On empathy

some thoughts for those who have not experienced trauma

A few weeks ago I wrote this post that describes what happens to your brain (the physical organ itself) when you suffer trauma. I’ve also written several times (here and here) about some of the symptoms you may experience as a result of the changes to your brain and the damage to your nervous system. Certainly my lists are not exhaustive; there are as many symptoms as there are traumatized people.

Photo by Chris Linnett on Unsplash

Almost every time I write pieces like this, I get emails from people thanking me for talking about it publicly. I am far from an expert on trauma, but I have the perspective of someone who has suffered a few different kinds of trauma, and I just want to share what I know. I spent years living in denial that anything bad had happened to me and stuffing everything deep down where it could not be seen and couldn’t disrupt my life. Ha.

When I was hit head-on six years ago, my strategies very abruptly stopped working and it all came gushing out in the ugliest of ways. I did not even recognize myself for a couple of years, and now that I am on the upward swing of my “healing journey” (as they call it), I wish so much that I’d had someone telling me why I was acting the way I was and that it was a perfectly normal reaction to all the trauma in my life. I spent so much time agonizing over what was “wrong” with me, and I wanted more than anything to know I was not alone, that it wasn’t just me.

Then one day I was mindlessly scrolling Instagram (did you know this is a strategy we use to escape from current pain? It’s a form of numbing.), and I saw a meme that said, “Write the book you wish you’d had but couldn’t find on the shelf” and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That was the seed for an actual book (ask me in a year if I’ve written it yet), but also for the blog Grace and Therapy. You’ve heard the story of G&T on Wordpress disappearing into the ether one day, at which point I stopped writing at all for a year.

But that meme was always there, the impatient child patting my arm saying, “Mama? Mama? Mama?”, and here we are at the new-and-improved Grace and Therapy on Substack.

Photo by Chris Linnett on Unsplash

All this to say, my one driving force here is to help you know you are not the only one. You should not have to sit by yourself, thinking whatever you are feeling or walking through has never happened to anyone else before. I promise, you are in good company and there are more of us than you think.

“There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man . . .” This passage in 1 Corinthians is talking about temptations, not trials, so maybe that’s slightly out of context, but please know you are never the only one. Whatever you face is common to man. “. . . [B]ut God is faithful . . .” Amen, he is. “. . . who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able . . .”

Let me stop here and say that God will most certainly give you more than you can handle because he wants you to need him, to depend on him, to come to him for help. If you never got more than you could handle in life, you wouldn’t need God.

“. . . who will with the temptation make a way to escape that ye may be able to bear it.” He is the way of escape. He is the help you need, either by his own self or by pointing you in the direction of whatever thing will help you. He makes a way to escape, whether that’s learning how to lament and cast all your cares on him or going to therapy or taking a medication. God is present in all those things and he may offer one or all as your way to deal with the traumas of life. Don’t limit him by thinking he can only use “spiritual” things to help you.

If I ever get cancer (God, please forbid) I will jump on the first plane and head for the Hope4Cancer center in Mexico. I will do whatever woo-woo therapies they recommend and eat whatever organic, crazy-sounding stuff they tell me to, and I will thank God for every single bit of what those doctors know because all of their knowledge comes from God. If you choose to go to Sloan Kettering and have surgery and chemo and radiation, go with the understanding that their knowledge comes from God too. As we say in Redneckville, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. But either way depends on God for help. As much as we like to think we are, humans are not self-sufficient.

(Sorry for that mini rant. Sometimes my teeny-tiny enneagram eight wing comes peeking out.)

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Here’s what I wanted to talk about today. I received an email in response to the More post that asked, basically, how should we respond to people who have had trauma when they are activated? In other words, when a person who has experienced trauma is having a difficult moment (or worse), what should we do?

This person said, “I've experienced various traumas and noticed that people generally don't want to be around me when I'm experiencing my strong emotions.”

Nobody wants to be in an awkward situation. When someone is crying or panicking or has high anxiety, we don’t know what to do or what to say or how to act. We feel awkward. The problem with this is that, as my reader said, “This feeds the belief that something is wrong with me.” And there lies the rub.

We all have to get over the idea that if someone is what we call “activated,” there is something wrong with them. We need to understand that this is their body’s God-designed way of responding to previous trauma. It is 100% normal, and shaming them in that moment is the most unhelpful thing we can do, and will, in fact, do them more harm.

She went on to say, “I've only ever had one friend who showed true empathy when I had a very tough time on a camping trip. I've never experienced that with anyone else in my life.  There was no pity, awkward feelings, or judgment—only empathy and me knowing it was okay to cry in front of her. She put her arm around me and took me for a short walk, gave me some space to use the bathroom, settle down, and then walked me back to my campsite. Before that experience, I had no idea what empathy was. It's amazing how quickly I was able to settle down when I felt someone truly cared and was there for me.”

