Where Is the Empathy?

Sometimes your kid does stuff and you wonder if there is hope.

“How did you think it made your teacher feel when you locked them in the room with you, buddy?” I asked, sitting on the floor by Xane’s bed.

Their face closed off. “They were mean to me!”

“Because . . .”

“They were scaring me.”

“How?”

“They just were.”

“And you don’t think that you scared them when you locked them in the room with you and started yelling and telling them you wanted them to die?”

“They want me to die.”

“No, actually, they still like you and are really worried about you.”

“They’re liars.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“How would you feel if someone told you that they wanted you to die, bud?”

“They were mean to me!”

“Because they wanted you to do work not on your computer?”

“Yes!”

One of our biggest worries about our kid, Xane, is their possible lack of empathy. It’s a rare thing that you will cry in front of them and they will express sympathy. Is there empathy buried down in their personality, we wonder, and they can’t get it out or express it? Do they care at all?

That’s a hard thing for a parent to wonder.

To wonder it, you have to define empathy. Kendra Cherry of VerwellMind has a great article about exactly that. She writes,

“Empathy is the ability to emotionally understand what other people feel, see things from their point of view, and imagine yourself in their place. Essentially, it is putting yourself in someone else's position and feeling what they must be feeling.

“When you see another person suffering, you might be able to instantly envision yourself in the other person's place and feel sympathy for what they are going through.”

When we talk to Xane about what they’ve done to teachers at school, and why they haven’t been allowed back, they never express any kind of sympathy or understanding. Any remorse they have is for themself.

That worries me. A lot.

There are people who will tell you that the most sadness-inducing part of life in our time is that we aren’t in a golden age. Geniuses, they allege, are not abundant. Amazing new books aren’t being produced. Mathematicians and scientists aren’t making breakthrough after breakthrough.

That’s an easy thing to think.

Life and improvement isn’t about easy.

And I say this as someone who appreciates a good genius, loves some intellectual banter about Derrida and Goethe.

More than that though? I appreciate a good person.

And to me, it’s the loss of kindness and empathy in popular culture that’s much more harrowing and depressing. Especially when it comes to who we are as individuals and as a society and as a world. It’s my personal biggest worry when I think about Xane.

I’m not worried about a lack of genius in relation to a golden age of intellectual glory, I’m worried about a lack of genius when it comes to kindness and empathy.

The popular definition for genius is this one.

a: a single strongly marked capacity or aptitude… had a genius for getting along with boys …— Mary Ross

b: extraordinary intellectual power especially as manifested in creative activity

c: a person endowed with extraordinary mental superiority especially : a person with a very high IQ

Thanks, Merriam-Webster.

I’d argue that there are a butt ton of people who have “extraordinary intellectual power” and “a very high IQ” out there right now.

But that lovely dictionary has another definition that’s much more attractive to me.

“person who influences another for good or bad”

And I think the problem might not be that our culture has too many intellectual or creative or scientific or mathematical or financial geniuses, but that we have too many influencing other geniuses influencing for bad.

In a piece for Psychology Today, Susan Lanzoni, Ph.D. writes of civil rights activist Kenneth B. Clark, who was also a social psychologist.

“Clark’s calls for empathy became more insistent as American politics shifted toward conservatism. In 1979 he scribbled in a lecture draft, “The only thing that will save us is a universal increase in empathy.” He thought that those with political power lacked empathy, evidenced by their support of the brutal inequalities in American society. Clark even suggested that world leaders might be given a psychoactive pill to enhance their empathic qualities and inspire them to just political action. He believed that competitive, anxiety-prone American culture rewarded the rampant pursuit of one’s own interest. It was therefore imperative for educators to strengthen “man’s empathic capacity.”

There is a slew of articles from both sides of the political spectrum about how we’ve lost empathy. Mel Mann has an editorial about it; Hailey Pinksen wonders where empathy wandered; Emma Jacobs bemoans COVID’s impact.

The one that speaks to me the most loudly is an opinion piece from Judith Hall and Mark Leary for Scientific American.

“You don’t have to be a social psychologist like we are to see that Americans are experiencing an empathy deficit. People everywhere lack the sense that others care, which makes the medical, economic, political and societal assaults on our fundamental trust in the world even harder to handle.”

There are three types of empathy out there:

1.     Affective Empathy – This is when you know how to appropriately respond to other people having emotions. Not laughing or fist-pumping when they are mourning is a good example. Hugging them in sympathy is an appropriate response.

2.     Cognitive Empathy – This is when you get how someone is responding to something. When it’s not working, you don’t understand why they are crying when their dog dies.

3.     Somatic Empathy – This is when you feel how someone feels.

And there are tons of barriers for when empathy doesn’t work.

We blame the victim. That’s because we don’t want to believe the world isn’t fair.

We dehumanize. This happens with race and religion, with distance and economic difference too. It also happens with sex and gender.

We have biases. We’re less likely (most of us) to feel for people who we think suck, who have some sort of internal characteristic that we don’t like and so on, who make us face our flaws or who make us do things we don’t necessarily want to do. Biology and empathy has bias. You are less likely to feel for my less attractive kid than my more attractive kid, which is terrible, but true.

I’m not a gorgeous person, but I’m not usually heinous either. One time I broke my nose on the bottom of the swimming pool at the YMCA trying to teach our kid to not be afraid to swim under water the whole length of the pool. With two black eyes and a bandage over my nose, the people at the grocery story no longer smiled and went out of their way for me. They looked away, avoided eye contact. And that was just me as a white woman suddenly gone messy. That’s not about race or any other aspects that people use to “other.”

As a parent and as a writer for kids books, it’s always been so important to me to try to build stories and worlds and words and a household that stresses empathy and understanding, where we all care about our actions and consequences.

Now that Xane is here full-time, I am constantly stymied by my inability to get that across. I have tried explanation. I have tried example. I have tried modeling. I have tried, it feels, everything.

This is a newsletter/site/whatever about LIVING HAPPY and this doesn’t feel very happy, does it?

So, I’m going to give you some hope.

Before Xane was Xane they were Zero. Before that, they were Kittiey and before that they were their birth name.

I couldn’t bring myself to call them Zero, not because it’s a negative name, but because I had been violently assaulted by someone who had that for a nickname a long time ago. I thought I was over it, healed completely; it was just a long-ago memory that happened to a me that isn’t the me I am now.

But, I just kept calling them Z, until one day, Xane said, “Carrie! Don’t call me Z. I hate Z. I am Zero.”

Sadly, I lost my chill. I said, “You keep changing your names. I am doing a really good job not calling you by your dead names, but I cannot bring myself to call you Zero because someone with that name did a very bad thing to me and just like words like ‘school,’ ‘consequences,’ and ‘divorce,’ trigger you? That word triggers me.”

I cried. Xane has rarely seen me cry.

And Xane actually looked mortified. They didn’t yell. They didn’t tell me to “Get out! Get out! Get out!” like they do to their dad whenever he says it’s time to shower, brush their teeth, or go to school. Instead they hugged me. Awkwardly, but it was a hug initiated by them. And they told me to call them Xane.

In that horrible moment, my absolute parent fail, my moment that I lost my chill and shared one of my horrible truths to a thirteen-year-old that I thought had no empathy, they hugged me.

That’s the hope I hold onto. Not just when it comes to our kid, but when it comes to our country and our world.

Sometimes people will surprise you in a good way. Sometimes a culture will, too. But you can’t give up. You’ve got to be honest. You’ve got to work for it.

Evil geniuses can abound, but good geniuses can too. Empathy can fade, but it can also be built back up, one authentic moment at a time.