Empathy’s useful, done right — like a voltmeter for relationships

In the scheme of “rewiring your brain for love,” one of the benefits of mindfulness practice when it comes to relationships could be thought of as acquiring a voltmeter — that quality of empathy that allows you the ability to accurately read the voltage between you and your partner.

Unfortunately, many people don’t “do” empathy in a way that supports a healthy relationship.

I’ve posted below an introduction to different levels of empathy, and how they can serve or undermine your relationships, which I hope you’ll find useful.

Acquiring a Voltmeter: Empathy

(Excerpt from Chapter 8 of Rewire Your Brain For Love)

Insight into your own inner workings, and having a coherent narrative about how you came to be you, are incredibly important for healthy relationships — and when you put those together with being empathic?

Wow.

Now you got it goin’ on.

Like lots of other people, for too many years I had empathy all wrong. Okay, well, to be more self-empathic, I only had it partly wrong, but it was an important part. Vital, even.

Mostly, I thought being empathic was about tuning in to others, getting what they were feeling. And then, to the very best of my ability, it was my task to try to make everyone feel better.

It worked, in a lot of ways. When I was little, I was really good at being able to detect the mood of my mother and behave in ways that I knew would make her feel better. I figured out how to soothe my dad’s ruffled feathers after my mother had dissed him.

Without consciously realizing it, I’d taken as fact that, if only I tried hard enough, I could make everybody feel better. If they didn’t feel better, I felt like a failure-or, to put it in attachment terms, I was afraid that they’d no longer love me.

And boy-howdy, did I try. Remember how I mentioned before that I had anxious insomnia when I was ten? Yep. That came from trying so hard to make everyone okay, from all of that “empathizing.”
Apparently, I didn’t get the memo that “everyone” included me. I was miserable.

I ended up being a kind of mind-reader/doormat, trying to come to everyone’s emotional rescue. My mother (for whom empathy was not a strong suit) was both mystified and disgusted by how I seemed to be thrilled that high-school friends constantly came to me with their problems. “Why on earth would you ever want to be crawling around in other people’s emotional underwear?”

Learning well and thoroughly from my early experiences with my primary caregivers-well-meaning parents who hadn’t figured enough out about their own attachment shtick-”attachment” for me meant that I had to give myself up and please the other person in order to have someone who was willing to be there for me.

I eventually figured out that being empathic isn’t about being an all-absorbing antenna, a doormat, a mind reader, and/or an emotional rescuer. It’s also not about fear (as in the fear of being alone, having someone be mad at you, disappointing someone, and so on). Being able to understand another person’s state of mind-using an emotional voltmeter-is essential for healthy relationships, but being able to do so without losing your awareness of your own state of mind is vitally important. It’s also something that mindfulness develops and supports extremely well, as you’ll see.

Dogs Do It

Empathy, as it turns out, isn’t a uniquely human trait or ability. At the entry level, it’s “the ability to be affected by and share the emotional state of another being” (as renowned primatologist Frans de Waal, PhD, thinks of it). Anyone who’s ever loved a dog knows what I’m talking about-if you’re happy, the dog’s happy. If you’re blue, the dog’s blue. This is the ground floor of empathy.

This first level of empathy isn’t even something we decide to do. It’s an automatic, involuntary activity that starts in the body. You detect what others are feeling, and before you can even register it consciously, you feel it. Period. Before you even know it.

It’s a “blind” reading, rather than an integrated, useful, feedback-producing voltmeter.

Hook people up to some electrodes designed to measure their facial responses, then subliminally flash facial expressions on a computer screen they’re watching. Even when the images flash so quickly that they’re below the threshold of conscious awareness, the subjects’ facial muscles will match the expressions on the screen. Simple mimicry? Apparently not — because if you ask subjects afterward to rate how they feel, the ones whom you’ve subliminally exposed to smiling faces say they feel good. And the ones to whom you’ve shown the frowning faces feel worse.

Congratulations! You’ve just entered the first level of empathy: emotional contagion. Sounds kind of gross, like catching some nasty skin disease, and, as a kid and young adult, it did feel like I was mucking about in the sewers much of the time, sucked in there without even realizing it, feeling other people’s feelings and often confusing them with my own.

