More Empathy is Probably NOT the Solution U think it is

Is empathy truly scarce, or are we simply running low on energy to act on it? In this eye-opening episode of Speak Plainly, I'll challenge the prevailing belief that empathy is limited in our world.

 Instead, I argue that empathy is abundant but often goes untapped due to the finite nature of our human energy. Drawing inspiration from Darwin’s insights and children's natural empathy, we examine how societal norms and energy constraints shape our ability to express empathy as adults.

#empathy
#empath

Chapters

• 0:35 The Role of Empathy in Energy
• 16:25 The Impact of Empathy Boundaries
• 22:49 The Battle of Boundaries and Empathy
• 27:34 Energy vs Empathy
• 31:37 Understanding Empathy, Boundaries, and Virtue-Signaling
• 38:54 Engagement and Feedback

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:35

Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Speak Plainly podcast, where we speak plainly about things that matter. I am your host, owl Medicine veteran best-selling trauma author, and I would like to talk to you today about something I've talked a lot about on this podcast, but it keeps coming up. I have a rule where if I have the same conversation more than three times in a week, then the topic is prevalent enough that I'm going to make a podcast on it, and that's what's happened this time. I've had many conversations this last week on empathy and people's lack of empathy or needing more empathy, and I have a totally different take on empathy than what someone might expect from a self-help author or from someone who has a trauma-informed perspective. But that's what I'm here to talk with you about. I'm here to talk with you about why empathy is overrated, and the conversations that I've been having around this really have circled around either a person claiming to be an empath who is then not being empathic towards someone, and then that person gets upset and being like you're using that word wrong. That's one way that this conversation has come up. That's one way that this conversation has come up, and another has come up because of a Facebook post. That I did because I had a friend who posted about the general lack of empathy in the world which is a common sentiment among left-leaning liberals like me.

Speaker 1: 2:19

However, I do not think that there is a lack of empathy in the world. I think that that couldn't be more wrong. I think that there is too much empathy in most of the world. Granted, I do believe that there are a small group of people at the very top, and so hear me now, before people get all pissed off I definitely believe and understand slash believe that there are a few quite sociopathic people at the top who lack empathy, at least in action. They do not have empathy and all they care about is the bottom line and making the next dollar. That's a very, very small percentage of the world and unfortunately, those people happen to make the rules of the world. However, for the average person like you and me, we typically engage with people who have empathy.

Speaker 1: 3:18

In fact, darwin said that the hallmark of the human species is empathy. We are the most empathetic species. There are other species that are even cross-species empathetic, as in like dolphins or elephants have been seen and known to see an animal of a different species in duress and to assist them. We used to think that only we did it because we're narcissistic that way. But we know that we're not the only ones who have cross-species empathy, but we do seem to have it across, like literally all species, like there's some human who cares about some weird dung beetle or some weird high-elevation species of fly in small streams in Uruguay.

Speaker 1: 4:18

So I don't think that we lack empathy. I think what we lack is an understanding of the entire, like human condition. So basically, here's my philosophy on it, and this is what I want to lay out for everybody is because this makes a lot of sense to me and I hope it makes sense to you, and if you think it's bullshit, then I hope that you leave a comment saying that, hey, I think this is bullshit and tell me why. I would like to hear that. But here's what I believe.

Speaker 1: 4:53

Darwin said it, but that's not good enough for me. I also need more than that, and children are really good at it. Children are really good with empathy. Children are really good at it. Children are really good with empathy.

Speaker 1: 5:08

Racism is taught, these fears are taught, but children are so incredibly empathetic to other children, to adults, to babies, to other species, to other animals, even to insects and things. Babies are empathetic. So how do we go from being an empathetic child to a not so empathetic adult? How do we move from this place of I feel what you feel to not allowing myself to experience what another person is experiencing, or just not experiencing it? And that's a long road of conditioning.

Speaker 1: 6:00

But what I think the basic mechanisms of action here are is that energy is finite and that's what we forget. And it takes energy to act in our environment. It takes energy to act on our emotions and that's the key. It takes energy to act on our emotions, no matter what that emotion is. We can be angry, but if we're too tired we're not going to act on that anger, we're just going to be like fuck and we're just going to give up or give in or whatever.

