The Surprising Gift of Self-Empathy

The Surprising Gift of Self-Empathy

? Steve Whiteford

I’ve been honing my experience and understanding of self-empathy recently. I’ve noticed a variety of comments on the subject, some positive and some negative. Beyond reading and considering interpretations, I need to process perceptions through my experience and into my behaviors.

Our society seems to have a fear of self-empathy and empathy as if too much of either might tax us emotionally, reduce our productivity, and limit our impact and success. I believe these negative perspectives are rooted in our learned rejection of emotions and learned behaviors of toxic positivity. It’s true that empathy is largely misunderstood. Through behaviors inspired by toxic positivity, its expression can be insincere, emotionally disconnected, and delivered placatingly as if every recipient is a pouting three-year-old.

The openness empathy requires is seen to be a weakness. The fear of it is “natural” because our negativity bias keeps us in a “survival of the fittest” mindset. Vulnerability, hurt, and error are repulsive at the level of a pandemic disease.

Self-empathy is limited because our society instills the power of shame to keep us in line, and always on the path of striving for success. It’s not a valued skill. We need to keep a close count of our shortcomings to keep moving forward. Tibetans often point out that in the West we overfocus on our faults and lack the skill of self-compassion.

The way out of the cycle is to learn to open to the experience of our sensations, feelings, and emotions. It seems too simple. It is simple and it’s a powerful habit to build as the basis of emotional intelligence and access to self-empathy/empathy. Our first rejection of self is our ignorance of our sensory experience. The signals our body/brain sends us to calibrate our well-being, both physical and emotional. The two modes are difficult to separate, they are strongly linked.

That societal mindset sets us up to be suspicious and reject these signals. Especially any that might result in an expression that’s not positive or is too positive for the current social context. So, it can be rare that we accept and experience our sensations and feelings long enough to notice their transition to the need to take action – the emotion. We often feel bad and judge ourselves when we have a “negative” feeling. We feel shame in the shadow of toxic positivity. It’s a double whammy called “second suffering.” We do it for both health issues and emotions.

Something magical happens when we notice this. We gain choice. It can be interesting when applied to pain. My experience has been that when I just feel the pain – you might say “accept it” – and not layer it with guilt and shame for being less than perfect, and fear for what it might mean – the pain lessons and it’s easy to relax or take action. I worked with this a lot when I went through cancer treatment.

Building the habit of noticing and working with the progression of sensation–feeling–emotion, instills self-empathy as we honor the signals of the body/brain. We become self-accepting, self-caring, and self-trusting. The big fear is this will make us stupid, because “you can’t trust emotions, they’re bad.” But becoming self-trusting of these signals doesn’t me you can’t question or investigate them. Being curious about them doesn’t require beating yourself up for having them. It’s being emotionally intelligent.

Once you begin to feel the ease self-empathy adds to your life, you may also notice the benefits of the self-trust you’ve gained and how it affects your behavior. Some might call it confidence. (I avoid that work because I associate it with about 100 years of snake oil marketing to get us to buy it.) I have called it self-assurance, but this morning at 4 a.m., I startled myself awake by realizing its real gift is courage.

Of course, the Latin root of the word courage is “cor”; the word for heart. Courage is heartiness, heart-centered. Centered in our hearts. Big heartedness. Empathetic. Courage enables empathy because our heart is big and inclusive and does not project “enemy.” With courage, we feel we can “accept” the information of our signals about a situation and handle it with an open heart. And we’re backed by self-empathy should we need to learn something uncomfortable about ourselves in the situation or during a communication.? We’re not afraid. We can be fully present and authentic with an open heart. We don’t have to “play nice” to be liked we just have to be full of heart. Heartiness can surround a full range of expression and emotion with openness.

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