Emotional contagion’s a useful thing, really it is. Take, for example, a herd of zebras. One of them notices a lion-that zebra’s emotional state of arousal and alarm spreads throughout the herd like lightning. None of the zebras pause, stand pensively with hoof to temple, and muse, “Gee, I wonder if Phil’s got a gas bubble or if we’re all about to be eaten?” One zebra feels it, and very quickly they all feel it, automatically activating their evasive maneuvers before becoming lunch.

Pigeons, mice, birds, monkeys, dogs-human infants — they’re all scoring well on this basic level of empathy. They’ve got some of the basic brain and nervous-system parts up and working, including areas that can detect things like changes in posture and behavior.

Since I’m fairly confident that you’re not a zebra, I’m going to have you imagine your human self walking around at a festive gathering of other humans. From across the room, you see a group of other humans you know and trust, and you see them laughing. You smile, and maybe you even feel yourself tickled in your belly, too. Tag! You’ve been emotionally contaminated!

Or you’re in a pretty good mood when your partner comes home from work. She has a tight look on her face, her jaw is clenched, and her briefcase gets plunked a little too firmly on the floor. Your facial muscles shift immediately and there’s a tightness in your stomach. Tag again!

But simply being able to catch someone else’s emotion, like some kind of instant-acting germ, isn’t really what we’re aiming for. Let’s kick it up a notch, and get more of your brain in the game. You want to be more empathic than a pigeon, don’t you?

“I Understand”

Sympathetic concern is the next level of empathy. You start with emotional contagion, then add a capacity to appraise the other’s situation and to try to understand why they’re feeling the way they do. Frans de Waal calls this “cognitive empathy” — you’re putting some thought into it, not just reacting at an automatic, bodily level.

This is also the level at which consoling starts to kick in. If you see your partner coming in the door looking tight and upset, you experience the emotional contagion (you feel some of her distress and alarm in your own body) and you can try to figure out why she’s in such a worked-up state — you might also then be able to consider accurate ways to console her.

Unlike the zebra, you’re not just feeling your partner’s distress, but you’re also figuring out what you might do to alleviate some of it. You might soften your face and ask empathically about what’s up. You might put your arm around her.

Monkeys are capable of showing this level of sympathetic concern, and of consoling one another (one monkey might console the loser of a fight, for example, by putting his arm around him). But it appears (from Frans de Waal’s point of view, as one example) that they’re doing this because, as they experience the emotional contagion of the loser, they feel yucky inside, and in order to alleviate their own yucky feelings, they try to get their tribe-mate to feel better so they can feel better too.

Been there, done that. Not where I wanted to stay. How about you? Ready to take it to the next level? You made it past the pigeons — want to make it past monkeys now?

Get steady and grounded, because you’re going to need to be in two places at once: having a sense of your self and simultaneously being able to take the perspective of the other.

Standing in Their Shoes – With Feeling

Empathic perspective taking is the next level. For a lot of people, “perspective taking” is what it means to be empathic-identifying with the other and being able to see things from someone else’s experience.

But — you could do that without actually feeling much. You can see this in intellectual debates: in order to argue against your opponent effectively, you need to be able to intellectually understand his or her point of view in order to effectively tear it down. From this stance, you can get into the head of the other person and get the cognitive perspective, then explain your perspective from an equally intellectual, cognitive stance. Okay on the debate team, but not so hot in your relationship. You end up missing out on what’s going on emotionally for your significant other, who says, “You just don’t get it!!” From your side, you’re pretty clear that you do, in fact (and I emphasize that word for a reason), “get it,” but you get it only intellectually. So you think your significant other is being irrational. And your significant other is being “irrational,” thank goodness — if we were nothing but rational, we’d be robots.

Feelings and emotions aren’t rational thoughts. They aren’t meant to be. They provide a balance to the rational, and as such they follow a different path. They bring color and life and vibrancy to our existence. They come from a different part of the brain, and they’re important, vital, and too often disrespected, much to our detriment. If you’re going to “get it,” you’ve got to “get” the emotional connection as well.

