies the other. So empathy must be informed by one’s good upbringing and ethics not to misuse empathic responsiveness to hurt others.
In conclusion, the recommendation and response of empathy to bullying – and in every case – is to set limits, establish boundaries, and get one’s power back in declining to take the bait of provocative gestures. Self-defense is always appropriate is one is the target of aggression, and so is retreating in the face of disproportionate unfavorable odds.
The challenges is to contain and disarming bullying without becoming an even bigger bully than the bully against whom one is struggling. The proposal is NOT to use empathy to get in touch with the bully’s suffering. Many bullies enjoy misbehaving and they get off on the conflict and making others suffer. Rather the recommendation is to use top down, cognitive empathy to put oneself in the place of there other person (the bully) in order to understand what might be motivating him so that one can deflect, defuse, or deescalate (including implementing a tactical retreat).
Even if the bully is the boss at work or members of the local police force who have a monopoly on violence, the recommendation is still the same: set boundaries, establish limits, and try to defuse the situation. Note well: this is not a suicide mission – one may have to retreat, call for backup, and find other methods of restoring boundaries and integrity such as civil disobedience, finding powerful allies, documenting and escalating to sympathetic authorities in the establishment (if there are any), or seeking a personal solution in another context. The devil – and the empathy – is in the details and in further podcasts in this series on empathy and bullying, additional guidance will be provided.
Notes
[i] Lou Agosta. (2015). A Rumor of Empathy: Resistance, Narrative, and Recovery in Psycho analysis and Psychotherapy. London: Routledge: 141–194.
[ii] “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” requires telling the truth about what happened and what one made it mean. In asking forgiveness one is required to say for what one is asking forgiveness. I ask: If the perpetrator does not think to ask forgiveness is one obligated to make an unsolicited offer? Forgiveness is a possibility and a recommendation, not an entitlement?
[iii] Dan Olweus. (1973/1993). Bullying in School: What We Know and What We Can Do. London: Wiley/Blackwell.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Emily Bazelon. (2012). Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy. New York: Random House. This chapter relies significantly on Bazelon’s journalistic synthesis of the literature and her incisive interviews; see also James Garbarino and Ellen deLara, (2002), And Words Can Hurt Forever: How to Protect Adolescents from Bullying, Harassment, and Emotional Violence. New York: the Free Press (Simon and Shuster).
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Rachel Simmons. (2002). Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. New York: Harvest (Harcourt).
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD, and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy as presence – online and in shared physical space
Review: Gillian Isaacs Russell, (2015), Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. London: Karnac Books: 206 pp.
Granted in-person physical meetings are impossible when the health risks become prohibitive, that is no longer the case (Q3 2021), at least temporarily. Therefore, the debate resumes and continues about the trade-offs, advantages and disadvantages, of online telecommunication (“Zoom”) mediated therapy sessions versus physical in-person work.[1]
Gillian Isaacs Russell’s book in a powerful and important counterforce to trending technological optimism that online therapy is the wave of the present and of the future. This optimism compels those of us who are digital immigrants to align with digital natives in privileging screen relations over physical presence in the same space in engaging in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. By definition, “digital immigrants” were educated prior to the explosion of the Internet (and world wide web on) or about the year 1999 and “digital natives” came up with “online everything” such as pouches for their smart phones in their parents’ baby strollers.
The cyber rush to judgment is slowed if not stopped in this hard-hitting critique of online screen relations. Isaacs Russell wisely asserts skepticism that meeting online (even in a pandemic) and meeting physically in person are “the same.” One may eventually go ahead with online therapy in many situations (especially in a pandemic), but if you are hearing “they are both the same” that is reason for a good healthy skepticism that the purveyor of the online approach is being straight with you. One also needs to be skeptical as online therapy starts out being “better than nothing” only quickly to slide in the direction of “better than anything.” As usual, the devil – and the transference – is in the details, and Isaacs Russell provides insight in abundance to the complex issues.
Speaking personally, in my own work on empathy, published in 2015, the same year as Isaacs Russell’s book, my Preface concludes with the ontological definition of empathy as “being in the presence of another human being without anything else added” – anything else such as judgment, evaluation, memory, desire, hostility, and the many factors that make us unavailable to be in relationship (Agosta 2015; see also 2010). Though Isaacs Russell uses the word “empathy” in a specific psychological sense, I would argue that her work on “presence” is consistent with and contributes to an enlarged sense of empathic relatedness that builds community.
Isaacs Russell has interview psychoanalysts, clients (clients), over several years and reports in a semi-ethnographical style on the trade-offs between online mediated relations and those which occur in the same physical space, such as a therapist’s consulting room. Her arguments and narratives are nuanced, charitable, and multi-dimensional. The reader learns much about the process of dynamic therapy regardless of the framework.
What she does not say, but might usefully have called out, is that the imperative is to keep the treatment conversation going, whether online or physically present in person. When someone I am meeting with in-person asks for an online session, after controlling for factors such as illness of a child at home or authentic emergencies, then my countertransference may usefully consider the client’s resistance to something (= x) is showing up. In contrast, when an online client asks to come into the office, one may usefully acknowledge that the individual is deepening his commitment to the work. In neither case is this the truth with a capital “T,” but a further tool and distinction for interpretation and possibility in the treatment process.
Isaacs Russell makes the point (and I hasten to add) that no necessary correlation exists between the (digital) generation divide and enthusiasm (or lack thereof) for online screen relations of baby boomers versus millennial or gen-Xers. Some digital immigrants are enthusiastic about online therapy, whether for authentic professional reasons, including economic ones, or to prove how “with it” they are, and growing numbers of digital natives are becoming increasingly skeptical about the authenticity of online relations, craving physical presence without necessarily being able to articulate what is missing.
Isaacs Russell provides an informative and wide-ranging briefing on developments in baby watching (child development research). Child development is a “hands on” process of physically relating to another emerging human being. Her point (among many) is that we humans are so fundamentally embodied that in some deep sense we are out of our element in reducing the three dimensional, heat generating, smell-broadcasting mammalian body to a cold two-dimensional video image. Though she does not do so, Isaacs Russell might usefully have quoted Wittgenstein: The human body is the best picture of the soul (1950: 178e (PPF iv: 25)). As the celebrity neuroscientist A. Damasio notes: [We need] “the mind fully embodied not merely embrained.” What then becomes of the relatedness when the body becomes a “head shot” from the shoulders up on a screen?
The answer is to be found in the dynamics of presence. Key term: presence. Physical presence becomes tele-presence and the debate is about what is lost and (perhaps) what is gained in going online. The overall assessment of Isaacs Russell is that, not withstanding convenience and the abolition of distance, more is lost therapeutically than gained.
Although Isaacs Russell does not cite Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty loom large in her account of the elements of presence. Much of what Isaacs Russell says can be redescribed as a phenomenology of online presence, including the things that are missing such as smell, the ability to physically touch, aspects of depth perception, and the privileging of “on off” moments over against gradual analogical transitions. The above-cited philosophers were, of course, writing when the emerging, innovative, disruptive technology was the telephone, and Heidegger himself went “off the grid” physically (and morally!) with his semi-peasant hut in the Black Forest near Freiburg, Germany. But even though they never heard of a mirror neuron, the distinctions these thinkers lay down about relatedness are fundamental for work in communications and human understanding.
Isaacs Russell gives the reader a generous tutorial in breakthrough developments in neuroscience, including the discovery or mirror neurons in Macaque monkeys and a neurologically-based mirroring systems in humans, which account for key aspects of empathy, intersubjectivity, and human social-psychological relatedness.
Since this is not a softball review, I must inquire, following detailed descriptions of embodied cognition, the primacy of movement in empathic relatedness, faces as emotional hot spots (which nevertheless incorporate full-bodied clues as to the exact emotion), kinesthetic and proprioceptive feedback: do we need a psychoanalysis or rather do we need an aerobics class (okay, at least a class in Tai Chi, moving meditation)? The point is that both participants may indeed “forget” about the computer-mediated relation, but the unconscious does not. The (unconscious) transference is also to the technology and needs to be engaged, interpreted as such. Isaacs Russell provides the distinctions to do so, which is what makes her contribution so valuable, even if one disagrees with her ultimate skepticism that online is the wave of the future.
Amid many useful distinction and nuances, as noted above, the key-differentiating variable for Isaacs Russell is presence. She connects this closely to D. W. Winnicott’s seminal work on enabling the client to recover the ability to “go on being” in integrity and individuality, even in the presence of another person. The model for this therapeutic process is the young child’s breakthrough in individuality as the child is able to be alone (e.g., playing) in the presence of the mother (or care-taker).
This process of becoming an individual being gets operationalized and tested when the client tries to destroy the therapist and the therapist [demonstrates that s/he] survives. Here “destroy” is a technical term, though it does indeed invoke hatred and the possibility of aggression. The paradigm case is that the client expresses hostility – even hatred – towards the therapist and the therapist does not retaliate. The therapist “takes it,” metabolizes the aggression and responds appropriately setting an empathic boundary in the relationship. This advances the treatment, expanding the integrity, autonomy, and individuality [mostly] of the client.
According to Isaacs Russell, this is the key moment – the differentiator: “In ‘screen relations’, the client can never really test the analyst’s capacity to survive” (p. 37).
Why not? Isaacs Russell quotes an astute client (in so many words) that without being in the same shared space the potential for the client or therapist “to kiss or kick” the other is missing. The potential for physical desire or aggression has been short circuited. Since the treatment must engage with these variables, the treatment is stymied and deprived of essential enriching possibilities of transformation.
Isaacs Russell is adamant that the ability of the therapist to survive, in Winnicott’s sense, cannot be test in the online context. If it could be significantly tested, then much of what she writes about the inadequacies of online presence would be invalidated or at least significantly reduced in scope. As noted, Isaacs Russell makes much of the potential to “kiss or kick” the other person in the same physical space; and it is true that such acting out rarely occurs but what is needed is the potential for its occurring.
However, what has been overlooked is such acting out bodily is not the only way of testing the separation and survival of the therapist. Many examples exist in which the client tests the limits by means of a speech act – seductive or aggressive language. Speech is physical and would not occur with the sound waves impacting the biology of the ear. This is not merely a technical point. Tone of voice, rhythm, and timing are physically available.
The distinction “speech act” is one that is critical path in any discussion of the talking cure, even if the latter is understood in an enlarged sense to be the encounter of two embodied (not merely “embrained”) talkers and listeners. Speech act theory includes pragmatics that allow for the illocutionary and perlocutionary force of speech. Speech does not merely describe things – it performs things, building connections and relations. People get other people to do things – change the physical environment – by speaking to them: close the door! Pick up the kids at soccer! Persons invested with certain kinds of conventional authority, powerfully change relationships and other aspects of the human world. For example: “I now pronounce you man and wife” spoken by the officiating authority at the wedding. This is a new reality – in so many ways. The empathic response of the therapist, spoken to the struggling client, is another such example.
Language is powerful, and we humans both wound and heal through our words. Heidegger, who is usefully quoted by Isaacs Russell as inspiring the work of Merleau-Ponty regarding physical spatial dynamics also noted, “Language is the house of being.” That is, presence – physical, mental, poetical, historical – emerge in the conversation that we have individually and in community in language.
Recall that Winnicott’s point is that when the client acts out – in this case verbally – the therapist demonstrates his survival skill by not retaliating. Thus, s/he remains in integrity as a “good enough” partner in empathic relatedness and becomes independent. This likewise rebounds to the expanding integrity and independence of the client.
If the therapist does retaliate – say by moralizing or withdrawing or blaming or becoming aggressive or seductive – then the possibility of treatment in the relationship is short-circuited. Absent significant repair, the relationship ends, even if the conversation continues in an impasse for awhile longer.
Speaking personally, and omitting confidential details, I recall an instance online where, being clumsy with a relatively new online client, who was vulnerable in a way that I did not appreciate, I triggered a challenge to my survival. I triggered a combination of panic, retraumatizing flashback, and panic, in the client that resulted in an extended and seemingly automatic combination of verbal abuse. It threatened me professionally and the safety of the client such that I seriously thought of sending emergency services to the client’s address. The screen is always the screen, in this case, but the screen was no protection against the impact of the hate. It is a further question whether the same thing might have happened if my clumsiness had occurred in person. Perhaps the client would have kept quiet and never returned. We will never know.