Can you imagine? In 2024 there are people who don’t even know what empathy is? How far have we sunk as a society? That’s mind-blowing, but I have experienced this myself. When I had a massive panic attack on a flight last spring, I got a lot of sideways looks but only one stranger offered kindness and support.

My reader went on: “On the other side of the coin, I don't know how to handle other people's strong emotions. A friend of mine had a miscarriage a few months ago and, having experienced the same, it was easy for me to share advice and insight about what was happening with her body and what to expect. But when she teared up a few weeks later and expressed her gratitude for my friendship and helping her through her miscarriage, I quickly said, ‘You're welcome,’ and changed the subject.”

I understand this too. It can feel awkward in a time when we don’t typically lay our emotions out for all the world to see. It’s my opinion that we need to do it more until we get used to it. We would all be emotionally healthier.

But let’s look at something: God has something to say about empathy. He says to love your neighbor as yourself. That sounds like you have to love yourself first, which comes naturally to most of us. We are inherently selfish creatures: we fulfill our own needs, we seek our own comfort, and we have to work at putting others before ourselves. I’m not advocating selfishness or self-centeredness here, but we do need to understand and have empathy for ourselves so that we can have empathy for others.

Here’s what self-empathy looks like: Quiet your inner critic. Have grace for your own self. Give yourself compassionate understanding. I’m not talking about making allowance for sin, but when the storms of life get heavy, remind yourself you are human and you are allowed to be that. You are allowed to feel overwhelmed. God does not expect you to buck up and show him how strong you are. He knows better. You have a Father who wants you to bring your overwhelm to him and let him wrap you in his arms and help you. So stop self-shaming. When you hear yourself making “should” statements (I shouldn’t feel this way, I should be able to handle this, etc.), that’s a good indication you are self-shaming.

Once you understand what empathy looks like, you can extend it to others. Empathy in a nutshell is “emotional sharing.” When we empathize with someone, we feel what they feel. God promotes this, telling us in Romans 12 to “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.”

According to Helen Riess, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, in her article “The Science of Empathy,”

“Empathy is a complex capability enabling individuals to understand and feel the emotional states of others, resulting in compassionate behavior. Empathy requires cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and moral capacities to understand and respond to the suffering of others.”

She claims that “faculty development programs that include empathy training” are becoming a priority in medical schools.

That sounds like empathy can be both taught and learned. And don’t we do this with toddlers? “Don’t hit your sister. How would you feel if she hit you?” We are teaching the young child to stop and consider someone else’s feelings, to put himself in her shoes. We are asking him to experience her emotions.

I understand that if you have never experienced trauma, it would be extremely difficult to know what a traumatized person feels, but if you can just try to imagine feeling completely overwhelmed, emotions running rampant, body so full of tension it can’t stop shaking, prefrontal cortex offline ( aka the logical thinking brain completely unavailable) . . . how would you want someone to respond to you? Then do that.

Often, it’s not so much what you do as it is offering your compassionate presence without judgment. When I was absolutely falling apart in my seat at 30,000 feet, the woman next to me reached over and touched my leg and said softly, “Keep breathing. You’re doing great.” For the next 30 minutes until we were on the ground, every so often she would say some small, encouraging thing very quietly. She reminded me to keep breathing. Then when we were about to touch down, she put her hand on my arm and said, “Here it is. Here it is.” She was with me in my distress.

That’s empathy. There was no “What is wrong with you? Nobody else on the plane is upset. Why are you?” As we taxied to the gate, she asked me if I’d ever experienced trauma and I very briefly told her my story. She responded, “You’re not alone.” She could put herself in my place. She could feel my feelings.

Photo by Chris Linnett on Unsplash

One more thing: Empathy is not the same as sympathy.

According to Merriam-Webster.com,

“while sympathy is a feeling of sincere concern for someone who is experiencing something difficult or painful, empathy involves actively sharing in the emotional experience of the other person.”

If you look at the etymology of the two words, sympathy comes from syn- (Gr., meaning “with”) plus pathos (Gr., meaning “experience” or “emotion”). If I have sympathy, I am with you in your emotion. I have concern for you and want to help you.

The word empathy was modeled on sympathy, but comes from the translation of the German word Einfühlung, meaning “feeling into.” If I have empathy, I “feel into” you as a person. I share your emotional experience. I don’t just feel sorry for what you feel, I actually feel what you feel. I feel it in my body, which is where we feel emotions.

My friend on the plane understood what I was feeling because she had felt it herself. That made it easy for her to have empathy.

Even if you can’t empathize with someone, you can still sympathize and be a compassionate human. You can set your judgment aside and just help the person in front of you however you can. A quiet, kind word, a soft touch, an offer to get whatever they ask for. It’s not that difficult, and a little compassion goes a long way. As my reader said, “It's amazing how quickly I was able to settle down when I felt someone truly cared and was there for me.”