Taken to its extreme, if you excelled at perspective taking but couldn’t do it at all from an empathic place, you’d make an excellent psychopath — able to understand how other people think, getting their state of mind, without feeling it yourself. No empathy, just perspective taking. You’d be really good at knowing how to torture somebody.

Most people who are in this rational, intellectual approach to relationships aren’t psychopaths at all. They’re simply responding to the world from a protective stance, probably learned early on, which we talked about earlier as “avoidant attachment.” Emotions are these unpredictable and potentially painful things that weren’t safe when I was a kid, so I’ve learned to take a detour around them as often as possible.

And then there’s a counterpart to that stance, the path of many who have a tendency toward anxious attachment. Sometimes the folks in this category are too good at tuning in to and feeling what their partners (or friends or coworkers) are feeling, so much so that their own experiences and perspectives get lost. They often are so very busy taking care of the needs of others that they eventually start to crumble-or get resentful, angry, depressed, burned out, maybe even physically sick.

If this sounds like you, you probably learned to do it this way so early and so well that your brain — which, you’ll remember, wires itself in response to what you do with it most often — might just go blank when you even try to consider doing things differently. Or when you do try to stay on your own side more, you ditch all empathy and just start acting angry and selfish, like a pendulum that was stuck all the way to one side, now knocked loose and stuck on the other extreme of its arc.
To be empathic in a healthy way, you need to be able to be able to tune in to someone else, “get” what his or her experience is, and yet not lose yourself in the deal.

© 2012 Marsha Lucas. All Rights Reserved

Improve your love life through simple meditation

I had a fun interview with Jennifer Abbasi for iVillage.com, and the results are up: 13 Ways to Have More Mindful Sex. Shockingly, the articles and other posts in which I discuss sex and mindfulness always get tons of hits. Imagine that!

I’ve posted the first part of the article here, but you might enjoy it more with the slideshow pictures that iVillage, has to go along with each suggestion — feel free to click on over. (It’s not G-rated, but it’s not anything more that you’d see in a typical women’s or men’s magazine.)

Have fun!

~ Marsha

Step One: Think Your Way To Better Sex

Forget the romantic chocolates and acrobatics: A recent study suggests that we can actually think our way to better sex. Researchers at Brown University showed that women who received “mindfulness” training reported their responses (“calm,” “excited” or “aroused”) to erotic pictures faster than they did before the course. Such responses reflect the ability to register changes in your body. You may lack awareness of sensation and arousal during sex, researchers say, if you’re too busy thinking about the grocery list or knocking around self-doubts like, “Do I look fat right now?” We talked to Marsha Lucas, Ph.D., a psychotherapist and neuropsychologist in Washington, D.C., and author of Rewire Your Brain for Love, about how to use mindfulness to improve your sex life.

Read More HERE

Question:

Do you have any comments about therapists taking on somatizing the fears and anxieties of clients? Are there recommendations for therapists protecting themselves while working with clients in the altered state that guided imagery produces?

Answer:

This is more likely to happen to newbie therapists, before they get their boundaries in place, but this issue affects us all.  You want to aim to set your boundaries in such a way that you can still experience empathy and compassion, but without taking on the client’s pains and fears.  This balance is critical to being effective and to staying that way, without burning out.

Remember it’s not your job to absorb pain, but to strengthen and assist the person so that they can better deal with what is causing them pain.  Your job is to help them shift and change so that they can surmount or ameliorate their circumstances.

It’s critical for all of us to remember that it’s not all up to us. To think otherwise is arrogant and presupposes superpowers we just don’t have.  We all need to avoid the trap of falling in love with the idea of ourselves as rescuer or savior.  We are there to assist, to provide insight and (hopefully) wisdom, to ask the right questions, provide moral support and tell the useful, useable truth; we are there to make it easy for the client to tell the truth about him or herself; and we are there to see the hidden splendor of that client and hold that unsullied vision, straight and true, while he or she struggles and changes.