So while the client might not effectively have been able to throw a pencil at me (to use Isaacs Russell’s example), the individual would have been able to inflict self-harm in a way that would do more damage to me than a kick in the shins (another Isaacs Russell example). Never underestimate the ability of clients to innovate in acting out around the constraints of an apparently firm therapeutic framework.
The good news is that, without making any commitments I couldn’t keep, by a combination of soothing statements, placating statements, self-depreciating humor, apologetic words, and deescalating inquires and suggestions, I kept my wits about me, and was able to restore the integrity of the therapeutic process. S/he agreed to continue the conversation. I survived and so did the relationship. It actually was a breakthrough, and, without everything being wonderful, the client demonstrated capabilities that had not previously had going forward.
Thus, the counter-example: Survival was tested online, not by physically throwing a pencil, but in reciprocal speech acts and the enactment of presence in speech, a physical media not to be underestimated. One learns that the environment is safe when safety breaks down. To Isaacs Russell’s point, the potential for non-survival also includes non-survival as an actual enactment and outcome – and neither online nor physical presence has a privilege in that regard.
In a real world emergency – a credible threat of self-harm – there is a difference between sending emergency services to the client location and summoning them to one’s own office. But perhaps not that much. The point about survival, safety, and containment (different but overlapping issues) and their respective breakdowns is the same. Many distinctions exist between an online and physical encounter, but the risk of survival or non-survival occurs in each context.
One may argue back that the risk of a meltdown is less extreme in the warm and cozy confines of one’s own office, but maybe you never met a borderline client like this particular one or a client as suspicious or deeply disturbed. If the client takes out a box knife on camera and starts to carve up her or his inner thigh (or threatens to do so), one may fervently wish that s/he kicked one in the shins instead.
Thus, in answer to the potential for “kicking or kissing,” the answer is direct: Oh, yes the client can – can indeed test the capacity to survive and do so online. The example “kiss or kick” is not a bad example, but many counter-examples exist that provide useful evidence to the contrary as cited above.
Positively expressed, plenty of evidence is available that the analyst’s survival can indeed be tested in an online session and s/he may survive or not. Ultimately even “kiss and kick” can be enacted as verbal abuse on line, perpetrating boundary violations with hostility or seduction that can be grave and survival threatening, either in imagination or reality, including the survival of the therapist as a professional and the therapy itself.
To give the devil his (or her) due, it is true that there are some cases that are decidedly unsuited for an online engagement. Marion Milner engaged in a celebrated analysis of a deeply disturbed and regressed client, in which the client was silent for long periods of time.[2] The client finally was able to recover significant aspects of her humanity in producing hundreds of drawings and sketches that expressed a therapeutic process of pre-verbal recovery. It is true that, though these were visual artifacts, and presumably might have been communicated remotely, the client herself was already so “remote” from reality that another layer of virtuality was not going to work (nor was it possible mid-20th century).
Heinz Kohut has a celebrated example that he presented in an lecture made a few days before his death. Kohut was working with a deeply regressed and suicidal client (client) in years gone by. In a desperate moment, Kohut offered to let the client, lying on the couch behind which he was sitting in his customary straight-backed wooden chair, hold two of the fingers of his hand. The point of this potentially life saving (and boundary testing) gesture was Kohut’s association to the client’s desperate grasp with her hand being like that of a toothless infant sucking on a nipple. An empty nipple or a life giving one? Powerful stuff, which of course, would never be possible online. Far be it for me to be the voice of reality, nevertheless, these two cases of Milner and Kohut are outliers, albeit deeply moving one, that are completely consistent with the sensitive and dynamically informed application of online analysis and dynamic therapy.[3]
Though the uses of extended moments of online silence should not be underestimated or dismissed, Milner’s and Kohut’s cases were ones that privileged physical presence. It in no way refutes the power or potential of online engagement. What are missing are criteria for telling the difference. No easy answers here but the rule of thumb is something like: do whatever is going to further the treatment in the proper professional sense of the words. What is going to sustain and advance the conversation for possibility in the face of the client’s stuckness? Do that. Winnicott has been mentioned frequently, and rightly so. He spoke of the “good enough” mother. Here we have the “good enough” therapeutic framework including the online one.
Another part of the narrative that was particularly engaging was Isaacs Russell’s discussion of ongoing online psychoanalytic training with the colleagues in China. There are few psychoanalysts in China, so in addition to significant culture and language challenges, such remote work would not be possible without online analytic therapy sessions and supervision. The nearly unanimous consensus is this is valuable work worth doing. The equally unanimous consensus, about which one may usefully be skeptical, is that this work is “functionally equivalent” or in other ways “just the same as” work done physically in person.
The author provides examples, whether from the Chinese colleagues or other contexts is not clear, where neutral observers are asked to evaluate transcripts of sessions where the online versus physical feature and descriptive details have been masked. The result? They can’t tell them apart. What more do we need to say?
Apparently much more. With dynamic psychotherapy and related forms of talk therapy if you can tell the difference between an online and an in person meeting (other than comments about traffic or Internet connections), then you are probably doing it wrong or there is some breakdown that interferes with the process (in either case). Abstinence is easier online – no hugs. But if we are talking boundary violations, maybe some people – exhibitionists? – are tempted to take off their clothes on camera. (This has not happened to me – yet.) Anonymity – just as one’s office has clues as to one’s personal life, so too does the background on camera. Neutrality – being on camera suddenly causes one to adopt a point of view on social media or politics or nutrition or economics or education? Perhaps but I am not seeing it.
However, what Isaacs Russell does not discuss is the “other” transcript – the unwritten one, which is only available as a thought-experiment. There is another transcript different than the verbatim account of what was said or even what a web cam could record. It is a transcript that is just as important as the recoding of the conversation, and why verbatim recordings of the conversation are less useful than one might wish. Both participants may “forget” that the session is being recorded, but the unconscious does not. There is the transcript of what the people are thinking and experiencing, but remains unexpressed or expressed indirectly. Such an aspect of the counter-transference or thought transcript is harder to access and includes the therapist’s counter-transference.
One thing is fundamental: When the context of the encounter between people is an empathic one, then both an in-person encounter in the same physical space and an online encounter via a video session are ways of implementing, applying, and bringing forth empathy.
The online environment and the imaginary thought transcript present new forms of client resistance and therapist counter-transference, and it is these that now are the main target of the discussion of this essay.
Moving therapy to online opens up a new world of symptomatic acts, parapraxes, “Freudian” slips, and acting out.
I had one online client who stands up in the middle of a session to check on what this individual had cooking in the oven, carrying her camera-enabled device with her. Was I amazed? Indeed.
I acknowledged to the client that clients sometimes have mixed feelings about their therapists, and nothing wrong about that as such. Yet I was wondering did she believe I was perhaps half-baked? Key term: half-baked. Further discussion occurred of whether this individual was expressing her unconscious hostility towards me – while, of course, also preparing a baked dish.
The breakdown in empathy may be a thoughtless remark by the therapist, a mix up in the schedule, or a failure of the computer network. The empathy – and transmuting internalization working through it – LIVEs in restoring the wholeness and integrity of the relatedness. Empathy lives as spontaneous relatedness, a form of transference and vice versa. This is not limited to psychoanalysis versus psychodynamically informed psychotherapy. This is not limited to online versus physical therapy.
Other than candidates for psychoanalytic training, few people are calling up practitioners are saying: “I want the most arduous, rigorous, time-consuming, expensive treatment known – I want a psychoanalysis!” I tend to agree with Isaacs Russell that the possibilities for doing full-blown remote psychoanalysis are – how shall I put it delicately? – remote, but not necessarily due to any features of the online environment.
After all the dynamics and debates are complete, Isaacs Russell ends her book with a masterpiece of studied ambiguity. She gives an account of a conversation in an online session with a client in London, UK. Isaacs Russell has relocated to Boulder, CO, USA. Having worked together in physical presence, the client misses her and Isaacs Russell misses the client – yet the therapeutic conversation continues. One cannot help but agree with the sentiment – there is something missing – and yet the conversation continues. Thus, we roundly critique cyber therapy – and go off to our online sessions.
[1] Acknowledgement: This reviewer first learned of Gillian Isaacs Russell’s penetrating and incisive engagement with all matters relating to online psychoanalysis and psychotherapy from my friend and colleague Arnon Rolnick in Q2 2021 as the 2020 covid pandemic was waning, at least temporarily. Thus, I am catching up on my reading.
[2] Marion Milner, (1969), The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psycho-analysis. London: Routledge, 2010.
[3] Charles Strozier, (2001), Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, “Gentle into that Good Night,” New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: 376–377.
References
Lou Agosta, (2010), Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lou Agosta, (2015), A Rumor of Empathy: Resistance, Narrative, Recovery in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. London: Routledge.
Reclaiming Empathy in Online Therapy: An Imaginary Conversation with Sherry Turkle
Here is the verbatim transcript of the complete conversation between Lou and Arnon Rolnick, PhD, about Sherry Turkle’s work on Reclaiming Conversation (also the title of one of her books), and including her memoire The Empathy Diaries (2021) and the debate about online therapy.
For the complete video see: https://youtu.be/6OId-0QDFys
To listen to the podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6K8byq8UAs85lnVcSAj4DJ
Lou Agosta (Chicago, USA): Today’s conversation is entitled Reclaiming Empathy in Video Conversation: An Imaginary dialogue with Sherry Turkle. Today I’m having a conversation with my colleague and friends Arnon Rolnick, PhD, Psychology. I will let him introduce himself momentarily. Just once thought upfront – his commitment is to integrating biofeedback, psychology, and technology. He says – and I believe it is accurate and true – that he is incapable of being indifference. His exuberance, enthusiasm commitment and empathy are an inspiration to me, and I believe will be one to the listening, viewing audience. Great to see you!
Arnon Rolnick (Tel Aviv, Israel): Great to see you and thank you for such a nice introduction so I want to share with you my almost 30 years of effort to integrate Psychotherapy Psychology and Technology. As a clinical psychologist I’ve been baffled by the power of those who characterize life in the 21 century. On one hand, technology and science are providing us with better ways to live; yet, on the other hand, people are suffering more. It is as thought technology helps us to neglect our selves. And before I will say a few words about my work in this area, I want to say why she [Sherry Turkle] is so important. She was a Pioneer and a guru.
Lou: A pioneer and a guru
Arnon: Yes – I will say a few words about my work and then the issue of empathy will lead us all the way. So it was her book The Second Self where she defines this computer as more than just the tube but part of our everyday personal and psychological lives. She looks at how the computer reflects on ourselves and our relationships with other. She’s claiming the technology defines the way we think and act. Turkle’s book, which was really the first one in this area, allowed us to view and re-evaluate our own relationship with technology. This was her first book and this was that the first moment that I thought “Wow!” interesting. And then came my own work as a psychologist. I felt that there is some gap between what happened in the meeting [between therapist and client] and then the person is going home and he either forgets or doesn’t do I what we decided he was do so. I thought we would like to do what in CBT they called homework I don’t like the name “home work,” but most people know
Lou: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy [CBT} and assignments there are sometimes assignments. Back to you
Arnon: II will even appreciate it, Lou, if sometimes my English is not so clear, you will help the audience to understand my accent. So it was sometimes early in 1995 – see how old am I – I think I work with biofeedback I thought why don’t you give that the patient not only a biofeedback but also a CD that you can work at home and we call it “De – Stress” and we sold it in Boots – you know the British Pharmacy [Boots the Chemist] and I so I thought that should be there the killer [“killer app”] that should be the most important thing you give to the world and apparently it didn’t work
Lou: You send the patient home with a CD and there is an interactive media here – so already we’re in the online digital world and the patience or the clients or the individuals struggling – so what happens? They still are not that engaged? Explain it – what is the take away here?
Arnon: I will explain it – a little bit later when I speak about “Beating the Blues” – then the company – the British company hired me to help them develop already for the internet – first for the first CD – the program of cognitive behavioral therapy to help the patient overcome depression and anxiety. I thought again it would be wonderful idea – after seeing the patient, he will use this CD. The company thought differently. She said we don’t need a therapist. Just we will give them this program: eight 45-minute sessions and they will be cured.