Speaker 1: 6:39

If we're sad, but we are too tired to wail, if you've ever lost someone very close to you and you've been grieving for a long time and like it's day four and that loss is still immense and the pain is still immense, but you've been grieving so hard for so many days that the sadness you just don't act on it as much as when the first. The first time that you heard that they had passed, you sobbed and heaved. It takes energy to act on emotions, and empathy is no different. It takes energy to act on empathy. Empathy is no different. It takes energy to act on empathy.

Speaker 1: 7:26

That's the key here, because I fully, truly believe that empathy lies at the heart of each and every human being, even those sociopathic ones who have done a marvelous job of conditioning themselves or being conditioned, almost always being conditioned out of it, being conditioned out of it. So for me, the key is understanding that it's actually all of these, most of these, not all of these, but most of these issues that we have around empathy. And I do want to talk about empaths in specific here in a little bit, but I think I want to talk about the general issues that we have around empathy and thinking that people don't have enough empathy is actually an energetic issue, not even an energetic like a metaphysical thing. No, this is a very measurable, I believe, level or way of looking at it. Our energy is finite.

Speaker 1: 8:44

Our emotions are simply reactions to what's happening around us, and when we don't have enough energy to act on those emotions, we handle them differently, just like if we have tons of energy and somebody makes us angry, we might act on that anger, we might fight, we might fight back, we might call a lawyer. Whatever your way of dealing with your anger is, that's what you'll do. But if you're too exhausted, you're not going to act on that anger, and you do that long enough. You stay angry long enough, without enough energy, long enough and you wind up in basically a depressive state, and you do that long enough and you're in a depressive episode. So we handle our emotions differently when we don't have enough energy to act on them appropriately or whatever we would normally do being the appropriate response.

Speaker 1: 9:35

Not that there is any one right way to handle our emotions, but the fact of the matter is chi energy is a finite resource and when a person believes that there is not enough empathy in the world, typically it's because that person has been hurt by a lack of empathy in their life. And again, it's not that they actually had a lack of empathy in their life. It's that the person that they needed or wanted empathy from at the time probably didn't have enough energy for empathy toward them. They had probably given their empathy and energy toward someone else during that day, towards lots of someone else's. Depending on what your job is, you have to be empathetic. If you're working retail or anytime you're working with people at all, empathy kind of comes with it. You have to at least fake it. And when you give that so long, all day, and then you come home to your family whether it's your spouse or your children or a sibling when you come home, even a roommate when you come home you have expended all of your energy enacting empathy whether it was true empathy or sympathy or you've expended your energy doing what you needed to do to get through your day at work, at school, at home, and that apparent lack of empathy, which was truly a lack of energy, then injured someone, so that someone then thinks that there needs to be more empathy in the world, and so we all, I think, have a natural inclination to be the change that we do want to see in the world, at least to some small degree, and that someone then sees themselves as a better person by being more empathetic, because they were hurt by empathy and they want to bring less hurt into the world. So they figure, being a little more empathetic won't hurt anybody, and probably being a little more empathetic isn't going to hurt anybody. Being a lot more empathetic is really only going mostly going to hurt that person, and being extremely empathetic all of the time is going to hurt that person, and being extremely empathetic all of the time is going to hurt that person and the ones that that person loves the most. And I'll get there in just a second, because now we're moving from the general theory of empathy that I have into empaths, and I think this should help hammer home this idea.

Speaker 1: 12:20

So an empath is a person who identifies themselves with their empathy. Their empathy to them is a large enough aspect of their personality that they say I'm an empath. They think that their level of empathy that they have in them, that they act on in any given day, is enough to make it a foundational aspect of their character. And in order for that to happen, typically that empath has been injured by other people enough by a perceived lack of empathy that they think empathy is the solution. And this is the problem that I think we have. I think we think that empathy is more empathy, especially in the West and the West Coasts and the left-leaning, more liberal people like myself and the left-leaning, more liberal people like myself. We think that more empathy is the solution, and I don't think that that's true. I think that that is the opposite of true, because empathy is our natural state. More of our natural state is not going to be helpful. What we need is we need to regulate our energy. But how do we get there?