It’s important to remember that just holding the space and holding the potential for unfettered growth in that space is huge and impactful.  Wishing our clients well from our hearts under these circumstances can make a vast difference – it’s transformative on an energetic level.  It comes down to these attitudes and beliefs, along with our conventional sets of skills and interventions and techniques…this is what gets the job done.

Continue reading the article HERE.

Researchers from King’s College and the Institute of Psychiatry performed a qualitative study to explore how practicing mindfulness related to living with and managing bipolar illness.

Qualitative methodology was used to explore the experiences of 12 people with bipolar illness who had been practicing mindfulness for at least 18 weeks. Semi-structured interviews exploring how the practice of mindfulness meditation affected their living with their condition were recorded verbatim, transcribed, and then analyzed using thematic analysis.

Seven themes emerged: (1) Focusing on what is present; (2) clearer awareness of mood state and changes therein; (3) acceptance; (4) mindfulness practice in different mood states; (5) reducing/stabilizing negative affect; (6) relating differently to negative thoughts; and (7) reducing the impact of the mood state.

Continue reading the article HERE.

This alternative approach to understanding how humor relates to our brain function is an eye opening and intriguing one.

He who laughs last usually has to have the joke explained. But then why bother? After all, nothing kills humor faster than analysis. That sentiment has long dogged humor studies, a field often disparaged as an affront, even an existential threat, to its subject matter. It’s just a joke: Don’t overthink it.

But what if humor (or mirth, in research speak) is intimately linked to thinking? What if we’d have trouble thinking without it? That’s the argument of “Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind” (MIT Press, 2011).

Coauthored by three scholars, the book had an unusual genesis: It began in 2004 as an undergraduate term paper. First author Matthew Hurley, a native of Reading, Mass., had enrolled at Tufts University after a few years of travel and work as a computer programmer. As part of a self-designed major in cognitive science, Hurley took a course on humor taught by the psychologist Reginald Adams Jr. It struck Hurley that most humor theories focused on why we find certain things funny. But, he wondered, why do humans find anything funny? Why do we have a sense of humor in the first place?

Hurley, now a doctoral student in cognitive science at Indiana University, offered his own theory, first in a final paper and then as a thesis guided by the prolific philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett. Encouraged to revise and publish his theory, Hurley solicited Dennett and Adams as coauthors on what became this book.

Hurley and his coauthors begin from the idea that our brains make sense of our daily lives via a never ending series of assumptions, based on sparse, incomplete information. All these best guesses simplify our world, give us critical insights into the minds of others, and streamline our decisions. But mistakes are inevitable, and even a small faulty assumption can open the door to bigger and costlier mistakes.

Enter mirth, a little pulse of reward the brain gives itself for seeking out and correcting our mistaken assumptions. A sense of humor is the lure that keeps our brains alert for the gaps between our quick-fire assumptions and reality. As “Inside Jokes” argues, much of what we consider comedy takes advantage of this cognitive reflex, much as McDonald’s taps our evolved taste for high-energy food.

Article Credit: Chris Berdik from The Boston Globe

Continue reading the article HERE.

Another study analyzing the benefits of mindfulness meditation for both newbies and experienced meditators.

Enjoy,
~Marsha

When you’re under pressure from work and family and the emails don’t stop coming, it’s hard to stop your mind from jumping all over the place.

But scientists are finding that it may be worth it to train your brain to focus on something as simple as your breath, which is part of mindfulness meditation.

A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the latest in a hot emerging field of research examining how meditation relates to the brain. It shows that people who are experienced meditators show less activity in the brain’s default mode network, when the brain is not engaged in focused thought.

The default mode network is associated with introspection and mind wandering. Typically, drifting thoughts tend to focus on negative subjects, creating more stress and anxiety. It has also been linked to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and Alzheimer’s disease.

Researchers looked at experienced meditators and trained novices. There were 12 in the “experienced” category, with an average of more than 10,000 hours of mindfulness meditation experience (Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” suggests that it takes 10,000 hours to be an expert at something), and 12 healthy volunteers who were novices in meditation.