Lou: And so you become [in]dispensable – you think maybe this is not going to work exactly as the British UK publishing company is imagining. But at some point, if the once the therapist, the psychotherapist, has designed the assignments, we no longer need you. So keep in touch! Have a great life good! What happened?
Arnon: What happened is very interesting. There were about eight good [unintelligible] that it works. I felt strange – it was a good program – I was part of it but could it really replace the human element? Later on it was found that the picture is more complicated. It works well only when there was a nurse involved her and she helped them to do the program so the nurse…
Lou: Let me just to interrupt you here. it sounds like the human element – so you’re already dealing with the human element and the technological elements whether it’s a CD or whether you know it goes fully online in the cloud as we have it today and it turns out what turns out we have the psychotherapist step aside and it [the nurse] turns out perhaps to be the replacement therapist.
But we’re just calling him or her a nurse shows up – and we suspect the human touch – the therapeutic Alliance if you will – the Rapport between human beings may be a hidden common factor
Arnon: Exactly. But this will allow me later after you will introduce your work and that will help me to divide the Psychotherapy into two main camps: the technique camps and the relationship camps. And I will talk about it only after you will tell us about your work about empathy
Lou: That sounds like a good segue for me to say something about empathy and we’re going to do it – so hold that thought: there’s the relationship camp and the tips and technique camp. And so hold that though – and so back to me – thank you! I appreciate the shout out – who the heck am I anyway? One claim to fame that may be more than one but is to have authored three peer-reviewed books on empathy, starting with A Rumor of Empathy – in effect, virtual volumes one and two and then Empathy Lessons and Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. My PhD from the University of Chicago began with a dissertation on Empathy and Interpretation – so I’m not going to give the storied, complicated history of the distinction empathy at the time I was a graduate student. It’s a matter of public record, my dissertation adviser, Stephen Toulmin, was being psychoanalyzed by the colleagues here in Chicago I don’t know the name of his analyst – he may have told me – but Kohut was innovating in the matter of empathy and his colleagues Michael Franz Basch, Arnold Goldberg, Ernie Ernest S Wolf were innovating in the matter of Self Psychology – and is there anything to this concept empathy or is it just cumbaya stuff? Really what’s the intellectual Providence? And it made a great dissertation for young graduate student and it is something meaningful to engage and so fast forward – I am not going to tell you about all of these books – they’re there’s actually available from your local online book seller. What I propose to do is provide really – no kidding – the one minute empathy training. You can actually do it in a minute. Now there are some conditions and qualifications – and so here it is: Drive out – get rid of – reduce – drive out things such as aggression, hostility, bullying, cynicism, resignation, bad language, politics in the pejorative negative sense – you know we are political and often times it doesn’t bring out the best [in us] – drove those things out – and empathy naturally comes forth – people are naturally empathic – people want to be empathic – and will be so if given half a chance. So that’s it! That’s the training: get rid of the negatives and empathy shows up in the space of relatedness. I pause for breath. I see you have a question.
Arnon: Being also trained in psychoanalysis you’ll clearly represent the Kohutian self psychology view – people are good – but what about the Kleinians? How can we get rid of our aggression
Lou: Well, thank you! I mean thank you: I mean human beings are naturally empathic; human beings are also naturally aggressive. We are a complicated species; and I have no easy answer. The difficult answer is that often times hostility and aggression are reactive. If you want to see somebody get angry – if you yourself get angry – if I find myself angry or even enraged, [then] one good question to ask myself – yourself – the people in the listening or viewing audience: who hurt your feelings? who perpetrated a dignity violation? or where did you not get the empathy and respect you deserved? cuz if you want to get a person angry, hurt their feelings – say something devaluing about their parents. It’s not going to go well. If you say something bad, it could get messy it’s just I have no [easy answer] – I mean we acknowledge the contribution of Melanie Klein. [Klein was] an incredible innovator. Let’s talk to some children. Freud’s innovating – Anna’s innovating – he’s got some ideas about infantile sexuality. Melanie Klein comes along – herself kind of a tortured genius in her own way – [she says] let’s talk to some children – and play therapy is invented. What a breakthrough – so I don’t know – there’s a lot of room for disagreement here but I’ve also seek some over lap and common ground. Hostility and aggression: there are a lot of things that can cause it. I mean, some of it may indeed be in it and species-specific. Nevertheless, who gets their feelings hurt and who experiences an empathy break down [or] a dignity violation. I claim that’s a candidate answer and so I may continue or you can get follow up
Arnon: So I think I’m responsible for the digression.
Lou: A digression but a productive one – so we finished the one minute empathy training; and there’s a lot more to be said about empathy – here right now. [However] We’ll come back to that. I’m going to segue – I think usefully – I’m going to begin a conversation about the contribution of I believe it would be: Madame Professor Dr Sherry Turkle, PhD, social psychology MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). On a personal – the occasion is – I’m going to wave the book – [Lou holds up Turkle’s book, The Empathy Diaries, on the on-camera version of this conversation for YouTube] here her Memoir is published The Empathy Diaries (2021); and there she is as a child of tender age in the 1950s and the 1960s, coming up on the residential part of Long Island. The parents [actually] grandparents are Holocaust Survivors. They escaped Eastern Europe; and her mom marries a man named Mr. Zimmerman. Something is immediately strange – an unconventional something comes out. He’s performing certain kinds of I should say weird experiments that end up sounding like the work done by Mary Main and John Bowlby on attachment [the blank face gesture]. He’s leaving the kid – the young Sherry, the kid – forgive me, Professor Turkle, of tender age – alone in her room, .and letting her cry your eyes out. This guy has gotta go. The mom divorces Zimmerman and marries Milton Turkle, who has issues of his own, but two other children come along, her younger siblings. And here’s the – here’s the empathic moment – here’s the moment of the break down of empathy. At home she’s “Sherry Turkle’; [but] at school, somehow given this bureaucracy, she’s a Sherry Zimmerman. Now in our time, this is second about to be now third quarter 2021, blended families what’s the issue? It’s somehow devaluing, stigmatizing, divorce- you know, the feminist Revolution is occurring but divorce is still an issue one in this community – it is a Jewish community – non observant – living in genteel poverty – coming up in a kind of genteel poverty. Here’s the problem: [pretending to be Sherry’s parents]: “Sherry, you’re not allowed to talk about it. You’re not allowed to talk about the fact that your last name really is Turkle but at school, it’s Zimmerman.” Holy mackerel! It’s a two-tone elephant in the room. It’s [confronting] and so here is my short review: this is a great memoire. It is in many ways a page-turner. I was engaged, and I’ll say just a little bit more about that [soon], and it is also entitled The Empathy Diaries, [but] it might be also [be] entitled The Breakdown of Empathy [diaries], because it gives an account of what Sherry has to survive to reclaim for Humanity. It goes well – she’s smart – her parents tell her or grandparents tell her: “Look, you are not going to typing class.” This is amazing – this is the 1950s. If she learns how to type, she will end up in the secretarial pool. “No, Sherry, you are going to be in the front of the class. You are going to be the teacher” They don’t let they refuse to let her do housework. “Read!” they say. I heard something similar in a kind of weird way. This is a way of improving one’s life and one’s humanity and of getting some empathy. She goes to MIT. She meets – she goes back and forth for a while. She ends up at the University of Chicago about a couple of years before I was there. So it is a page turner for me, cuz they’re she is in Social Science 122 – sitting in the classroom – Social Sci 122 – and in comes Professor Bruno Bettelheim. He brings his straight back wooden chair; puts it on the low stage; and the students, who are trying to speak truth to power, give it to him, he gives it to them back – [Bettelheim is] the author of so many books: Love is Not Enough, the empathy fortress, [oops, I mean], The Empty Fortress, The Children of the Dream – over to you for a digression – insert your story here – he goes and visits a Kibbutz for a few months and says a few things which become controversial – you grew up there – tell me –
Arnon: I was born in Kibbutz and I was there raised there in this unique type of experiment – experiment – experiment – and you know what? We still don’t know that result of the experiment. What I mean is that we develop in so many ways and how many of us became leaders in various areas but we also have some pain and maybe it has been in his own way. May I take the leave now?
Lou: You have the conk shell –
Arnon: I want to say that again Sherry began with computers and she was fascinated with computers in particular and slowly she changed her ideas about the problems with computers – for example, she has many books – but I speak about two of them – both have explored how technology is changing the way we communicate – in particular, she raised concerns about the way in which organic social interaction can be degraded through constant exposure to lose every meaningful exchange with artificial intelligence. I will speak about artificial intelligence later on. In [Sherry’s book] Reclaiming Conversation, which is the book just before the one you mentioned
Lou: Reclaiming Conversation [Lou hold sup the cover on camera]
Arnon: She is arguing – she is gathering data from schools [and] companies [and] families – she says: we forgot [how] to speak with each other. We [are] all the time doing it via devices – we type – we send SMS – but we don’t talk and that’s led her to the interview that we will talk [about] later on where she kind of arguing – and maybe you will express it better – that online therapy is something completely different from psychoanalysis – and we will talk about this [more later] – but let me come back to this distinction between the two camps – and I will try to explain how the internet when it entered into the Psychotherapy world how it affected the two camps in different ways. So let’s begin – what are the two camps? The technique camp and the relationship. And everybody who knows Psychotherapy – you know that there is the group that thinks that their relationship is (a) very important aide in understanding the problems of the patient and (b) in maybe curing. Now you know that the earlier relationship with the parental figure is very important and this might be reflected later on in the relationship with therapist so that that camp is clearly or might be worried or interested about how does online therapy work. It seems like you want to comment and talk or should I continue?
Lou: – Well I have some comments I mean I think you hit the nail on the head so to speak in that the book you refer to – Reclaiming Conversation – she launches a Jeremiad – she is on a tear – you know, remember the Prophet Jeremiah in the Hebrew Bible? He was angry about something – we’re talking about anger – and it’s not clear whose feelings got hurt – but the feelings of the people at the dinner table where dinner conversation and conversations between friends are interrupted by beeping, buzzing, alerting smartphones – she is on a rant that we have got what amounts to acquire attention deficit – it’s not like we were born ADD or ADHD – amphetamine-based interventions will not help, because it is acquired through the number of interruptions that – so she’s, you know, [on a tear] and that’s the immediate trigger if you will, which, I believe, you’re expressing – what I would say is you are then tracing the conversation in the direction of online therapy – and it’s because – I mean – it’s now, you know, we’re emerging from this pandemic – the positivity right here in Chicago – hopefully – fingers crossed – we are jinxed now, I said, but – let us not do magical thinking. The positivity rate in Chicago is last week was .6 per cent and I had said the pandemic is at least temporarily over when it hits .5% but on other places it’s 6% and 10% and the struggle continues and we are really not going to go into it and there is a conversation about technology which we are not going to go into – technology can be used for great good and there can be big issues with it. That’s the point I wanted to make. She launches a Jeremiad – back over to you.
Arnon: We spoke about the relationship camp and how they acted to [towards] the Internet and I mentioned the technique camp – this camp who believes that what changes people’s behavior and thought and emotion is: we should give them technique. It could be cognitive behavioral technique – it could be emotion-focused therapy – it could be hypnotic technique.
Lou: You are not anxious or depressed – you just lack skill – that’s an enormous over-simplification, but there may be some useful techniques that can be improved and manage one’s anxiety and depression in a downward Direction
Arnon: Yes, and I should have made [note] that part of my research has dealt with this CBT techniques and I’m not I’m not in any way against it [unintelligible] Now what happened when the Internet entered the picture? Beating the Blues
Lou: Beating the Blues – I’ve got the name of the British company – we give them a shout out if they still exist: Beating the Blues – sounds good.
