UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium, transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at soundstruefoundation.org. And in advance, thank you for your support.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Dr. Judith Orloff. Dr. Judith Orloff is a New York Times bestselling author, psychiatrist, and a leading voice in the fields of medicine, psychiatry, empathy, and intuitive development. She’s a member of the UCLA Psychiatric Clinical Faculty and has been called the Godmother of the Empath Movement. Her book with Sounds True, The Empath’s Survival Guide: Life Strategies for Sensitive People was a breakthrough book that has helped tens of thousands of empaths claim their sensitivities and learn how to care for themselves. She’s the author of Thriving as an Empath, the creator of The Empath’s Empowerment Deck, and Judith has written a new book, it’s called The Genius of Empathy: Practical Skills to Heal Your Sensitive Self, Your Relationships, and the World, with a foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. This is what we’ll be talking about, The Genius of Empathy. Judith, welcome.
Judith Orloff: Thank you. Good to be here. Hi, everyone.
TS: All right. Right here at the start, tell me about this title, The Genius of Empathy, the title itself.
JO: Yeah. The Genius of Empathy is about empathy as a healing power that you can tap into to create a genius in your life, and to be able to shift the energy in your body to heal, personally, through your relationships, or the world. Usually, empathy is spoken about more as an abstract concept or something that you show once, I’m talking about it as a practice that you have every day to increase your open-heartedness and your healing abilities in your own body and with others.
TS: It’s interesting that you said to increase your open-heartedness, because as I was engaging with The Genius of Empathy, that’s what I felt again and again. I felt this impact happening right at the level of the heart, and this may be like a very obvious question, but what is the connection between the physical organism of the heart, the energetic heart center, and empathy?
JO: Well, empathy opens the heart. It’s one of the actions that we can take to open our heart and to shift out of an overactive mind, because there’s the mind that probably won’t want to have a lot of empathy because it feels justified in being right, and staying hurt, and not wanting to heal. But learning how to shift… and this is what I want to teach people, to shift out of the overactive mind into a state of empathy, which in turn opens the heart and creates healing inside of you. If you’re feeling anxious, let’s say, and you perform an empathic act, that will trigger your own healing and your own warmth from the heart chakra, which will extend throughout the body.
TS: Well, you mentioned you want to help people who have overactive minds, so this I think is a good place for us to start our conversation. So many of us find us… especially at this time, when change is happening so quickly and there feels like there’s so much acceleration, disruption, whether it’s insomnia, or we’re caught worrying, what would you suggest at that moment in time we’re aware of that and we want to shift to more of an empathic way of feeling ourselves?
JO: Yeah. So that’s a beautiful way of phrasing it, because you want to be aware of yourself, first of all, you want to have an awareness of your body’s energies and where you’re at. And if you’re feeling empathy, overwhelmed, or you’re feeling like you’re overthinking, then you could consciously say to yourself, “I’m going to shift now out of my head into my heart,” and you could begin to practice self-empathy, which was one of the chapters in the book. And it’s about showing yourself empathy for whatever happened that day. You can always start with the day in a very concrete way and say, “You did a great job in a hard situation. It’s okay that it didn’t turn out perfectly. You did a great job.” Or even though you said something that you regret, you can always go back to the person and making amends.
Now, that’s the beauty of self-empathy. But it’s about self-soothing, and bringing this balm of empathy to yourself, to your poor overworked mind, and to shift out of that into the heart so that you can forgive yourself and clear your energy and do something nice. If you’re overthinking at 3:00 in the morning and you’re wanting to calm down, this is a way to shift your energy so that you could find that peace and calm within.
TS: Now, Judith, you use this interesting phrase, “If you’re feeling empathy overwhelm.” Can you tell me more? What is that?
JO: Yes. Well, I’m a psychiatrist and an empath, and so I both have the scientific knowledge and being an empath. And I know very well, as an empath, what empathy overwhelm is, it’s when too many things are coming at you too fast, there’s sight, smells, sounds, people, movement, demands, sounds. It’s just excessive stimulation, that’s a very painful state. And I get into that state in airports. If I’m in airport for too long, that’s my vulnerable point. But it’s a very painful thing and you don’t want to be in it for too long. So if you’re an empath, or if you have empathy, and you notice that you’re overloaded, as soon as you possibly can, you need to stop, go into your room, close the door, take a breath, maybe close the shades if the light is too intense, and just begin to get quiet so there’s no excessive input coming in.