Speaker 1: 13:39

And this is why using the empath as an example works so perfectly, because an empath thinks that, because they can solve problems in the world by being more empathetic, they want to be as empathetic as they possibly can be, because that's how they do good in the world and that's how they identify themselves. So if they weren't being empathetic, then they wouldn't know who they are. And the thing about empathy is and empathy is I feel what you feel, versus sympathy is I feel for you. I can put myself in your shoes to enough of a degree to be able to wrap some of myself around what you must be feeling. I feel for you, and empathy is I feel what you feel.

Speaker 1: 14:29

Now, with empathy, there really can't be much of a barrier between you and the other person in order for you to feel what they feel. When you're being empathetic with someone, you're observing them very closely. You're watching their body language. You're watching the way that they hang their head and we have these things called mirror neurons, where we pick up what's happening on another person's face and then we wind up mimicking that face with our face and that's how we understand what it is that they're feeling, because we make the same faces, we assume the same postures, we watch a person so carefully and then we reenact their physiological state on the outside until it creates a mirrored effect inside us and then we can actually feel what they feel. And it's not just an energetic thing Although when you mimic somebody like that, you're definitely mirroring their energy and that's how you're feeling what they feel. But it's not just an energetic thing, because when you take these positions, it's the opposite of like a power stance and we know we tell people to do power stances where if you're like you're standing up tall with your arms, with your fists up in the air and a Y above your head and your feet wide and stand up really tall that way. Do that before you go into an interview, Because there is a feedback loop where, when you take these large poses, there is a biological change inside us, there's a biochemical change inside us that then changes our outlook and changes how we interpret things and how we enact or react to other people, how we interact with other people, and then that can positively affect the outcome of an interview.

Speaker 1: 16:25

The exact same thing is happening when we are empathetic with another person. We drop in to their state physically. We mirror what they're doing. If they're being quiet, we be quiet. If they're being quiet, we be quiet. If they're being loud, we be loud. If they're hanging their head, we hang our head If they're wringing their hands, so on and so forth. And when we do that, that same kind of biochemical effect happens in us. That feedback loop happens and we have our actual physiological status inside us changes. We release different neurotransmitters and different hormones. We release a whole new chemical cascade. So we literally feel what they feel, or at least our version of what they feel.

Speaker 1: 17:17

And in order to do that, there can't be very many boundaries between us and them if we want to really be empathetic with someone. And that's what makes it hard. In my experience, I've never met in my life an empath who didn't struggle profoundly with boundaries, and this is the exact reason, because the barriers that they have to remove in order to be empathetic with another person that's a boundary and a person who identifies with empathy as a primary facet of their personality, especially if that's the first thing they tell you about themselves. If it's the primary facet of their personality, run. I'm not kidding. If a person tells you, if the first thing that they tell you about themselves is I'm an empath, fucking run. Do not look back, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Just run, because that means they have zero boundaries. I truly mean that they do not have boundaries. If the first thing that they tell you about themselves is I'm an empath and they mean it, then what they mean is I can connect with any person that I come in contact with.

Speaker 1: 18:47

And when you live your life with all of those boundaries down, you're really bad at putting them up, which means you're bad at protecting yourself. And when you're bad at protecting yourself, what that really means is you're bad at protecting your energy. You are walking around with no barrier between you and the outside world, so you can drop in and you can help other people. You can help other people. I'm talking to the empaths right now. You can help other people by feeling what they feel, so they know that they're not alone. And sure, there are times when that is helpful, but most of the time I feel we're much better off throwing in a ladder than crawling into a pit with somebody. And that's the difference to me between empathy and sympathy. Empathy is I feel, what you feel, and sympathy is I feel for you. So empathy is if you're in the bottom of a pit, then I'm crawling into the bottom of the pit with you. So you know that you're not alone, which wonderful. But now we're both in the bottom of a pit. So now what? Now I think that there are good things about both.

