In Support of Empathy.

**I wrote a piece on the correlation between empathy (or lack thereof) and well-being for Let Her Speak’s Community Blog and wanted to share it with you as well.

Who am I to reach for my soul at a time like this? To reach for the portal to the future I cannot see.

Who am I to “indulge” in my own well-being at a time like this? To utilize the tools that help me show up as the best version of me.

Who am I to be “worthless” aka “unproductive” at a time like this? To feel the mental and emotional overwhelm and resist the programming that says “push through.”

Who am I to be overcome with grief for people I do not know and whose stories I cannot tell? For innocent lives brutalized and lost. All of them. Not just one color or creed. Not just one moment in time.

Who am I to turn inward at a time like this? To tend to my roots and my wellspring so that whatever I have to give might be a light to someone else.

Who am I to resist the oversimplification of the human experience to the point that we no longer know what it is to be whole and human and to love each other well.

Who am I not to?

What if our first response to someone else’s expression of pain (or any emotion for that matter) was simply, “I believe you.”?

What if this was our response to our own experience as well?

Humans are biologically wired for connection. Without it, we die. Empathy is an essential element in establishing and maintaining connection.

Empathy describes our capacity to feel what someone else is feeling (even if we haven’t had the same experience), communicate our understanding of the emotion under the experience, care about the other person’s well-being, and respond with compassion.

A couple of weeks ago, in the face of the devastating loss of innocent life on both sides of the current crisis in Israel and Gaza, The Atlantic published a piece by Xochitl Gonzalez titled “What Happened to Empathy?”

“We have become inured to human suffering,” Gonzalez writes in her exploration of the impact technology has had in allowing us to go about so much of our daily lives without encountering other humans, particularly humans that are different from us.

As with all topics involving humans, the absence of empathy in the world today is complex, and cannot be tied to a single origin. Off of the top of my head, I can name a variety potentially causal factors:

• The reduction in human interaction facilitated by technology as described by Gonzalez.
• Lack of awareness of what empathy is or how to practice it.
• Belief that empathy is “soft” and ineffective or inappropriate.
• A cultural reward system that allows people to achieve measures of success (power, position, financial, etc) without accountability to other humans.
• Disconnection from our own internal emotional experience(s) which may then mean we have no capacity or desire to acknowledge and validate the emotional experiences of others.
• An epidemic of burnout and compassion fatigue.

The list could go on, but today I want to emphasize this last factor: an epidemic of burnout and compassion fatigue.