Arnon: But there is today ten thousand applications programs trying to do what beating the blues did, and it’s amazing how people are still trying to help or be helped by online application. Now just a the beginning of June there is a big article in the New York Times about an application called something –BOT – Webot – something – and it says that this application is working so well that one cannot differentiate if the bot – this machine – is a human being or behind it [a computer] or in fact, they are using a some engines like Google is doing now and – has developed Meena – a computer or machine –
Lou: A system of hardware-software stuff – Meena –
Arnon: That passed the tutor test –
Lou: The Turing test – Allen Turing – can I tell the difference between – in a conversational exchange between someone who supposedly hidden in a room or a machine or a device the Turing test and it turns out – we think – natural language has fallen to a technology that we now have technologies that can simulate natural a conversation with another human being the debate continues
Arnon: The debate continues and it is interesting to note that Sherry Turkle was married to one of [the members of] the group that developed Eliza. Eliza is another very early program that used Rogerian concepts to try to imitate Psychotherapy. Of course it was by far more simple. But let’s go back to the technique camps and a lot of effort to get rid of the psychologist I do at what Sherry Turkle says “the robotic moment.” She has a very strong anxiety – or she’s afraid that this artificial intelligence idea making – how can I say? – It’s dangerous to our humankind
Lou: Humanity – yes – yes –
Arnon: Humanity – I spoke about the technique camp and they’re mistaken direction; and I agree with Sherry [as] she speaks a lot about the dangers in this robotics [approach]. Oops, my chair almost fell.
Lou: If you disappear off camera, we will await your return. Maybe I can pick up the thread usefully at this point and a segue to the immediate occasion where you called me a few weeks ago and you said: “Hey, you know, let us have a conversation about her concerns and objections. I mean, she’s got some energy for this matter. She publishes – and I’m going to quote the publication that catalyzed our back-and-forth conversation: Afterward – here’s the title: “Afterword: Reclaiming Psychoanalysis: Sherry Turkle in Conversation With the Editors of Psychoanalytic Perspectives,” Volume 14: 2017 in this one and in this article, she raises a number of serious objections about the very possibility performing online therapy and she makes the case for co-presence. What I want to say at this point is –
[Video freezes and Internet connection is lost – connection is restored]
Arnon: We had some problems – we don’t know where was it – I don’t hear – you are on mute – we can we use this moment – I don’t know what exactly happened
Lou: I’m so I’m just going to pick it up I’m going to pick it up at “Afterword Reclaiming Psychoanalysis: Sherry Turkle in Conversation With the Editors of Psychoanalytic Perspectives
[[Video is frozen again – and connection lost]]
Lou: You were frozen
Arnon: You were frozen also
Lou: Things like this happen
Arnon: And it happens in online conversations – just a moment – and the question – how the therapist and the patient react to this? One could be completely angry – the patient – or the therapist could be: I’m not psychotherapy online anymore or we could use it
Lou: I mean you might reboot the router too for that matter – that could make a difference – 3, 2, 1 – the name of the article in Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Volume 14, year 2017: “Afterword: Reclaiming psychoanalysis: Sherry Turkle in Conversation With the Editors of Psychoanalytic Perspectives” – and in this – I must say – this was 2017 – I listened before the pandemic – then she denounces – I would say it’s not too strong a word to say she speaks in a devaluing way about online therapy, and [she] considers that psychoanalysis is missing the opportunity to emphasize the presence [of] the being together in the physical space – and all of the issues that occur there, which I will shortly enumerate – and what I really want to emphasize here is that there are at least three objections that she has: she says, lookit, online, to make eye contact with another person, you have to look at the green dot [the “camera on” LED]. I’m looking at the green dot. And it looks like I’m looking directly at you but when I look at Arnon’s eyes, I’m actually looking away from the green dot. So it’s not like sometimes, if you take a step back, it’s not clear where you are looking, but in person there’s a kind of code presence which is makes also, I think, an interesting but perhaps questionable point – so I want to be an honest broker here and charitable – who makes the point what starts out as being better than nothing – key term: “better than nothing” – in it pandemic, you can’t meet in person. So it is so, as she acknowledges in a podcast in July 2020, at the height of the pandemic here in the States, you can’t go to visit in person. It doesn’t work – you can’t – it’s impossible – it’s forbidden – and when we get back at someday out of the pandemic, from which we are (arguably) emerging at this time, the problem is (she sees) is that there will be friction and resistance to meeting in person where our fullest Humanity, if you will, empathy in the sense of being present with another human being in the same physical space embodied in a physical way. And so being “better than nothing” becomes “better than everything,” “the best of all” in so many words. And, finally, well those are her two points, and she says psychoanalysis may be missing a great opportunity here to take a stand and then she talks about a number of issues including [incomplete thought] – but she doesn’t say, you know, how to use the couch online – the couch – lie back on the couch – free associate – I’ve seen people who lie back on the couch and immediately have a breakthrough. They think of things which they were aware of – that they have not really been unaware of them – but we’re just kind of shoved back in there you know in their consciousness -in their inner sanctum, and all the sudden lie back and relax a little, and, oh, my God, I remember this or that about parents, about friends, about current relationships that they had not been aware of; so it can be a powerful tool and how does that work online? It doesn’t come up in this particular article. I pause for breath.
Arnon: The issue – is that the real psychoanalysis – is that typical discussion in psychoanalysis for many years – and now when Sherry Turkle says this is not psychoanalysis, speaking of online therapy – she is repeating and doing what many people did years ago before when the question was being on the couch or not being on the couch or sitting front face-to-face was considered not psychoanalysis
L: Somehow it was not echt – not genuine or authentic enough
Arnon: Yes, it was not the real classical Freudian in the day – and also the question should it be five times a week or three times a week – so psychoanalysis all the years is it the real thing or not the real thing and in this way I look on Sherry Turkle context can be partly understood – old psychoanalysis – is it true or false – in the 1950s when people said can you do psychoanalysis via the phone there were articles that said, you can do it but it is only supportive therapy – so what I am trying to say is the relationship camp was very much obsessed with the question was it the right thing as regular therapy or not regular therapy – so what I am saying is it is clearly different but it might be interestingly different – we might even find some advantage and learn a little bit what works in psychotherapy – for example, now when we are talking to one another, is it the content, my interpretation or is it my fault my visual appearance, which might be even bigger than what we you would seeing if you are in the end and I turn. You can see my face – my bird [beard] – my eyes – and like that so, and look. For example, I can do now this [Arnon zooms in and out with the camera] I’m going backward and then zooming
Lou: Amazing – we are gong to zoom in – we are literally zooming – and so may I jumping in at this point, because you raised a number of questions – now this is now not Professor Turkle (Sherry) – this is Lou Agosta: We may usefully have a phenomenology of presence – of online presence – just as we have the philosopher Merleu-Ponty talking about embodiment and a number of researchers [on the subject]. There is need for that, because the image is different than the physical presence – sometimes – it’s – it’s just different – it’s not better – it’s not worse – it may be richer in some sense and then less dimensional in another sense – and so, you know. I mean I could see – she doesn’t call for this, but she might usefully do so. The second idea: take a transcript of an in-person psychotherapy session and take a transcript of an online session. What’s the delta [between the online and the in-person]? How could you tell? Now the Internet blows up as it did a moment ago in our conversation, then you know we’re online. If the patient comes in and says, well the traffic was horrible, then you know you’re on the ground. But remove those deltas – remove those considerations – I suggest that in most cases – but interesting ones may not be on the list of most cases – one could not tell the difference, because therapy is basically a conversation – it lives in language – but [unintelligible] what about those instances [that are] new forms of Freudian slips. An anecdote: I met a new patient I had a second meeting with the individual – we use some version of Zoom – she gets up – the device is moving around the apartment – she goes to the kitchen – goes to the oven and says “pardon me, I got something in the oven” I am thinking – this is now would not be in the transcript – my thought would not be in the transcript – I’m thinking: Okay, this is amazing – this is practically like an enactment – an acting out – a Freudian slip – and I [think to myself] sometimes clients wonder whether their therapists know what they’re doing – it’s a valid question to be a little bit skeptical when we are consumers of psychotherapy services – does his or her therapist guy knows what he’s doing; and I said I’m thinking it’s a new relationship, but people are a little ambivalent about how they feel about their therapist and I say to her: “Do you perhaps think I am half baked?” She’s got something in the oven – she is baking a cake – it’s denied yet the thought is there – you can’t make this up – you can’t make stuff like this up – so that would be a delta – you get new forms of slips of the tongue, parapraxis, Fehlleistungs. Make no mistake, the transference is always the transfer, and so, this does not come up in Professor Turkle’s work. It might usefully do so, because the genie is out of the bottle.
Arnon: I think the example you gave is wonderful. Being a more CBT like therapist, I would not interpret as Half Baked or those things like but I would say: Wow. What a wonderful opportunity to see you are working – have hobbies – that you can cook – you see, what I am saying is the fact that the therapy is not now in our clinic but in in her room – her place, helps me know things about her self that I would not know – so instead of fighting this – and lets make the room exactly the same – let’s use this uniqueness that I can see their room and maybe they can see my room which is again interesting.
Lou: It is significant, and I would tend to agree, and I claim that I was using it to explore the relationship and it’s true my countertransference was like can – one version of empathy is to be fully present with the other person – and I think Turkle – I mean, she doesn’t actually define it that way, but I think Sherry gets that – she appreciates this matter of copresence and really being with the other. I mean just like, you know, if this dialogue between you and me, Arnon, we go back a bunch of years – you know, if it were successful beyond all of our dreams, notwithstanding internet interruptions, we would succeed in making present a certain empathy. I mean, like I got you, man, I know, you know, we’ve been struggling with these issues for a lot of years, and now that’s a criteria of success: that we bring it forth – and we [are] doing it online. Hey! Hello! We are having [an online conversation] – we couldn’t do this on the ground. I mean you’re in Tel Aviv – we didn’t put this at the start of the video but you’re in Tel Aviv – I’m in Chicago Illinois – it would not be humanly possible otherwise
Arnon: Right – right and that brings me again to my belief that we are reclaiming conversation – we are reclaiming conversation of [as] Internet dialogue and that it works very well – and let me tell you I am doing it for almost twenty years – and I prefer still to have the patient in my clinic – but I clearly suggest to our readers or audience not to go in either direction – not to say that technology will replace the human element and, on the other hand, let’s use technology. May I just add one more thing that we are currently struggling with – remember I want the therapy to continue only by the one-hour session. So the question comes, can we use technology not only by doing the one-hour session but by [for example] I am doing quite a lot of couples therapy – can the couple call me in the middle of a crisis – they are at home –
Lou: That would be powerful – that could be power at the moment, the enemy (so to speak} – the issue is present at the moment
Arnon: That would be one way to enlarge therapy – the second thing I am doing – according to the technique camps, not the relationship – I am using application, but the application is not trying to replace me but trying to resonate our interaction. Suppose you are now my therapist and I was your patient and you will use this resonator application to resonate [saying to me] remembering how we felt when we had this problem – the idea: so we can use technology in many other ways not to fight it and not to say this is everything.