Speaker 1: 20:03

Right, because I've been in the bottom of a pit where people have thrown ladders and I didn't care, and I needed empathy. I needed somebody to crawl in there with me and tell me that it's all going to be okay and that I am worth something and that life is worth something and that it is better outside of life is better outside of the pit, if I'll only climb up. But I needed somebody to crawl under the covers with me. But if all I want is empathy all of the time, I just want to create a pile of dead, lifeless, useless bodies at the bottom of a pit, because I'm at the bottom of a pit too. So for me, I totally I get the need, the necessity for empathy.

Speaker 1: 20:50

We are mammals. There's a whole thing I covered in the polyvagal theory episode about. The polyvagal is meaning multiple vagals. The ventral vagus nerve is a nerve that innervates our face and heart and it allows us we think, and it's only in mammals, and the theory is that it was developed as a way to be able to read into other mammals' emotions so we can trust each other to raise each other's babies. If you haven't heard that episode, go check out that episode.

Speaker 1: 21:23

But when it comes to empathy and sympathy, a whole pile of people in the bottom of a pit is useless unless there's at least one ladder to pull them out. And I'm at a place in my life where I can get myself out of a pit. I'm pretty good at it now, so I'm good at dropping in with empathy and saying, hey, love, things are better on the outside. I promise it's all good. Why don't you come with me? Why don't you climb out of here with me? But I don't have time to sit in the bottom of a pit with you anymore. There are people and there are places, and I am thankful to the depths of my soul for those that have shown me empathy, and I am apologetic to the depths of my soul to the people who showed me empathy when I just shit on it because I wanted to sit in the bottom of my hole and they exhausted themselves and they weren't able to give that empathy to a person who was going to use it. Empathy crawls into the bottom of a pit with you and sympathy throws in a ladder People who identify as empaths and say I'm an empath first, like right away, when they meet you.

Speaker 1: 22:49

I've never met one who doesn't struggle with boundaries, because they move through life without any boundaries around them, because they believe, because they were hurt by a lack of empathy which, again, I don't think was a lack of empathy, but I think it was a lack of energy. And so the real question is where did that lack of energy come from? If that was the actual cause of their lack of empathy, it was not that they're not empathetic, but that they were too tired to act on that empathy. How do we maintain our energy more efficiently? And the answer to that is boundaries, and this is why any person who identifies as an empath is going to have to abandon that, at least as their primary identity, in order to have healthy relationships, a healthy mind, a healthy body and a healthy life.

Speaker 1: 23:53

Because when I say I'm an empath, what that actually means is I'm being empathetic to every single person around me, which means I don't have boundaries, which means I'm constantly giving and giving, and giving, and giving and giving and giving, and there's eventually going to be somebody in their life that they have been so empathetic for in the past, like, especially, children. This is a perfect example with kids where it's like well, you're my kids, obviously I love you, obviously I empathize with you. But they see mom going around and being super empathetic to everybody else and then, when they have needs at home, at the end of the day she doesn't have that same level of empathy to give. So they see mom as not empathetic, and clearly she's empathetic to other people and to her children. But because we do this and we tend to overestimate the strength of those closest to us or just estimate wrongly the these types of these types of interactions with those that are closest to us, it's easy to see how a child could see mom as not being empathetic and her being like well, of course I'm empathetic. I'm your mother and I've done this, this and this and this and this and this and this, and all of that's true, but it doesn't change this child's perspective who then decides to move through the world as I'm an empath, because I was hurt by a lack of empathy, when it wasn't a lack of empathy that hurt you, it was a lack of energy that would have allowed this person to act on their empathy. So if you are out there listening and you are somebody who says that I'm an empath, I really, really hope that you decide to drop being an empath, maintain your empathy. But when you identify as an empath, if you want to have good boundaries for yourself, to maintain healthy relationships and to maintain the energy, to put the energy in the places that you think it deserves to be the most, then you're going to have a battle of wills. You're going to have a battle of ego, because you identify as an empath, which means you identify with having no boundaries, because you can't have good boundaries, you can't have a boundary between you and a person that you're empathizing with. And if you identify as an empath, then you are identifying as somebody who empathizes with everyone, essentially. So again, I'm not trying to demonize empathy.

