And a healing plan for this type of overwhelm below.
I was talking with family the other day, and heard myself saying, “I feel ashamed all the time.” My aunt, who is amazing says, “oh honey, but mistakes are how we learn.”
God bless her, she’s so practical.
I’m sharing this because, on a couple of levels I know mistakes are okay. I clearly make mistakes even here – marketing, misspelling, and odd formatting among others. But interpersonal mistakes are a doozy. Recovering from one of these, then dragging oneself back up into humanity with some semblance of dignity can take every bit of energy one has.
And sometimes I’ve found myself feeling shame that others, I perceive, should feel, but don’t.
For instance, on a national scale, I have felt shame around the orange man being our country’s president, even though I didn’t vote for him and actively campaigned for an alternative. Yet, I still feel responsible for his rise. Crazy, right?
So I wonder if there are others who also feel shame about things beyond their control? What’s the mechanism for this? And can it be reversed?
Perhaps when we take on tremendous responsibility in our hearts, we feel as if we control the world we live in – that we’ve co-created it in some way1. Or maybe random shame is sign of a sensitivity to unclaimed emotional energy in one’s surroundings.
My mom used to call people who pick up on others’ emotions “psychic sponges.”
Since the president is a known sexist2, rapist3, bigot4, conman5, classist6, adulterer7, and stiffer of staff8, perhaps he can’t handle to feel the shame an ordinary person would experience around those behaviors. This could explain why he acts shameless. It’s a cover.
This could also explain why empathic9 10 folks may feel exceptionally badly about this man taking a lead role in decision-making. We pick up on natural order being kind of upended.
I’m guessing that I’m not alone in feeling random, untethered bouts of shame –– it may be a woman thing. Or perhaps it’s a trauma-response holdover. Either way, shame seems to land disproportionately on women, and I’m hoping it isn’t taking any amazing ladies down too hard.
We need women specifically, and the empaths of the world, standing up for love and restoring practical compassion as the way we do things. This seems to me to be a cornerstone of peaceful and civilized society: compassion in action.
We also need empathic folks supporting each other, because only deep feelers understand this burden, and how to throw it off. To be transparent, I’m attempting to lay out understanding and path forward for myself here. I’ve been buried in a near underground of confusing emotion more than I care to admit, and maybe my explainer will help others.
Mechanics of mistakes and correction: the basics
Most of us grew up occasionally feeling shame, guilt, disappointment, and other unpleasant emotions in the relationship with others. These difficult emotions are helpful in guiding us to become functional and considerate members of humanity, so they have a positive purpose.
If we stole someone’s pail from the sandbox, we likely felt shame, or got chastised, and never did it again. If our parents yelled at us that something was “wrong,” we may have felt guilt, and probably never did it again. We learn what works, and doesn’t work, via action⇄consequence in this way.
Theoretically, we’re also learning that we’ll get what we need by working well with others and communicating. But this is not always the case, especially if the communication is coded.
While many of us were conditioned to live a “good” and “happy” life via an authoritative reward/punishment system, this is not fool proof, because…
some of us learn best by action⇄emotion. Or by the arts, or by grace, or by reflection.
Different people learn differently. And consequences are not the only factors in behavior modification, contrary to what we (as partly Pavolvian11 animals) are often led to believe.
And we know this because some folks in history have appeared to wish to absorb the negative emotions and consequences for others. Think of Jesus “dying for our sins.” This is a generous act that includes taking huge piles of responsibility onto oneself, presumably to help others feel better.
Maybe to help people feel “happy?”
And if you are an empathic Christian, you may wish to be more like Jesus, not just listen to what he says about your being “all set” regardless of what you do. Some actions just kind of suck, I think we can all attest to that.
If someone possesses a high degree of empathy, no one needs to point out relational mistakes to that person, they’d just KNOW they’d missed the mark by their dark emotional state.
An empathic person’s growth does not require an authority figure to ‘work.’ An empathic person will naturally reflect and do things better the next time when they feel odd. Folks with empathy also need support in recognizing the collective issues they could be carrying, and be encouraged to drop them. Sometimes these burdens conflate too: little issues like an ordinary miscommunication combined with big issues, like survival.
Emotional Plan for Healing
So, I’m writing this little plan for me and anyone else who resonates with carrying more than their share of emotional burden for a community.
Healing for an overburdened empathic person requires
- open communication with others
- self-knowledge
- self-reflection, and
- Decision. Specifically, decisions around boundaries.
Boundaries are as much about who/what can enter your life, as who and what you emulate too. For me, boundaries need to also be set around what I allow myself to think about and whose energy I ‘follow’. Basically, not idealizing anyone.
People are rarely the problem when pain erupts, my vulnerability,12 and openness to flawed people is what causes me pain. Then if I cling to it, suffering ensues. Yet, pain helps me learn compassion, so for this I am grateful.
Empathic folks may also need to limit consuming media that fosters paranoia13 and/or is violent. Holding judgement of anyone is also problematic if you consider that you may also experience self-judgement in return.
This is because empathic folks can feel the inner and outer worlds in tandem, almost like they are transparent. So if one focuses on a positive like “grace,” that person’s life may externally become more enjoyable than if it is focused on “blame.”
Healing also requires forgiveness, to be shone inwardly and outwardly all at once.
I hope to let you know how this goes.
FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT 😉
- I actually believe we do co-create our world: practically and emotionally too. That is, our perception of the world is to some extent, a unique-to-us, created mindset that enables us to focus in on parts that have meaning to us. ↩︎
- Video. ↩︎
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- Remember when Elon Musk, when serving as Trump’s right hand, went to war on empathy? How do you go on the offensive against something like this? It’s invisible. ↩︎
- Susan Lanzoni, author of Empathy: A History writes “to have empathy, in the early 1900s, was to enliven an object, or to project one’s own imagined feelings onto the world. Some of the earliest psychology experiments on empathy focused on … a bodily feeling or movement that produced a sense of merging with an object.” ↩︎
- Pavlov’s Dog experiment. We aren’t dogs, but we aren’t so far away from this kind of trained response either. Learning from life is stored in our bodiesI, even if we attempt to rationalize this away. ↩︎
- I can’t recommend enough the work of Brené Brown, forerunner on vulnerability and authenticity in the workplace. Ted talk here. Her website here. ↩︎
- Think horror, true crime, conspiracy theories, and the like. ↩︎