Lou: Technology – surely, I mean this is a cliché, but perhaps hidden in plain view – technology can be a two-edged sword. Like any communication [device], it both connects and divines – I mean, we are relatively inexperienced with online therapy. I said earlier, dropping in the [conversation that the] genie is out of the bottle. In her in her podcast in July 2020 at the height of the pandemic, Sherry expressed concern that there would be a lot of friction, as she said, to going back to in person meeting just as there apparently is a lot of the people going back to the office and to their cubicles in person, and in some cases it’s essential and in some cases it’s definitely not required, and so how to tell the difference becomes the challenge. And it does seem like there is something – she makes the case, I mean, with which I must occasionally and in many ways align, that she makes the case that physical presence has something that is missing, and, yet. The genie is out of the bottle. We’re not going, you know, we’re not going to get rid of our telephones, and if I want to send a message, I write you a letter, or, you know, I send you a message with a boy – a runner – run and deliver – people would do that – we’re not going to be able to go back, so the challenge then becomes how to be authentic online and interact with a phenomenology of online presence with new forms of, I mean, in the world of online humor I’ve been known to say occasionally two new clients, I mean, well what about the digital divide. You need a computer and zoom and a door that you can close for confidentiality, and privacy. I’ve had clients, sadly at the beginning of the pandemic that fell through the digital divide. This young man was living in the same bedroom with his younger brother. He was trying to do the conversation, walking around outside. It was really hard. It was really kind of not working the way it should. And so there are peopling now where are you may need to meet with them in person, because they don’t have the technology. And here in the States, it’s a much bigger country (bold statement of the obvious) than Israel; in some ways, more poverty. There are parts of this country, which are not digitally wired and connected; and so those issues become a matter of social justice as well. And so I have to call them Sherry doesn’t solve them either, but nevertheless she lines up and makes the case that it’s very important. So where are we? I want to – maybe since I’ve got The Conch Shell here, I will tie up two loose ends. I interrupted myself as I was talking about her Memoir. After she answers up for a little while at the Committee on Social Thought and she ends up writing a dissertation at MIT on the social psychology of French political psychoanalysis. She meets Jacque Lacan – so all of the controversial figures Professor Bettelheim, Jacque Lacan – the amazing thing – I really want to put this on the video – he [Lacan] treats her nicely – bad [boy, Lacan] – I mean, Why? This is so uncharacteristic. Why? He wants her to write nice things about him. He wants her to produce a enriching and ennobling and even perhaps – you know, given who he is – a flattering report and she doesn’t of course do that but he does come to Boston to visit at Cambridge, and to visit the colleagues, and the thing about Lacan – the only criticism – the only problem with Lacan – there’s only one problem, Jacque Lacan. He goes to dinner. He doesn’t wear a tie. He throws a conniption fit. It’s kind of an interpersonal disaster. Professor – Sherry not yet Professor Turkle has nothing to do with his bad behavior but it resonates in different ways, She goes on to publish that book I was waving around or about to wave around [on camera] in this version Psychoanalytic Politics [on camera] you see the cover [and a silhouette] of protesters of May 1968 and the Eiffel Tower there. She is not a Lacanist, but she is informed by the dynamics, and, you know, the prohibition creates the desire. I didn’t know I wanted to go online to do therapy until you told me I couldn’t. Now if I have to explain the joke, it’s not funny. That’s the best I can do. So that wraps up her memoire. There’s a lot more there, but those are some of the essential talking points. So I pause for breath.
Arnon: It’s a nice way to finish with the more personal. May I bring up another personal [matter] – Sherry speaks so honestly about a Jewish home she grew up and her problematic father and she came to the same direction that I came to though I have a wonderful father, because he thought technology can help change the statues of the Jewish people. It can help solve the pandemia, the pandemic. It can help the human race. So my father really believed in technology, but not only in the technical aspects, but it’s a part of the human spirit that we can fix things. We can overcome problems,
Lou: That is remarkable, because here you are growing up in a Kibbutz, which is kind of a collective environment. The parents are not dismissed, but moved to the side and here Sherry who gets a lot of attention, in some ways it’s almost impossible to get too much attention but she does and not always of the right kind in some instances, and the end result is this complicated relationship with technology for the things that it is powerful in doing and for its disadvantages and drawbacks as well advantage. So final thoughts as we are coming up on the back end of our conversation. And your personal anecdote is a final thought. Two thumbs up on the work she’s doing. We find that we take exception to the throwing online therapy and online psychoanalysis under the bus as we say here in the States. The problem with that – here is my final reflection – the problem with that is that it is getting crossed under the bus. There are a lot of people under the bus struggling so we want to make productive useful application of all of the means to combat human suffering. What all of these different modalities have in common – whether it’s CBT or biofeedback or group therapy or traditional dynamic therapy or rigorous Freudian therapy or self psychology – they’re not exactly the same – all of these are commitment and a stand against human suffering which is significant and ongoing that’s my thought. So I think Sherry stands with that. I think we have common ground there.
Arnon: Yeah, maybe she would join us in the next go around
Lou: Well, would you like to make an invitation? Make the formal invitation, because that occurred at the start of the conversation.
Arnon: Well, you probably would say it in a more American, polite way – but I would say: Sherry, I was trying to communicate with you, she know it, so I wrote to her, because we wrote a book – we did not mention it yet – we wrote a book about online therapy with Haim Weinberg [editor] and you wrote a chapter – and I wanted to have her in the book – it was before she wrote the Empathy Diaries – and she wrote to me, I am so much into it [writing the memoire] that I cannot stop – and I pushed again – and being Israeli, I pushed, and she replied, “I appreciate it but no.” Maybe now she will be more open.
Lou: There’s an invitation for further conversation. Thinking of the end: we acknowledge your empathy, Professor Turkle – Sherry. I acknowledge your empathy, Arnon, my colleague and friend. I acknowledge the empathy of the listeners to this conversation, because you’re listening creates the empathy in this conversation. We honor and thank and acknowledge you for that. Thank you very much. Signing off.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD, and the Chicago Empathy Project
Resistance to Empathy and How to Overcome it (Part 2): Individual Provider and Receiver (of Empathy)
Overcoming Individual resistance to empathy (provider)
Empathy is trending. As we engage with provider empathy, the pendulum has swung far enough for a backlash against empathy to be emerging.
Empathy with negative emotions and suffering is difficult. From a purely selfish perspective, empathic data gathering about the negative experiences endured and survived by other persons can be, well, negative. Negative experiences such as loss, hostility, intense rage, sexual danger, sadness, sleep deprivation, fear, and so on, are not welcome by anyone even as a less intense vicarious experiences. One fears getting the full-blown experience, not merely vicariously experiencing a sample or trace. The would-be empathizer is at risk of being overwhelmed, inundated, or flooded by emotional upset. The person’s empathy is on the slippery slope of empathic distress; and the empathy is at risk of breakdown.
The language is telling. If one is hit by a tidal wave, then one is going to be “under water.” Kick your feet, make swimming motions with the arms, and rise to the surface to try to catch your breath. While an empathic response is easier said than done, expressing the suffering of the survivor in a simple and factually accurate statement can open the way to containing the suffering and getting unstuck. Dial down empathic receptivity and dial up empathic interpretation and understanding.
People committed to providing empathy to other people resist their own commitment to empathy for several reasons. As soon as a person makes a commitment—in this case, a commitment to practice empathy—then all the reasons why the commitment is a bad idea, unworkable, unreasonable, or just plain absurd, show up. There is no time. It is too expensive. No one is interested. What seemed like a good idea yesterday, now seems a lot more challenging and like a lot more work. Yet empathy is never needed more than when it seems there is no possibility of it.
The would-be empathizer is vulnerable to a vicarious experience of the other person’s suffering. Indeed if one’s empathic data filter is not granular enough, one is at risk of being inundated by emotional contagion. This does not mean that the provider of empathy has to be a masochist, stuck on suffering. However, it does mean being vulnerable to a sample of the suffering. It does mean opening oneself up to a sample of the other person’s upsetting experience. It does mean being receptive to that which the other finds so upsetting, but doing so in a regulated and limited way. Hence, the need for training.
The training consists in interrupting and accepting one’s own feelings and letting them be. Practice is required in order to increase one’s tolerance and learn to be with uncomfortable feelings.
One key to forming a humane relationship with anyone who is upset: Vicariously getting a taste of the upset, experiencing vicariously the other’s fear or anger. Acknowledge the experience as valid. Accept the experience, not as good or fair, but as what one has indeed experienced.
One celebrity academic claims that in empathy the better part of emotion is reducible to emotional contagion. What the world needs to practice is not empathy, but rational compassion. As if one had to choose between the two! The world needs expanded empathy and more compassion of all kinds.[i]
A vicarious experience is essential data as to what the other person is experiencing; but if one is distressed to the point of upset by the other’s upset, then one is not going to be able to make a difference. Paradoxically one is not going to be able to experience one’s experience due to being distracted by one’s own upset. One’s empathy has misfired, gone off the rails, failed.
Empathy is in breakdown. One has to regroup. Take a time out. Acknowledge that one is human. One does not always get it right, but that does not mean that one is less committed to empathy or helping the other. It is worth repeating that the empathizer may expect to suffer, but not too much—just a little bit.
The good news is that empathy, when properly implemented, serves as an antidote to burnout or “compassion fatigue.” Note the language here. Unregulated empathy supposedly results in “compassion fatigue.” However, this work has repeatedly distinguished empathy from compassion.
Could it be that when one tries to be empathic and experiences compassion fatigue, then one is actually being compassionate instead of empathic? Consider the possibility. The language is a clue. Strictly speaking, one’s empathy is in breakdown. Instead of being empathic, one is being compassionate, and, in this case, the result is compassion fatigue without the quotation marks. It is no accident that the word “compassion” occurs in “compassion fatigue,” which is a nuance rarely noted by the advocates of “rational compassion.”
No one is saying, do not be compassionate. Compassion has its time and place—as does empathy. We may usefully work to expand both; but we are saying do not confuse the two. Empathy is a method of data gathering about the experiences of the other person; compassion tells one what to do about it, based on one’s ethics and values.
Most providers of empathy find that with a modest amount of training, they can adjust their empathic receptivity up or down to maintain their own emotional equilibrium. In the face of a series of sequential samples of suffering, the empathic person is able to maintain his emotional equilibrium thanks to a properly adjusted empathic receptivity. No one is saying that the other’s suffering or pain should be minimized in any way or invalidated. One is saying that, with practice, regulating empathy becomes a best practice.
However, the good news is sometimes also the less good news.
The other person’s suffering reminds one of one’s own suffering.
The other person’s anger reminds one of one’s own anger.
The other’s failures evoke one’s own setbacks.
The other’s self-defeating behavior is plainly evident to any third party, but one’s own self-defeating behavior seems to continue with regularity in tripping up oneself.
Rarely does a person say, “I want to be empathic in order to confront my own personal demons.” Rarely does one say it, but that is what is needed. That is the work of expanding one’s empathy. As in the fairy tale, one must spend three nights in the haunted castle, fighting the ghosts of one’s past and confronting the illusive specter of one’s blind spots.
Anxiety, depression, fragmentation, and the dehumanization dwelling in the dark side of human nature loom large before discovering the buried treasure of one’s own emotional resources in the face of upsets.
The thinking and practices that created empathy breakdowns are insufficient to overcome them. The thinking and practices that created resistances to empathy are insufficient to transform them. To get one’s power back in the face of resistance to empathy, something extra is required.
Expanding one’s empathy in the face of one’s own resistance to empathy requires something extra. Expanding empathy requires expanding authenticity, so the person who would practice empathy has to confront and clean up his own emotional contagion, conformity, projection, egocentrism, devaluing judgments and opinions, and the tendency of communications to get lost in translation. This clean up requires acting to repair disruptions in relatedness and repairing misunderstandings and miscommunications with other people by acknowledging one’s own contribution to the breakdown. It requires picking up the phone or requesting a meeting. It requires showing up, engaging, and acknowledging how one acted to cause the upset or breakdown.
Instead of emotional contagion, conformity, projection, and mistranslation, one enters the empathic cycle, engaging with openness towards the other person in receptivity, understanding of possibilities, taking ownership of one’s meaning making so that the other person is left free to be self-expressed, and responding in such a way that the other person is left whole and complete.
This means accepting the consequences of one’s deeds and mis-deeds. That is the first step—and every step—in recovering one’s power in relation to empathy. One might not get what one wants. However, what one is going to get is unstuck—and the freedom to be empathic in relationships going forward.
Overcoming individual resistance to empathy (recipient)
Everyone wants to get empathy, don’t they? Speaking of a recipient’s resistance to empathy sounds like resisting rainbows and colored balloons. What’s not to like? Empathy is what everyone really wants, isn’t it? Well, not always. Resistance to empathy—that it exists—is the basic empathy lesson of this chapter.
Emotional closeness leaves a person vulnerable to disappointment. The would-be recipient of empathy is ambivalent and vulnerable about being intimate with the other person, inhibiting the recipient’s empathic relatedness. The result is resistance to empathy.
People want approval from other people. People want approval for their opinions and behavior. People want agreement. Life is definitely easier, at least in the short run, if one is surrounded by people who agree with one rather than disagree.
People especially want agreement when they have something to be disagreeable about. They want agreement when they have a complaint. However, empathy does not lead off with approval and agreement.
Empathy leads off by being quiet and listening. In the face of chronic complaints and self-defeating behavior, being empathic often takes an open and inquiring stance that the other person may usefully take a look at any responsibility or potential blind spots he may be holding onto as the source of the complaint. It seems like “mission impossible,” since the blind spot is precisely that which, by definition, one does not know and that to which one can get access only through sustained self-inquiry. Doing the hard work of undertaking an inquiry into one’s own issues is, well, hard work. That results in resistance to empathy.