Speaker 1: 26:35

Empathy is a wonderful, wonderful thing and I think it's the baseline for the human condition. I think what we lack is the understanding of the whole system and how a lack of energy manifests as a lack of empathy and how, especially generationally, when we look at this and we see a person who has been injured by a lack of perceived empathy that was actually a lack of energy they identify as a person who is empathetic because they want to solve the thing that harmed them in this world and, by doing so, wind up doing the exact same thing. This is how we wind up, being exactly like our mothers and our fathers, despite our best efforts. This is exactly how because we actually missed the greater picture, the greater picture being it wasn't a lack of empathy, it was a lack of energy.

Speaker 1: 27:34

And if you want, if you want to control your energy and put it where it belongs, you have to have good boundaries. And if you have good boundaries, then you're not an empath. You can be, you can be empathic, but you will not be an empath. You can be empathic, but you will not be an empath. There is no way to be an empath and have good boundaries. It is built into the definition of these words. That doesn't mean that you can't be a good person and be empathic. It doesn't mean you can't be a good person and be minimally empathic. There's a million ways to be a good person.

Speaker 1: 28:10

As long as you're trying to do more good in the world and you are constantly trying to learn so you can know whether or not you actually are doing good or you're hurting people Like that's good enough, I think. But we've got to be aware of these systems as a whole. If you want to do good in the world, then you need to understand the world, to understand how to do good in it. You can't just take this one little antidote from your experience saying, oh well, I was hurt by a lack of empathy, so I'm just going to go run around the world being the most empathic person that I can think of and that's going to make the world a better place. That's not the way things work. It might work that way in your late teens and early 20s, when we didn't get enough. You're around people who didn't get enough empathy from their parents and that sort of thing, but it's really not going to pay off in the long run. You've got to be aware of yourself. You've got to be aware of your energy expenditure, how much energy that you have in reserve.

Speaker 1: 29:19

And at this point in our development in the world, we are constantly bombarded with people from Syria and Palestine and people in Gaza, people in the Ukraine, people in the South, people in Texas, people around cop cities, people all over the world, here and afar, that are in horrible situations, and we empathize with those people. We sympathize with those people. We sympathize with those people. We feel awful for them and every time that we feel awful for them, that consumes some of our energy. And if we're watching it all the time and we're talking about it all of the time, that's going to consume all of our empathy All of our empathy will be or all of our energy that it takes to even feel and express empathy. That energy is just getting more and more consumed. The longer we talk about it, the more we talk about it. It consumes more and more and more of our energy.

Speaker 1: 30:33

And then when we look around at home and we see homeless people on our streets we've spent all day talking about people being bombed in Gaza and how awful it is that no one's helping them and then walk right past a homeless veteran on our streets. Is that because you lack empathy or is it because you lack energy? And that's the heart of the issue to me, and that's the heart of the issue to me. The heart of the issue is do I lack empathy or do I lack energy? And the answer is almost always energy because you do care. We all care about the homeless vet on the street, but if we've spent all day talking about what's happening overseas, we don't have the energy for our empathy to manifest into anything useful.

Speaker 1: 31:37

And that is where the term virtue signaling comes from. This is where the right has the left. It is virtue signaling. This is one of the ways that they fucking called us out, and it is super real Because we have so much empathy and we say that the right has none.

Speaker 1: 32:02

But what's happening is the right does have a lack of empathy in general, because their empathy is only toward the people who are closest and nearest and most like them, which is why they keep perpetuating the same bullshit. That's why everything is the good old boy club, because they have real, real strong boundaries between the us's and the them's, between the usses and the thems, and the usses are people who look like them, pray like them, dress like them, talk like them and fuck like them. Those are all the usses, and everybody else is a them. So they're good at empathizing with people just like them and they're terrible at empathizing with anybody different, whereas the left is really good at empathizing with invisible people or theoretical people or people on the TV screen really far away, and they are truly, I think, more empathetic in that way, but run out of energy because the news is just constantly berating us with stuff that consumes our chi. It consumes our energy to be so empathetic with so many atrocities around the world.