Each volunteer was instructed to engage in three types of meditation: concentration (attention to the breath), love-kindness (wishing beings well) and choiceless awareness (focus on whatever comes up). Scientists looked at their brain activity during these meditations with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Across all of these types of meditation, the experienced meditators showed less activity in the default mode network than in the novices. The experienced participants also reported less mind wandering than the novices. Interestingly, experienced meditators also showed increased connectivity between certain brain networks during meditation and non-meditation.

Article Credit: Elizabeth Landau from CNN.com

Continue reading the article HERE.

An improved sense of interoception may help us all gain a better understanding of our bodies’ ability to deal with stress and to promote mindfulness.

You’re struggling up a hill halfway through a ten-mile race. Your breathing is ragged, and your footfalls seem heavy. You lurch toward the water station, grab a cup, and gulp it down. Back in the middle of the pack, you feel strengthened and pick up the pace.

Your decision to lope over to the water station relied on your interoceptive sense—the ability to sense your internal state. When you talk to your physician about a nagging pain or discomfort, you are also acting on information passing through your brain’s interoceptive system. Facing a major mental and physical challenge, however, requires you to do more. You need to match your internal sensations with an assessment of what the environment will demand of you. Do you need to slow down to summit the hill, or can you power through to the next water station?

A group from the University of California at San Diego and the Naval Health Research Center theorizes that the extra edge that allows certain people to perform particularly well in stressful situations may come not from a physiological advantage but from differences in the brain. To explore this question, they tested a group of Navy SEALs, adventure racers, and Marines, all of whom have learned to triumph over physical challenges without succumbing to stress. “Navy SEALs don’t all share a prototypical body type—they’re all different,” Nate Thom, a stress physiologist at the Naval Health Research Center, says. Nonetheless, they share a certain amount of resilience.

Specifically, they surmised that individuals who shine in tough circumstances may benefit from highly attuned interoception, which then informs the decision-making areas of the brain. Interoception is thought to rely heavily on the insula, a small brain area that plays an important role in self-awareness and emotional experiences.

Article Credit: Sandra Upson from Scientific American.

Continue reading the article HERE.

From my UK friend and fellow mindfulness author, Ed Halliwell, a helpful article on how mindfulness can be a hard thing to do…

For  the last couple of weeks, I’ve been catching up on streaming videos from Creating A Mindful Society, the Mindful.org-sponsored event which took place in New York last month. Two segments stood out for me. The first was Richie Davidson’s brilliant keynote on the neuroscience of meditation—a clear and cogent outline of what happens in our brains as we train in presence and kindness. The second was a discussion of why, twenty years after publication of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s seminal book, Full Catastrophe Living, and with so much evidence pointing towards the benefits, mindfulness practice hasn’t yet become a part of most people’s lives.

There were several interesting takes on this, including Kabat-Zinn’s own call for patience—he talked in terms of a thousand-year unfolding—and Davidson’s reminder that in spite of all the remarkable data, we are far from convincing the scientific mainstream that meditation is a valuable thing to do.

But even if the science were unquestioned and the political and social atmosphere ripe, perhaps we shouldn’t expect mindfulness to be met with an unqualified, widespread embrace. I say this because meditation can be difficult, unpleasant, andscary. That’s not to put people off, but to acknowledge that it means coming to terms with not just the stuff we like (calm, ease, freedom, flow), but also the stuff we don’t like (pain, anger, death, loss of control). When we practice mindfulness, we’re changing our habitual pattern of relating (hold on to the “good” stuff, and push away the “bad”). Indeed, we’re exploring the possibility of giving up our preconceived judgments about what is good and bad. I’m reminded of a meditation teacher who once told me: “It’s not about trying to sniff the roses, or avoiding the smell of manure, so much as appreciating that we have a nose.”

When we look at the remarkable scientific results, and hear stories of increased well-being from practitioners, it’s easy to forget that these changes usually reflect a letting go of established ways of seeing and doing in the world, a gradual coming to accept that they don’t serve us as we had imagined. Mindfulness practice opens us up to the expanse of who we are, the reality of our lives. This, as Kabat-Zinn says, means being willing to own the Full Catastrophe, the pain as well as the pleasure.

Read the rest of the article HERE.

