Jean Decety, a scientist at the University of Chicago, has broken down empathy into four components.
1) The ability to share someone else's emotions.
2) Awareness of yourself and of other people - and knowledge of where you "end" and the others "begin", i.e. appropriate boundaries.
3) The mental capacity to set your own perspective aside and to view things from the perspective of another.
4) The ability to consciously control your own emotions.
Decety tells us that empathy is formed by combinations of all four of these components. If any one of the components isn't kicking in either because of genetics or dysfunctional thought patterns, i.e. programs, selfish emotional reactions, being around people who manipulate reactions out of you under false pretenses, stress, etc., one's "empathy" can be all wrong. When you are empathizing with the wrong people or situations for the wrong reasons, your behavior can deteriorate and you lose your ability to interact with others in a healthy way. One of these unhealthy ways of experiencing empathy is to have too much - to be unable to separate yourself from another, to not know the boundaries of your own feelings and desires.
Another point is that it is possible to turn empathy on and off as has been studied by neuroscientist Yawei Cheng. Cheng realized that it would not be possible for truly empathic doctors, nurses, and other health care persons to go through their jobs every day if they felt the personal distress that normal people feel every time they see another person in distress (for that work, see studies on mirror neurons). So, some studies were done. It seems that the brains of individuals who work in health care react very differently to seeing situations that, in others, would make the mirror neurons jump like crazy. What happened was that a part of the brain retrieved a memory that triggered the brain's command central to shut down the ability to empathize with someone else's pain. At the same time, it increased the signal to the part of the brain that makes us aware that someone else is just that: someone else, not the self. The brain was amping up the part that says: that's somebody else, not you! Fuggedaboutit!
Obviously, doing this very often can have repercussions.
What this suggests is that people who have to deal with suffering each and every day (assuming they aren't sadistic psychopaths to begin with) somehow learn to disconnect their personal emotions when they are undesirable and could interfere with efficient functioning. The one-two action of dampening emotions and ramping up the separate-person-signals makes this possible. Interestingly, it is the right frontoparietal network that permits us to distinguish ourselves from others. Lesions or low/absent functioning in this part of the brain is associated with psychopathy. Possibly, creating imprinted circuits that repeatedly shut down emotions could permanently affect this part of the brain and could even effect epigenetic changes on future children.
Obviously, people in the caring professions who are in them because they actually care, obviously don't go to some sort of school to teach themselves how to damp their emotions and amplify the perceptions of boundaries; they sort of learn it by trial and error, by exposure, by experience, sort of like blinking. But this can be a tricky thing because without awareness, one can turn off empathy entirely...
However, having said all that, the ability to be able to exert top-down control over bottom-up emotional swarms is crucial to those individuals who seek to be of service to others. Being the driver of your carriage means that other people's moods and emotions do not control your moods and emotions. So, what to do?
There are two basic ways of reacting to the suffering of others:
1) Empathic distress. Empathic distress is the natural response of most empathic people. This can lead to two outcomes:
a) Feeling guilty if we try to avoid or abandon the hurt person.
b) Being overwhelmed ourselves and burning out which means we only hurt ourselves and do not help the other person. This is why care-givers train themselves to turn off the empathy which can have way more severe consequences including increasing callousness, emotional exhaustion, depression, etc.
2) Empathic Concern: transforming empathic reactions to compassion which leads to action. That is, you can learn to immerse yourself in the pain of others for the purpose of being galvanized to action.
Now, have a look at this:
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/247956-Compassion-Meditation-May-Be-Key-to-Better-Caregiving
Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering. Neuroscience has proven that similar areas of the brain are activated both in the person who suffers and in the one who feels empathy. Thus empathic suffering is a true experience of suffering.
When some empathic caregivers are exposed to others' suffering day after day, their continuous partaking in this suffering might become overwhelming and can lead to burnout. Other caregivers may react by shutting down their empathic feeling and drawing an emotional curtain between themselves and their patients. Both these reactions are far from optimal.
Could mind training and meditation on altruistic love and compassion serve as an antidote to burnout? An example of this is the caregiver who naturally displays overflowing kindness and warmth toward his patients and does not experience any burnout.
Experienced Buddhist meditators have reported that when they focused for some time on what they called "stand-alone empathy" (visualizing intense suffering affecting someone else and resonating empathically with that suffering) without allowing compassion and altruistic love to grow in their minds, they soon experienced burnout.
However, when they added a powerful feeling of unconditional love and compassion, the negative, distressing aspects of empathy disappeared and were replaced by compassionate courage and a resolve to do whatever they could to soothe others' suffering. It would therefore seems that there is no such thing as "compassion fatigue," as burnout is often called, but only an "empathy fatigue" that can be remedied by cultivating compassion.
Neuroscientist Tania Singer, in collaboration with such meditators, is planning to train caregivers in cultivating loving-kindness in a secular way based on Buddhist techniques. This would to allow caregivers, nurses, and doctors to continue to offer altruistic services to those in pain without themselves suffering from empathic distress.
That is one of the things that the SOTT editors work with every day: being able to view horror and suffering repeatedly, and having something of an outlet to actually work on doing something about it.
What happens then, after awhile is that compassion for the cosmos at large grows and while there is no stemming of the flow of love and compassion, it just simply becomes harder and harder for things out there to trigger negative emotions within.
(See: "The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Empathy" in "Empathy in Mental Illness, edited by Tom F.D. Farrow and Peter W. R. Woodruff - 2007 - Cambridge University Press)
Strange! I am sure I recall Laura mentioning something similar.