Speaker 1: 33:19

So then we don't actually have time or energy to do anything about what we say, we believe, and that is the definition of virtue signaling. It's going oh well, I believe this and I believe that and this is so wrong and this is so wrong, and doing nothing to change it. Just making a few social media posts and pretending like that does something for somebody. Maybe if a few trillion people make the same post, it might do a tiny tiny bit of good, but ultimately it's virtue signaling, and I gotta say the right has us on that. We are phenomenal at virtue signaling and that is part and parcel with this whole empathy, sympathy, empath, lack of boundaries thing. The right has very strong boundaries in certain places and I don't think that they're the right places, but hey, at least they have strong boundaries. The left not so much. We're pretty terrible at it. We're pretty terrible at it. We're pretty terrible at boundaries. Every single one of us and it's something that we all talk about pretty often with each other is struggling to put up boundaries because we want to be good, we want to be good people.

Speaker 1: 34:40

Well, for all of us left-leaning, empathetic people, then my suggestion to you is you need to understand how the fucking world works and make decisions based on that, not based on what it should be, but make decisions based on how the world actually works and make your decisions. Make those decisions. Make it to where the world that you're creating is better than the one that you're in. But spending all of your time making decisions based on how the world should be is never going to help anybody, and that's part of the reason that we're in the shithole mess that we're in. You've got to get that. The world is a very imperfect place. I'm sure that you know that, and any solutions that we're going to come up with are going to be imperfect solutions, because we live in an imperfect world and the goal is that our imperfect solution is slightly less imperfect than the imperfect one that we're in right now. That's what we can hope for.

Speaker 1: 35:51

So I wanted to cover this again. I've covered it a few times, but I think it's that important I've had since I had the conversation three or more times last week. I think it's worth talking about. There is no empath in the world who doesn't struggle with boundaries, and that's because of what it takes to empathize with an individual, and when you identify with empathizing, then you are identifying with the process, and if that process has to include a lack of boundaries, then your identity by de facto has to include a lack of boundaries. I hope I've made that really clear.

Speaker 1: 36:37

So if you are someone who identifies as an empath, or you know and love someone who identifies as an empath, share this episode with them, because we do need empathy and there are people who need your empathy and there are people who need your sympathy and you need to learn to tell the difference. Some people need a person to come cuddle with them under the covers, but that's usually like best friend material, like sometimes when we're really alone and things are absolute shit. A stranger crawling under that blanket with us for an evening can be a real lifesaver, but in general it takes somebody that we know and that we love and we have a longstanding, trusting, deeply trusting relationship with for them to be able to crawl into that hole with us, crawl under the covers and say, okay, you don't want to come out? Well, I'm going to come in here with you and let them know that they're not alone. But that's best friend material. And on occasion it is called for Don't get me wrong empaths.

Speaker 1: 37:54

I used to claim to be an empath and it was because I was extremely sensitive, and I still am. I don't even say extremely now, I say exquisitely. I am exquisitely sensitive, but I have good boundaries now. Now I get to choose when and where to place them, which means I'm no longer hurting the people who are close to me by over-giving to the people that I'm not actually going to be that beneficial to. Whether or not I want to, whether or not it could work, is irrelevant, because, at the end of the day, being there for the people who mean the most to me is more important than being there for the people that I don't know very well, who. The chances of me helping them are much, much lower Just because we don't have an established relationship already. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for spending it with me today. I hope that you have a marvelous weekend.

Speaker 1: 38:54

If you like this podcast, please leave a comment. If you hated it, leave a comment. It really helps a lot to have people engage with the material, to get it out there for people. I don't know what you're listening to this on right now. It could be Spotify, it could be Apple, it could be iHeartRadio, it could be YouTube. If you're a YouTube person, go to YouTube and leave some comments on there. All of the podcast episodes are up on YouTube now. So thank you, thank you, thank you, and, and remember, stay curious and stay uncomfortable. We'll be right back. Thank you, oh yeah.