Resistant or not, people want to be understood. People want to be gotten for who they authentically are. People want other people to know how they have struggled to succeed and overcome adversity.
Yet, in hoping to be understood for who they really are, people are asking, not so much for agreement as for empathy.
People assert that they want to be understood; yet they do not want to be understood too well.
People do not want to take too close a look at how they have contributed to their own struggle and effort. People do not want to face directly how they have contributed in self-defeating ways to their own frustration and stuckness about which they so loudly complain.
People want the recognition of their humanity that comes with empathy; but not the unmasking of their own blind spots, which requires getting out of their comfort zone.
Let’s face it. People can be difficult. People are disagreeable. People are contrary. People are ornery. People are rude and discourteous. People push and shove. People often forget to honor their agreements. People lie. People are overly aggressive. People are overly sexed. People are under-sexed. People smell bad. Is it any wonder that people do not want to get close to other people? Is it any surprise that people develop resistance to being empathic towards other people?
This is a case of you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them. People, that is. Yet there is no such thing as a person in isolation. A person by himself is not a survivable entity. That is true of newborn babies. That is true of children of tender age, who require years of guidance and education. Likewise, that is true of adults, though in more nuanced ways.
The “I” is a part of the “we,” and the “we” a part of the “I”
Early prehistoric humans needed a companion to tend the campfire and stand guard against predators (or hostile neighbors) while the other(s) rested. The basic male and female pair was an inseparable requirement for procreative success.
Propagating the species to build a community against the ravages of infant mortality was a priority requiring skills to cooperate with one another socially. For most of recorded history (and before) children were the equivalent of a pension plan for aging parents; and in many parts of the world today that continues to be the case.
Domination and control of individuals in community based on physical strength and violence coexisted alongside (and contended against) forms of cooperation, leadership, and community-building based on the skillful use of language and symbols to exercise power based on motivation, persuasion, inspiration, inclusion, and enlightened self-interest.
The point is not to tell a “just so” story about the origins of civilization, but rather to acknowledge that, not only is the individual a part of the community, the community is also a part of the individual. This bears repeating. The “I” does not only belong to the “we”; but the “we” is a part of the “I.” We carry within ourselves a readiness for community, a readiness for relatedness, a sense of inclusion in community; and if there is no one else to talk to, we talk to ourselves.
The empathy lesson? Empathy is the foundation of relatedness, and resistance to empathy is resistance to relatedness. People are born into “relatedness.” Empathy is about participation with others. Empathy is about relatedness with other people and who these others authentically are in their strengths and weaknesses, in their possibilities and limitations. Even when a person is a hermit, all alone, he is alone in such a way that his aloneness depends on the basic condition of his being a creature designed for relatedness. Being unrelated is a privative form of relatedness; and being alone is a deficient form of relatedness. Paradoxically, nonrelatedness becomes a way of relating for some.
Given that resistance to empathy on the part of the would-be recipient of empathy is pervasive, what is the recommendation? Ask yourself: What is coming between myself and the other person who is offering empathy? Perhaps fear of being misunderstood is a factor. Fear of being let down is another factor. Fear of being vulnerable gets in the way. Fear of disappointment is a consideration.
What do all these factors have in common? Fear. Fear is front and center. However, there is something else further back behind the fear. Less obvious but highly significant. What would a person have to give up in order to be receptive to the gracious and generous listening being offered? Behind the fear is attachment—attachment to suffering.
Suffering is sticky
For people who are survivors, whether of the college of hard knocks or significant trauma, allowing themselves to experience another’s empathy takes something extra. Many people who fall short of a clinical label of “post traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) have an area in their lives in which they are engaged with their suffering in an intimate way. You know the saying: “Keep your friends close, but your enemies even closer”? So it is also with suffering. In order to survive suffering, many people have decided to keep it close to them. They are attached to it. Overly attached? One thing is for sure. Suffering is sticky.[ii] Letting go of the suffering through the soothing experience of empathy seems like a risky proposition to people who feel fragile and vulnerable.
Consider PTSD. (We define our terms.) In an attempt to master the consequences of the life threatening experience of trauma, the organism (the human mind/body) keeps the fear, anxiety, and pain split off from being experienced as one’s own. Yes, one was present when the assault happened, the violence was perpetrated, or the train wreck occurred.
Yet in another sense, one was not present. One was not there, at least not as a conscious being. In being overwhelmed in the moment, one immediately took oneself out of the experience as an immediate reaction and survival mechanism. The traumatic experience remains unintegrated with one’s other life experiences, spinning in a tight circle of repetition.
The circle of repetition is split off from the person’s awareness and everyday life, remaining isolated—“sequestered” is the technical term for it.[iii] Suffering lives. The pain is real. Suffering itself becomes a kind of “comfort zone,” but only in the limited sense that it is isolated and separated from the awareness of the person trying to live his life.
This in no way diminishes the struggle or suffering of the survivor. Yet letting go of the suffering through the soothing balm of empathy shows up like a risky encounter with the unknown. For most people, the unknown itself is fear inspiring. The unknown is as fear inspiring as the suffering itself.
One keeps coming back to the suffering in the hope that it might be magically shifted. One keeps coming back to it like an exposed nerve in a toothache. Yes, it still hurts—ouch! The suffering starts to dominate one’s whole life, and one builds one’s life around the suffering, trying to manage and contain the uncontainable. One says, “I know my own dear little suffering up close, and it is a comfort to me in its own way—it gives me all these secondary gains—even though the impact and cost is staggering in the long term—yet I cannot let it go.”
We cycle back to empathy and its many dimensions in the context of suffering as an uncomfortable comfort zone.
How to be empathically responsive to the struggling individual and his “dear little suffering” requires an empathic listening of remarkable finesse and timeliness.
Empathy can help people get out of their comfort zone, in this case a place of suffering, in a safe and liberating way. When empathy gets an opening, empathy shrinks the trauma the way interferon is supposed to shrink tumors. Empathy sooths the accompanying suffering and reduces the stress.
The survivor is able to let go of the attachment to suffering, and engage with new possibilities. No guarantee exists that the outcome of the new possibilities will be favorable; many risks await; but the individual is no longer stuck.
In summary, we have engaged with resistance to empathy from three perspectives. We have explored overcoming resistance to empathy in the organization, in the individual providing empathy, and in the individual receiving empathy. In each case the empathy training consists in driving out obstacles to empathy, reducing or eliminating the resistance, so empathy can spontaneously grow and develop.
The organization drives out empathy by enforcing conformity to an extensive and contradictory set of rules, whose complexity is such that at any give time, the individual is technically (though unwittingly) in violation of one of them.
Speaking truth to power can be hazardous to one’s career; and humor is closely related to empathy; so humor becomes a powerful way of regulating empathy, expanding and contracting empathy in such challenging organizational contexts. Humor is a powerful tool against the arrogance of authoritarian domination. Both empathy and humor require crossing the boundary between self and other with integrity and respect, but humor offers additional opportunities for questioning the status quo, speaking truth to power, and creating the stress, suddenly relaxed by laughter, caused by expressing what’s so.
Empathy has a key role to play in organizations in reducing conflict, overcoming “stuckness,” eliminating self-defeating behavior, building teams, fostering innovation, developing leadership, and enhancing productivity. The empathy lesson is to use humor (and empathy) to undercut resistance to empathy in the organization. The lesson is that empathy is a source of creating possibilities, overcoming conformity through innovation, and leading from a future of possibilities.
Resistance to empathy on the part of those who provide empathy shows up as “compassion fatigue” and burnout. The word is a clue: compassion, not empathy, causes “compassion fatigue.” So much compassion, so little empathy. I hasten to repeat that the world needs both more compassion and more empathy. Peer group dynamics, collegial support, and self-care are required to recharge the emotional resources of those routinely providing empathy to others.
Regular self-care, including exercise, nutrition, quality time with family/friends, is on the critical path to survival and flourishing, managing the risk of experiencing empathic distress.
This makes the case for self-care and self-monitoring on the part of professionals of all kinds and first responders in health care, education, sales, leadership, public safety, customer service, and so on, whose empathy is a significant part of their role. Professionals take breaks and are on top of their empathy game; amateurs try to be empathic all the time (whatever that would mean), experience empathic distress, make it mean they lack empathy, and quit. Those who do not take care of themselves, then blaming empathy when they get burned out, are committing a kind of malpractice of empathic engagement (in the literal, not pejorative sense of the word). Like a helicopter, empathy is powerful and complex, so it requires regularly scheduled maintenance lest something go wrong at an inconvenient time.
For those individuals who want empathy or think that they want empathy, but then change their minds, resistance to empathy confronts readiness for empathy. Some people simply would rather not be understood. For them, being understood has resulted in bad outcomes. They have been manipulated, used, even abused.
In such cases, the would-be empathizer has to “dial down” empathic receptivity, in which the communication of affect looms large, and “tune up” empathic interpretation, in which one cognitively processes what it might be like to take the other’s point of view. Once a person feels safe, the person will be willing to risk exposing and exploring the vulnerabilities that got the person stuck in the first place and need working through to get the person moving again into a flourishing future of possibilities.
In conclusion, empathy is supposed to be like motherhood, apple pie, and puppies. What’s not to like? A lot. People can be difficult—very difficult—why should empathizing with them be easy? Yet most of the things that are cited as reasons for criticizing and dismissing empathy—emotional contagion, projection, misinterpretation, gossip, messages lost in translation and devaluing language—are actually breakdowns of empathy. With practice and training, one’s empathy expands to shift breakdowns in empathy to breakthroughs in understanding, possibilities of flourishing, enhanced humanity, relatedness, and building community.
[i] Empathy is now a major publishing event. There is a wave of books on empathy—popular, scientific, political, and scholarly. For example, Frans de Waal’s The Age of Empathy explores empathy between humans and higher animals; J.D. Trout’s The Empathy Gap considers empathy and social justice from the perspective of Ignatian Humanism; Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization, 800 pages long in hardcover (don’t drop it on your foot!) channels Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of a global consciousness, now including the politics of empathy; Jean Decety’s Social Neuroscience establishes correlations between sensations, affects, and emotions using functional magnetic resonance imaging technology (fMRI) as a kind of x-ray for the soul, exploring the relation between empathy and psychopathy (with his colleague Kent Kiehl); Simon Baron-Cohen’s Zero Degrees of Empathy considers the role of empathy in cruelty and disorders of empathy such as psychopathy and autism. Thomas Farrow’s (ed.) Empathy in Mental Illness drills down scientifically on the disorders of empathy in all their profound differences. See also: Susan Lanzoni, Empathy: A History (Yale 2018); any collectioin on social neuroscience by Jean Decety; William R.Miller, Listening Well: The Art of Empathic Understanding (WIPF and Stock, 2018); Cris Beam, I feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy (Houghton Mifflin, 2018); Jodi Halpern, From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice, (Oxford, 2001); David Howe, Empathy: What It Is and Why It Matters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Leslie Jamisom, The Empathy Exams (Essays) (Graywolf, 2014); Thomas Kohut, Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past (Routledge 2021).
[ii] I discuss this proposition in detail in Lou Agosta. (2015). A Rumor of Empathy: Resistance, Narrative Recovery in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. London: Routledge (Taylor and Francis): 53, 55, 117, 190.
[iii] Bessel van der Kolk. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma. New York: Penguin Books.
Resistance to Empathy and How to Overcome it (Part 1: Organizational Resistance to Empathy)
You don’t need an expert to practice empathy
Every parent, teacher, doctor, social worker, sales person, person with customers, first responder, consultant, neighbor, or taxi driver already knows a lot about empathy. They would not be successful, much less survive, if they did not practice empathy. You may need a license to be a barber and cut hair. However, outside totalitarian state, no one can require that you have a license to do what comes spontaneously to the vast majority of human beings—be empathic. However, an expert can be helpful in clarifying distinctions, providing tips and techniques, and modeling the empathy you want to get or apply and expand.
