Feel Like Sharing?

January 28, 2006

You hear a lot of terminology thrown around in the mental health field. Diagnosis. Treatment plan. Affect. Anxiety. Medication. You get the idea. Some of this stuff is easy to define. Diagnosis: “the identification of the nature of an illness or other problem by examination of the symptoms”… Medication: “a substance used for medical treatment, esp. a medicine or drug”. Other terms, like anxiety, are a little more esoteric, and therefore, a little more difficult to explicitly define.

In school we talked a lot about empathy. According to the dictionary, empathy is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”. I haven’t actually heard the term used at work, but it’s one of those understood tools of the trade. It’s difficult to help someone through something without at least attempting to be empathetic to their situation.

I was talking to a rather distraught patient today who kept reminding me that I had no idea what she was going through. It’s true. I haven’t experienced what she was dealing with… in the strictest of terms. Many times, this is the case. The best you can hope for in a situation like that is to find some sort of common ground on which to build from while keeping your fingers crossed that its enough. Sometimes it is. Other times, like today, it isn’t.

The entire incident got me thinking about the -pathies: empathy and sympathy. Sympathy is easy. You don’t have to understand something to be sympathetic towards it. The mere fact that another person is dealing with misfortune is enough to enable you to be sympathetic. But empathy is more tricky. Based on the above mentioned definition, to be empathetic means to understand and share.

Since each experience is unique to the individual involved, and since emotions are so personal, is true empathy really even possible?

Understanding is the first part of an empathetic response. The word understanding itself has many different meanings and levels. I can read stereo instructions and understand what they’re saying. I can listen to two people talking in Spanish and somewhat understand what they’re saying. I can listen to a stranger talk about how great shooting up heroine is and understand what they’re saying, technically. I understand the words. I know what the phrase “I like to shoot up” means.

But that is where my understanding of shooting up ends. I have never shot up. So while I can understand what it means to shoot up, I can never understand what it feels like to shoot up. My understanding is only partial and quite superficial. But let’s pretend for a moment that I have shot up. I know what it felt like for me. But that in no way guarantees that I know what it felt like for anyone else. I would remember the experience in a completely different way than someone else who had done the exact same thing. So while they’re thinking one way about shooting up, I’m thinking a different way. Is that still understanding in the real sense?

The other side of the empathy coin says I should share in the feelings of others to be truly empathetic. By simple definition, this is impossible. Its possible to express the same feeling as another person. I can be mad at the same time my neighbor is mad. We can even be mad about the exact same thing. But while my neighbor trashes his apartment and screams like a while banshee, I prefer to get in the car and take a long drive. Same emotion. Different experience. I’ve never trashed anything or screamed like a banshee.

While it’s possible for me to express having the same emotional response as another person, the actual experience itself is completely different. You cannot actually share the emotions of others. You can share similar experiences and you can share similar reactions. But the real emotion of every single thing we encounter in life is completely personal and completely individual. Two victims of the same crime experience two completely different things. Do they still have a shared emotion?

Perhaps I’ve over-thought the whole empathy thing. Maybe I’ve actually written a better definition of what empathy really is just by exploring it above. The two victims of the same crime may be able to help each other deal with their experience because they have that common ground I spoke of before. It could even be argued that they would have a decent understanding of what the other was going through to some degree. But they cannot share the emotion of the experience. And they cannot truly understand what the other is going through.

So I’m still left wondering if empathy is something that’s really possible… or if it’s simply something we’d like to think is possible…

Category Posted in Human Nature