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Some of them get irritated when I obey my script and refuse to make eye contact. I’m supposed to stay swaddled and numb. These irritated students take my averted eyes as a challenge. They never stop seeking my gaze. Wrestling me into eye contact is the way they maintain power—forcing me to acknowledge their requisite display of care.
Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must really be hard—it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see:
the hunch that I had a parched interior life activated only by the need for constant affirmation, nothing more.
Getting your heart fixed will be another burglary, nothing taken except everything that gets burned away. Maybe every time you get into a paper gown you summon the ghosts of all the other times you got into a paper gown; maybe every time you slip down into that anesthetized dark it’s the same dark you slipped into before. Maybe it’s been waiting for you the whole time.
You live in a world underneath the words you are saying in this clean white room, it’s okay I’m okay I feel sad I guess. You are blind in this other world. It’s dark. Your seizures are how you move through it—thrashing and fumbling—feeling for what its walls are made of. Your body wasn’t anything special until it rebelled. Maybe you thought your thighs were fat or else you didn’t, yet; maybe you had best friends who whispered secrets to you during sleepovers; maybe you had lots of boyfriends or else you were still waiting for the first one; maybe you liked unicorns when you were young or maybe
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I needed something from the world I didn’t know how to ask for. I needed people—Dave, a doctor, anyone—to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it’s shown.
These encounters aren’t about dissolving pain. They’re about seeing it more clearly. The healing part is always a hypothetical horizon we never reach.
His calmness didn’t make me feel abandoned, it made me feel secure. It offered assurance rather than empathy, or maybe assurance was evidence of empathy, insofar as he understood that assurance, not identification, was what I needed most. Empathy is a kind of care but it’s not the only kind of care, and it’s not always enough. I want to think that’s what Dr. G. was thinking. I needed to look at him and see the opposite of my fear, not its echo.
It was a strange intimacy, almost embarrassing, to feel the mechanics of her method so palpable between us: engage the patient, record the details, repeat. I was sketched into CliffsNotes. I hated seeing the puppet strings; they felt unseemly—and without kindness in her voice, the mechanics meant nothing. They pretended we knew each other rather than acknowledging that we didn’t. It’s a tension intrinsic to the surgeon-patient relationship: it’s more invasive than anything but not intimate at all.
A 1983 study titled “The Structure of Empathy” found a correlation between empathy and four major personality clusters: sensitivity, nonconformity, even temperedness, and social self-confidence.
The Chinese character for listen is built like this, a structure of many parts: the characters for ears and eyes, a horizontal line that signifies undivided attention, the swoop and teardrops of heart.
Decety has found that imagining the pain of others activates the same three areas (prefrontal cortex, anterior insula, anterior cingulate) as experiencing pain itself.
It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse.