Parents are naturally empathic towards their children; teachers, towards their students; medical doctors, towards their patients; business people, towards their customers, consultants towards their clients, and so on. Even if a person is clumsy and does not get empathy quite right, people can’t stop doing it. Yes, that’s right—people can’t stop being empathic; but then fear stops them—fear of experiencing vicariously another person’s pain, struggle, conflict, or suffering—and a breakdown occurs in their empathy. There must be something wrong here! Blame starts flying around. They blame themselves. They blame the other person. They blame empathy.
Even if doctors are trained to “tune down” their spontaneous empathy until it becomes “detached concern”—and good reasons exist for doing that at times—empathy naturally breaks through, and they often relate authentically to their patients as one human being to another in spite of themselves.[i]
The really useful thing is that in learning to contract one’s empathy, one is also learning expand it, because one is learning to regulate and manage empathy. Contracting one’s empathy also means being able to expand it. “Dialing down” empathy also means being able to “dial up” empathy.
“Dialing down” empathy does not mean “stop listening,” “be unkind,” “blame,” “make wrong,” “reject,” “be hostile,” “use devaluing speech,” or “feign thoughtlessness.” Such a response would be absurd.
There is a sense in which a feeling may be socially appropriate or inappropriate—for example to laugh at a funeral when nothing is funny—feelings are valid in themselves in that they always are what they are.
A feeling may be an inarticulate judgment—fear being the judgment that one should run from danger—especially if a mountain lion is coming around the bend. The fear is an absolute given in the moment.
One may wish that one felt differently than one does in fact feel in the moment; but that one feels a certain way is an absolute given.
The best way to turn fear into an out-an-out panic attack is to say to oneself: “This (fear) should not be!” But of course it is, so that means what? One has lost control. Panic!
The recommendation? Accepting the feelings as what’s so does not make an unpleasant feeling any easier to bear, but it takes away its power, drains the upset out of it, and gives one space to be in equilibrium with oneself again. Thus, radical acceptance of the feeling is an effective method of “dialing down” one’s empathy.
Most people are naturally empathic, but they lack practice. They set about practicing empathy, but are clumsy. Or they had a bad experience in relation to their own empathy or someone else’s (lack of) empathy. They develop a “flinch reflex” when it comes to practicing empathy. For such individuals, resistance to empathy replaces their spontaneous empathy. Most people use empathy every day, and do not need an expert to tell them what it is. Olympic athletes get a coach, but it is not because they are not good at what they do. They are good at what they do; and are striving to get to the next level of excellence. Few people claim to be really good at empathizing. Those persons who are practiced in empathy can be useful coaches in helping one to clarify definitions, engage the hard cases, and distinguish how to transform breakdowns of empathy into breakthroughs that make a difference.
Using empathy—practicing empathy—sometimes means being used by empathy. Yes, empathy uses us.
“Being used by empathy” means that the person has trained in being empathic, so that the person has a level of mastery that allows the person to be empathic (or not) without thinking too much about it. Empathy has become practiced, habitual, and automatic.
There’s what we know we know about empathy. There’s what we know we do not know about empathy and hope to find out. Where did the word come from? What are mirror neurons anyway? How does one expand one’s empathy?
Finally, there is what we do not even know we do not know about empathy. The third area is where this book and its training operates—what we do not even know we do not know: our blind spots about empathy; our vulnerability, shame, and cynicism in relating to others; and our resistance to empathy.
Empathy requires that one get “up close and personal” with other people. Other people can be notoriously difficult, irritable, dishonest, manipulative, apathetic, too pushy, or contrary. Other people resist being on the receiving end of empathy, because being understood makes them feel vulnerable.
If someone understands me, really understands me, then he can use what he understands about me to take advantage of me. Now an authentically empathic person would not do that, but the world is not known for being filled with authentically empathic people.
Well-intentioned persons sometimes simply misunderstand what empathy is and are resisting something else that they happen to call “empathy.” They mistake the breakdown of empathy in emotional contagion, conformity, projection, distortion, mind reading, or lack of responsiveness, for empathy proper, and throw out the baby with the proverbial bath water. The empathy lesson in confronting resistance to empathy is direct: remove the resistance to empathy, and empathy comes forth, develops, and blossoms. Empathy expands.
Overcome resistance to empathy: empathy expands
Another person’s blind spots are easy to see, but one struggles to catch a glimpse of one’s own. Thus, one of my own blind spots about empathy comes into view, albeit in my peripheral vision. When I do not get my way, I have the thought that the other person (or the world) is unempathic. This is of course absurd and self-serving, though, heaven knows, empathy is unevenly distributed in the world. The empathy lesson? Wherever there is empathy, can narcissism be far away? (No.) Thus, I clean up the thought—give it up, distinguish it as not helpful, let it go. But no matter how may times I give it up, the next time I am frustrated, it seems like there is that thought again, coming into view like the grin on the Cheshire cat. Only now it becomes an inside joke, and a challenge to earn my empathic wings everyday.
This lesson is easy to express, hard to do. The devil is in the details. One has to descend into the hell of one’s empathy breakdowns in order to emerge from the refiner’s fire of self-inquiry with renewed commitment to empathy, relatedness, and community. This sounds too hard. No one said it would be easy.
How to start? One begins by introspecting. Acknowledging one’s own lack of integrity and inauthenticity in the matter of empathy. Like the labors of the mythical hero Hercules, there is a whole lot of shoveling of manure to be performed.
Cleaning up broken interpersonal relationships is on the agenda. Repairing integrity outages and inauthenticities is in order. Empathy training includes the requirement to go out into the world of one’s relations with other persons and engage and practice.
The very idea of resistance to empathy inspires resistance. The idea of resistance to empathy requires motivation.
What could that even be? Resistance to empathy seems to make no sense. It sounds like resisting motherhood, puppies, or apple pie.
The idea that some people would resist empathy is surprising. Very surprising. What’s not to like about empathy? A great deal it seems. Even within this way of talking, appearances can be deceptive. Puppies make a mess on the new carpet. Apple pie is delicious, but it makes one fat. Mothers are wonderful people. The human race owes its existence to those who are mothers both individually and as a community; but motherhood is a damn tough job, not withstanding its many rewards. Mothers require a lot of support. Volunteers?
In general, receiving empathy is like getting a gift; providing empathy requires effort. Getting empathy is a benefit. Providing empathy requires listening to the other person, attending to one’s introspective reaction to the other person, managing the increase in tension, living with the uncertainty of being open to the other person, being vulnerable, and risking misunderstanding. This is why providing empathy inspires resistance. It requires work.
On the other hand, receiving empathy from a committed listener has been compared to sinking back into a warm bath. It is relaxing. It reduces stress. It is restorative of one’s emotional equilibrium. However, even in a one-on-one conversation, receiving empathy sometimes feels like being publicly acknowledged and recognized at a banquet. It has its uncomfortable side.
It is not always easy to be explicitly acknowledged and recognized for one’s contribution. One may feel ambivalent about being exposed and vulnerable. So even receiving empathy, though properly regarded as a benefit, has its conditions and qualifications; and some people are made painfully self-conscious by being acknowledged.
Whether one is giving empathy or receiving it, empathy has its dark side. If one is committed to giving empathy—being empathic—one is vulnerable to burnout, empathic distress, or “compassion fatigue.” If one is on the receiving end of empathic receptivity, though a restorative experience, one is still exposed in one’s potential weaknesses and limitations. One feels vulnerable to misunderstanding by the other person, to whom one has exposed oneself emotionally.
At a deeper level, resistance to empathy lives in our individual and collective blind spots about our dear self. Where there is empathy, can narcissism be far away? “Narcissism” is a way of relating to oneself. The mythical Narcissus was an attractive young man. He was so enamored of his own reflection in the mirror-like surface of the pond—this was before the invention of “selfies”—that he did not see the dangers of his surroundings. In different versions of the myth, Narcissus either fell into the water, drowning in his own image of himself, or he was consumed—metaphorically eaten—by the lion of his narcissistic desires, who also frequented the watering hole.
The empathy lesson of the myth of Narcissus? Empathy requires de-emphasizing “the dear self.” Even for someone committed to giving empathy such a de-emphasis of self-love is not automatic. When the empathy being delivered includes recognition, people struggling with self-esteem issues—either too much or too little—find it challenging just to accept the acknowledgement. “Naw, it wasn’t nothing—just doin’ my job.” It is not easy to be acknowledged, and therein lies resistance to empathy, too. Though receiving empathy feels good, it is not easy to open up to another person and acknowledge one’s personal issues, sufferings, sources of shame, or struggles.
In every instance of resistance to empathy, the empathy lesson consists in identifying, engaging, reducing, managing, or eliminating, the resistance to empathy by interpreting the resistance; driving out cynicism, shame, guilt (and so on); saying what is missing the presence of which would make a difference (such as respect for boundaries or contribution); and being open to the possibility—of expanded empathy.
When the resistance is reduced, empathy has space to expand, which it does so spontaneously as well as through providing explicit practices, tactics, strategies, and training.
The qualities that make organizations successful are not always the qualities that enhance their empathy. I am so bold as to assert this generalization applies whether the institution is a tax paying public one, listed on the stock exchange, or a nonprofit, community organization. Whether the corporate mission is to deliver value in manufacturing automobiles or to serve the community by collecting and distributing whole human blood to sick people, the ultimate truth is: no money, no mission.
Yet to say that the purpose of one’s business is to make money is like saying the purpose of life is to keep on breathing. Well, okay. The two are closely related. Definitely, don’t stop breathing. But somehow “don’t stop breathing” is not very useful as life guidance; and, likewise, “make money” is not a useful business strategy.
The ongoing process of living—or doing business—should not be confused with the purpose, vision, strategy, and meaning of the activity in the direction of excellence, whether in business or the community.
In most successful organizations, expanding revenue is a result of a successful strategy—applications and implementations that deliver value—and satisfy the demands of the customers, employees, and stakeholders. The expanded revenue is the effect of getting the vision and implementation just right, not the cause of it.
Successful enterprises of all kinds have to handle navigating an intricate, complex network of rules assigned by government, law enforcement, taxing authorities, and non-governmental special interest groups. Business and nonprofit enterprises must contend with competing organizations that assert and authentically believe that they can provide the product or service at lower cost or higher quality. Within the enterprise itself, the organization must balance the personalities of the leaders, individual contributors (workers), and stake-holders, who make up the organization.
An inherent challenge exists in building organizations and crafting an administrative structure that actually functions; and then getting the administrative structure—the bureaucracy—to act in a responsive and balanced way to customers, employees, and stake-holders.
Economies of scale that require fitting people into functions that can be substituted for one another to increase efficiency rarely expand empathy, because empathy consists in recognizing differences in individual contributions.
Hear me say it, and not for the last time: the things that make us good at business, including the corporate transformation of American medicine and education, do not always expand our empathy. What to do about it? The battle is joined. The recommendation?
Let your customers, constituents, or stake-holders train you in empathy: Realize that if you do not respond empathically, the customers are just going to go quietly to the competitor that does. Empathy is good for business. If the customer has a complaint that he is having trouble expressing, then use one’s listening skills to get to the bottom of things.
If the customer expresses anger, know that empathy is one of the best methods, bar none, of deescalating conflict and soothing anger. “Gee, it really does sound like you have not been well treated. Let’s see what we can do to make things better” [or words to that effect].
Still, I do not know of a single organization that as of the date of publication of this book, when making decisions, serving customers, documenting complaints, closing sales, managing conflicts of interest, asks: “What would the empathic response be?”
To be sure, aspects of the empathic response are included in such common factors as “be respectful to customers,” “be helpful to clients,” “keep one’s agreements,” “strive to deliver value.” Empathy is already in the mix, and many customers are willing to pay a premium for empathic services even if they do not use the word “empathy.”
The astute businessperson, committed to expanding the enterprise, knows that “if you want to gather honey, do not knock over the bees’ nest.” This is distinct from empathy, but not by much. Thus, the task is to nurture the seeds of empathy already present in abundance, but lying in hiding in cynicism and denial, while making the case that smart organizations build and deliver value empathically.
