I've been thinking about when empathy works (and when it doesn’t).
I’m constantly trying to figure out how to help the clients who sit across from me in my therapy office. I’ve learned that it takes more than understanding to heal what’s broken in us. We can understand from books and seminars, sermons and a therapist’s wise counsel; but read and attend and listen as we will, we remain unhealed until someone who understands us moves across the distance between us, climbs into the world of our confusion and broken relationships, and loves us.
For me this means that I give up the comfort of my professional experience and hard-won maturity, the sense of myself I’m used to as I sit in my chair. If I am to truly help someone, I need to leave the emotional safety of my contented self and enter the world of my clients’ damage and darkness, relate to them on their terms even though these terms seem strange, sometimes emotionally dangerous, and therefore a bit frightening to me.
This move into one another’s worlds is what I mean by empathy. For me, this kind of relating is the foundation for any intimate relationship, in therapy and friendships and partnerships and extended family life.
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In public circumstances, empathy changes shape. It doesn’t require intimate love and trust, or the sense that we’re personally safe with one another. Public empathy means we can be in the same room together, pointed in the same direction, working to understand one another even if our disagreements persist.
I’ve lived through such opportunities for public empathy when we could listen to one another despite our differences and respect the person across the table from us, a kind of collaborative understanding that allowed us to work together to accomplish common goals, whether we loved one another or not.
Presbyterians for Lesbian and Gay Concerns banner at the New York City Pride Parade in 1982. Photograph from the David Sindt papers (RG 521).
I was a pastor in a conservative Presbyterian Church in the mid-1970s when the issue of whether we should ordain gay and lesbian candidates into the ministry exploded in our denomination. I decided to make this a subject for discussion at the monthly meeting of the congregation’s governing board, so for nine months we shared information, strong disagreements, and a wide range of emotional and moral reactions as we worked together to find common understanding of the issue. We listened with respect across our differences, even when one side could not wrap its mind or heart or faith around the other side’s opinions.
I never let the board take a vote; I didn’t want a divided outcome. But in one-on-one conversations with board members, I was convinced at the end of that year that a majority of these conservative Presbyterians in this conservative town would have voted to ordain these candidates nearly fifty years ago.
Demonstrators march toward Central Park during a massive nuclear disarmament rally, when about 750,000 activists gathered to demand a nuclear arms freeze. New York City, June 12, 1982. (Photo by Lee Frey/Authenticated News/Getty Images)
A decade later, in the early 1980s, I was part of an interfaith group of Muslims, Jews, and Christians working together to reverse the nuclear arms race when Palestinians began to stage protests against Israeli occupation; those protests turned into years of violence that became known as the First Intifada. Though my interfaith group was more than seven thousand miles from the riots, the rage and distrust seeped into our discussions and some of us, myself included, feared that our work to reverse the arms race would be scuttled by these powerful tensions that filled the room every time we met.
The three interfaith leaders - a rabbi, an Episcopal priest, and the head of the Los Angeles Islamic Center - agreed to talk openly about these tensions and about their shared desire not to let the Intifada derail our commitment to reversing the arms race. All of us felt free to express our positions about Israel's occupation and Palestinian violence; we listened to one another and often had to agree to disagree. We didn't necessarily trust one another's positions, but we got on with the work anyway.
We continued to work together to build the coalition we’d put so much hope into, and we succeeded together in planning and carrying out conferences and seminars, interfaith worship services and celebrations. We demonstrated again, as our church board had a decade earlier, that public empathy means we can stay in the same room with one another, pointed in the same direction.
But despite these experiences I've had, in these recent tumultuous years in our culture, I realize that this kind of empathy, this ability to move into one another’s public worlds, has begun to crumble for me. So what's changed? Why does public empathy seem so out of reach now?
We live in walled-off worlds where we can't find common goals, much less the means to cooperate in order to reach them. We’ve replaced shared information with alternative facts; we refer to one another as stupid or evil, unpatriotic or fascist; the heat rises and the possibility of finding common ground is destroyed in the conflagration. The respect and civility of our task force to reverse the arms race, meeting during the original Intifada, seems as quaint as tea and crumpets in a world of guns and drones, left and right.
It's hard to admit this, given my devotion to finding ways to connect and cooperate, but I’ve pretty much given up on creating such conversations with those on the other side. When I’ve tried, or when people I disagree with have tried with me, we quickly arrive at a stalemate.
In these current cultural battles, I find that my instinct is to defend myself, to point out the folly and failure of the other sides’ arguments. And I must confess, I have a full set of facts and opinions ready for any such confrontation. I may not like it, but I find that I’m as dug in as my opponents, in part by seeing them as opponents and not companions on a search for common ground. The quality so essential to both personal and public empathy – the willingness and ability to move into another person’s world – seems impossible when I’m no more welcome in their world than they are in mine. We’re so vigorously committed to defending our own truths that neither of us seems committed, or even interested, in finding common ground.