Article Credit: Ed Halliwell from Mindful.org

It’s easy for us to get caught up in our own lives and forget about the people around us.  This article by Janet Lansbury reminds us to acknowledge our children’s unique points of view.

Enjoy,
~Marsha

Write this word on your hand. It’s a magical way to connect with a child of any age, can ease tears and tantrums and even prevent them. It’s a simple but surprisingly challenging thing to do, particularly tough to remember in the heat the moment…

Acknowledge.

Before you tell your child that it’s time to leave the park, or remind him that the really cool truck he’s examining has to stay at the store, acknowledge his point of view. Acknowledge your child’s feelings and wishes, even if they seem ridiculous, irrational, self-centered or wrong. This is not the same as agreeing, and is definitely not indulgent or allowing an undesirable behavior.

Acknowledgement isn’t condoning our child’s actions; it’s validating the feelings behind them. It’s a simple, profound way to reflect our child’s experience and inner self. It demonstrates our understanding and acceptance. It sends a powerful, affirming message… Every thought, desire, feeling — every expression of your mind, body and heart — is perfectly acceptable, appropriate and lovable.

Acknowledging is simple, but it isn’t easy. It’s counter-intuitive for most of us, even when we’ve done it thousands of times. Won’t acknowledging our child’s wishes make matters worse? Won’t saying “I know how much you want an ice cream cone like the one your friend has and it does look yummy, but we won’t be having dessert until later” make our toddler hold on to the idea longer, cry harder? Wouldn’t it be better to dismiss or downplay the child’s feelings, distract, redirect or say:”Oh, sweetie, not now”?

Our fears about an honest acknowledgement of the situation “making things worse” are almost always unfounded. Feeling heard and understood allows children to release the feelings, let go and move on. Here are more reasons that acknowledging our child’s truth is worth the conscious effort it takes…

1. Acknowledging can stop tears and tantrums in their tracks.

I have witnessed this many, many times. Whether a child is upset about an injury, a disagreement with another child or anger over a conflict with a parent, acknowledging to the child what happened or that he is hurt, frustrated or angry can miraculously ease the pain. Feeling understood is a powerful thing.

2. Acknowledging, instead of judging or “fixing”, fosters trust and encourages children to keep sharing their feelings.

Parents and caregivers have an enormous influence, and their responses have an impact on young children. If, for example, we try to calm children by assuring them that there’s no need to be upset or worried about something that’s troubling them, they may become less inclined to express their feelings. If our goal is our child’s emotional health and keeping the door of communication open – justacknowledging is the best policy. “Daddy left and you are sad.”

Article Credit: Janet Lansbury

Read the rest of the article HERE.

Thought-provoking summary of a study on improving female sexual difficulties using mindfulness.

Abstract

Objectives Treatments of female sexual dysfunction have been largely unsuccessful because they do not address the psychological factors that underlie female sexuality. Negative self-evaluative processes interfere with the ability to attend and register physiological changes (interoceptive awareness). This study explores the effect of mindfulness meditation training on interoceptive awareness and the three categories of known barriers to healthy sexual functioning: attention, self-judgment, and clinical symptoms.

Methods Forty-four college students (30 women) participated in either a 12-week course containing a “meditation laboratory” or an active control course with similar content or laboratory format. Interoceptive awareness was measured by reaction time in rating physiological response to sexual stimuli. Psychological barriers were assessed with self-reported measures of mindfulness and psychological well-being.

Results Women who participated in the meditation training became significantly faster at registering their physiological responses (interoceptive awareness) to sexual stimuli compared with active controls (F(1,28) = 5.45, p = .03, η_p² = 0.15). Female meditators also improved their scores on attention (t = 4.42, df = 11, p = .001), self-judgment, (t = 3.1, df = 11, p = .01), and symptoms of anxiety (t = −3.17, df = 11, p = .009) and depression (t = −2.13, df = 11, p < .05). Improvements in interoceptive awareness were correlated with improvements in the psychological barriers to healthy sexual functioning (r = −0.44 for attention, r = −0.42 for self-judgment, and r = 0.49 for anxiety; all p < .05).