The legendary Marshall Field, one of the inventors of the department store, on which the sun is now setting, and a kinder, gentler robber baron of capitalism, is famously quoted as saying, “Give the lady what she wants.” It made Field rich, and his workers well off. It is perhaps a sign of the times that Field’s was purchased by Macy’s some years ago, which has struggles of its own in a world in which retail, having been “Amazoned,” is not what it used to be. So the tenuousness of the market value of empathy can be measured by the mark down of the once storied Field’s Enterprises in the face of Internet shopping.
An alternative redescription of the fire sale of Marshall Field’s flagship stores is that individualized, personalized, customized one-on-one service has moved to the ultimate free market, the Internet, once again, disintermediating the disintermediators. I would not rule out expanded empathy in online cyberspace, but, even allowing for the convenience of shopping naked, it is a work in progress.
Even in mild and efficient bureaucracies, people misuse organizational rules and paper work to create resistance to empathy. Passing the buck, “Not my job,” “I’ll have to get back to you,” “We received no such request,” “I don’t know, and I can’t tell you when,” are common responses. Bureaucrats (which used to mean “office worker,” but is now a devaluing term) address such pseudo-answers not only to customers, but also to their coworkers and managers.
Resistance to empathy uses organizational rules and regulations to build protective walls, instead of teamwork. Without concern for the other person, bureaucracy unwittingly creates obstacles that prevent workers from being present with one another.
Mutually implementing and contributing to agreements with the organization and one another is not a priority. Perpetuating the bureaucracy is. Managing permissions and gaming the system occur to avoid work, rework, and overwork. The threat of uncompensated overtime and overwork consumes the energy required to get the job done.
People automatically and unwittingly fall into resistance to empathy, exploiting the tendency to be territorial.
The organization itself can show up as the unempathic authority figure—like the unempathic parent, who leaves the child feeling devalued, depressed, and de-energized. In response, an individual pushes back against the organization and its rules, disagreeing and speaking truth to power.
Rarely does the organization respond empathically to the individual, but rather urges the individual to conform. The individual asks for an accommodation. “Power” exhorts the individual to comply. “Power” says, “I did not make up the rules—I just enforce them.”
The individual states that the organization exists to serve the stake-holders, not to perpetuate its own rule-making. But rule-making has a way of becoming habit forming, if not addictive. Whenever a problem, issue, or breakdown occurs, the tendency is to try to formulate a rule to cover the new case. If the individual continues for any amount of time in a state of non-compliance, then “power” tends to experience a loss of authority, which is deeply threatening and unacceptable to “power.” Power escalates efforts to force compliance. Power imposes sanctions, increasing the cost to the individual. Empathy struggles to make a difference and be heard.
Compliance is definitely trending. This is the age of compliance. And there is nothing wrong with compliance as such. Stop on red; go on green. Yet sometimes so many “shoulds” exist that doing one’s job can end up on a slope of diminishing returns. Filling out the required paperwork takes an increasing percentage of the workday.
For example, some people train to become nurses because they care about other people, and they want to take care of them and their health. However, when virtually every patient encounter has to be documented to satisfy compliance regulations, then an eight-hour workday includes hours of electronic documentation. Many nurses are saying, “This is not what I signed up for.” Engagement—a synonym for empathic nursing encounters—struggles for space to make a difference.
“Compliance” includes conforming to acceptable boundaries and limits. No one is saying break the rules. No one is saying disregard boundaries. Rather one is saying relate to rules and boundaries empathically. But what does that mean? Even if the light is green, look both ways for emergency equipment or an inattentive driver running the light. Don’t be dead right. And as applied to empathy?
Empathy is about traversing boundaries between individuals. But these include not only boundaries between the self and the other, but boundaries between those in a position of authority and subordinates, between insiders and outsiders in communities, and between those who are insiders and those who feel left out—or are actually marginalized and have become invisible.
Humor and empathy versus cynicism
Cynicism and denial are the enemies of empathy. The empathy lessons are simple: Empathy up, cynicism down. Humor up, empathy up. Yet in the face of life’s challenges, setbacks, and struggles to survive, everyone gets cynical on a bad day.
Ground zero of cynicism and humor is Scott Adam’s Dilbert cartoon. It is wickedly funny, because it expresses more than a grain of truth about dysfunctional, anti-empathic organizations.
In one classic example, the pointy-haired boss says that from now on the organization will assign job functions based on the Myers-Briggs Personality Test (MBPT). For those readers who may not know, the MBPT is the test that distinguishes introversion and extroversion, thinking and feeling, and related categories. The boss continues: “For those of you who do not have a personality, one will be assigned by the human resources department.”[ii] I must say that I am deeply ashamed of myself—I can’t stop laughing.
In humor, stress and psychological tension are created by violating a standard—saying people in corporate cubicles have no personality—and then the stress is released in laughter by the mechanism of the joke such as a pun, double meaning, or violation of expectations.
Humor is closely related to empathy in that both humor and empathy cross a boundary between the self and the other. However, unlike empathy, in which the boundary crossing occurs respectfully, with acknowledgement of the other person’s contribution or struggle, and with recognition of humanity, in humor the boundary between self and other is crossed with aggression, put down, or (in other cases) sexuality. The rule? The more objectionable the joke is, the funnier it is. The put down, “If you do not have a personality, one will be assigned by HR” is indeed wickedly funny; but it is also deeply debunking of the corporate world (and shaming of the individual), in which people come to feel like a gear in an inhuman mechanism.
So empathy for the long suffering inhabitants of corporate cubicles, whose personalities are at risk of being erased, does come to the surface after all. The laughter largely dissolves the cynicism. It is a commonplace in the organizational world that people function as replaceable cogs in a well-oiled machine. Therefore, the cartoon is an example of what not to do. Cynicism and shame drive out empathy; and, more importantly, driving out cynicism and shame create a space into which empathy stands a chance and can expand spontaneously.
How then does one drive out cynicism, shame, denial, and so on? The short answer is by calling it out, acknowledging it, interpreting it, and offering an alternative point of view. Not “alternative facts,” which have come to mean “spin” and “deception”; but an alternative perspective. It is now cynicism versus empathy in the organization.
For example: “Given the challenges we are facing, it is easy to become cynical. However, I have an alternative point of view. If we adhere to our commitments, then the way forward is clear. Not easy, but clear. We have to … remember who we authentically are, serve the customer, be inclusive, expand the community, be guided by our empathy (and so on). We have to live up to our commitment that everyone who comes in contact with the organization, even if we cannot completely solve their problem, is left whole and complete, treated with dignity and respect (and empathy).”
In the face of pervasive cynicism, it takes courage for a person to responds empathically. Such a person may be perceived as a threat to the prevailing, default attitude of “I won’t call you on your lack of authenticity if you don’t call me on mine.” Such a committed person is at risk in standing out from the crowd; but such a person just might provide the leadership, gather the power to make a difference, get the job done with grace and ease under pressure—and get a promotion.
One does not even have to stop being cynical, since it is so pervasive, but one has to adhere to one’s commitment to making a contribution, work to make a positive difference, and deliver value on one’s agreements.
Cynicism is shown up for what it is: taking the easy way out. The practice of empathy is hard work.
It is not only the executive suite, but also the front and back office and every part of the supply chain in between that are staffed by harried people pushed down into survival mode by a cruel gig economy where empathy is not a priority. Of course, empathy gets paid lip service. Please pardon the double negative—one dare not not pay empathy lip service.
However, all-too-often, empathy is too messy. It is too complex. We are not even sure what empathy would mean in an organizational context. We need results now. Suck it up. Get over it. Conform! Nor is there anything wrong with conforming as such. Submit your expense report on time. Even the customer wants to conform, if only he could get the product to function as designed. It is just that empathy is too time consuming, which means—it is too costly.
Yet never was empathy more important than when it seems there is no time for it. Positively expressed, as with most forms of resistance, the method of overcoming it is to call it out and interpret it. Once visible and explicit, it is less formidable.
The empathy of cross-functional teams, managing by walking around, making a contribution, building the bigger team, being inclusive of all the stake-holders, communicating goals and connecting the dots between individual accomplishments and the objectives of the entire organization—these create a clearing in which empathy shows up and makes a profound contribution to the success of the organization.
In addition, one’s employer is not one’s parent. Remember the sign in the common kitchen that says “Your mother does not work here—clean up your dirty dishes!”? Of course your mom told you that, too, and she did “work here” at home, and it still hasn’t snuck in.
Notwithstanding the rich comic possibilities, one’s employer and its leaders do indeed “work here.” Leaders provide powerful examples to whom we look for inspiration. This must give one pause about the state of leadership today. Just as children have to get empathy from their parents before they can give it to others, employees have to see and experience examples of empathy from their leaders to be effective in their own roles as individual contributors. The idea is not to be paternalistic, but to lead by example, the example of empathy.
The difference between banging on a stone and building a cathedral
Executives of all kinds have varying degrees of empathy and different attitudes towards it. It may sound like yet another burden that the CEO now also has to take the role of “Chief Empathy Officer.” This comes up for detailed discussion below in the chapter on the empathy application to “Business and empathy, capitalist tool.”
Meanwhile, when I am bold and ask executives what is the budget in the organization for empathy training and empathy consulting, they usually look at me with a blank stare or just say “zero.” However, when I ask what is the budget to reduce conflict, enhance teamwork, innovate and improve productivity, inspire participation, cause the staff to take ownership of the mission and honor their agreements, then the leaderships sees possibility where none had previously been present and makes it a priority to obtain a budget.
Simply stated, empathy training consists in surfacing the resistances to empathy, the pervasive fear and cynicism (and so on) in the organization that lurks just beneath the surface; interpreting the resistance, and driving it out: “It is perfectly understandable that you would be cynical, given what you have been through, but that is not who you (we) authentically are. Rather we are the possibility of [health, transportation, nutrition, education, retirement, housing, recreation, and so on (according to the mission of the organization)].”
What would it take to design agreements that overcome resistance and commit to aligning organizational and individual goals and then taking action to implement the agreements on an ongoing schedule? The empathy training consists in engaging in a sustained dialogue for possibility around agreements that work for everyone in delivering value.
In particular, overcoming resistance to empathy, expanding empathy, is on the critical path to eliminating or at least reducing organizational conflicts and dysfunctional behaviors. When staff, executives, stake-holders, and so on, expand their empathy for one another and for customers, they are able to deescalate confrontations and negativity; they avoid provocative and devaluing language; and they are able to head off dignity violations, all of which reduce the conflicts that literally suck the life out of organizations.
When employees appreciate the possibilities of empathy, they even try to replace office politics with professional behavior. Staff get more done because they can concentrate on doing their jobs, working smarter, and serving customers and coworkers rather than struggling with departmental politics.
In addition, expanding empathy—overcoming resistance to empathy—is on the critical path to building teams. Empathy is the foundation of community, and the team is nothing if not a community. In empathy, people practice giving acknowledgment and recognition for their contribution to the success of the team and the organization. Being inclusive does not always come naturally or easily to us humans, territorial creatures that we are. We oscillate between closeness and distance like a pendulum.
However, no organization can succeed without including every contributor and turning him or her loose to do the job at hand. Even in hierarchical organizations, where departmental boundaries are rigid, empathy works to demonstrate that good fences makes good neighbors but that gates are needed in the fences through which empathy can be practiced.
Expanding empathy is also on the critical path to innovation and enhancing productivity, because people feel gotten for whom they are as a possibility and as a contribution. They stop withholding and working in quasi-competitive isolation. When they get in touch with one another as possibilities, the business results take off.
Successful leaders know the importance of drawing on the talents of every contributor. When employees get a sense of how their role and contribution fits into the whole, they work to deliver on their commitments.
That is the key to improved productivity. People are generous in sharing their ideas for process and product improvement, because they feel confident their contribution makes a difference and is recognized. For example, two workers are going through the same motions, making the same gestures. An empathic milieu makes the difference between the one, who is banging with a hammer and chisel on a chunk of stone, and the other, who is building a cathedral. The worker’s gestures are exactly the same. The one is sentenced to hard labor; the other participates in greatness.
[i] Jodi Halpern. (2001). From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[ii] Scott Adams. (1996). The Dilbert Principle. New York: Harper Business.
Lou Agosta, Ph.D., Listening With Empathy 