And while you’re being quiet, you’re saying nice things to yourself, and you’re putting your hand on your heart, and shifting into an empathic state with your own body, really feeling how tired you are and telling yourself, “It’s okay. Now is the time you’re going to repair and replenish. Right now.” And so begin the repair process through this time of being alone, and showing yourself self empathy and decreasing all the stimuli, that’s important.
TS: You mentioned, Judith, that you’re both a psychiatrist and an empath. When did you first discover, “Oh, I’m an empath,” and name it as such?
JO: Well, I discovered I was an empath as a little girl, but I didn’t have the word for it, so I had no idea what it was. And I was very sensitive. I would feel things coming from people. I would know certain intuitive things. I couldn’t go into crowded places or shopping malls. I’d go in feeling fine and walk out exhausted, or with some ache or pain I didn’t have before, or anxious. And I didn’t really understand what was going on, I just knew I wasn’t good in those places. And so I would talk to my mother who was a doctor, and she said, “Dear, just get a thicker skin. You need a thicker skin, you need to be stronger in this world.” And so I was left with nothing. Really, I was left alone. I was an only child and I didn’t know what to make of being an empath.
And it wasn’t until many years later, really, where, through my own work with myself and my own therapy, and learning about various aspects of energy in my spiritual practice of Daoism, I began to understand things in energetic terms, and then it’s much easier to explain what’s going on with an empath as an empath. And I began using that word around that time. And also, in Star Trek, they used it in one episode. I remember this beautiful Deanna Troi, the character, I loved her, she was feeling into everything like an empath does. And so it was put in the media… I forget what year that was, but I heard it there too, and it made a lot of sense.
TS: What enabled you to start relating to your sensitivity, not as some kind of fault, like, “Oh, you should get a thicker skin,” but something that you felt you could claim and that had genius in it?
JO: Yeah. Well, I spent a lot of years running from my sensitivities. So I got involved with, in my adolescence, drugs and everything, to shut it off. I wasn’t at all making peace with it. But because of many of the mentors in my life who have taught me a lot of wisdom, and I really was learning that in order for me to be whole, it was not only okay, but a beautiful thing for me to incorporate my empathy and my intuition into my life, and then I had to do it to be whole, and I had to do it to be me. And so it was through that love, and support, and empathy that I came into my own and my own power, and I was ready for it later on in life, which was probably in my early 30s… no, late 20s. I began really working with it a little bit more and owning it. But I didn’t own it for a long time, because I was brought up in a way to believe that it was weird, and it was strange, and you don’t want to show people that.
But now, it’s a whole different world for me. It’s a beautiful thing that I want to encourage everyone to develop. If you’re an empath, if you’re listening to this and you want to develop your empathy, wherever you are on the empathy spectrum, either in the center, where you’re happy for other people’s happiness, or you’re sad for other people’s sadness, or up on the spectrum to an empath, where you’re an emotional sponge and you tend to absorb the energy of others or the stress of others, but you need to learn techniques on how to center yourself so you don’t experience empathy fatigue, that’s the skill. One thing is to feel empathy, the other is to work with it in a healthy, boundaried way. And then I began owning it. And certainly, with my books, seeing the response of all the people who have been in the closet about this, and similar paths to my own, we’re amazingly similar, and how it feels to come into your empath power when you’ve been so ashamed of it all your life, it’s a wonderful, wonderful thing.
So I see all the good that comes from it, and the liberation that comes from it. And you don’t have to be an empath, this book is about for empaths and it’s for everyone. There are different kinds of empathy. You might have, or your spouse, or your friend might have cognitive empathy, that’s an empathy more that comes to the mind, were, “I’m sorry that happened to you. Oh, I’m with you with that,” not so much my heart, that would be an emotional empath or emotional empathy. But some people just have cognitive empathy and that’s great, and they don’t want to develop anything else, and that’s fine too. You go to the kind of empathy that most moves you and makes you feel whole. Empathy is a very alive force inside your body once you begin to activate it, and you begin to know it as an energy that you work with in a healing sense.
TS: Now, there’s a lot to go into here, Judith, so I want to begin with these four styles of empathy that you introduce in The Genius of Empathy. You briefly just mentioned the cognitive style, the person who thinks empathically. Describe that person to me, and let’s go through all four styles, and maybe tell me the gifts and the challenges, if you will, of each style, if that’s okay?
JO: Yes. The cognitive empath… I love cognitive empathy. The four types are cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, intuitive empathy, and spiritual empathy. They’re just places from which we come naturally when we view other people, or you can have more than one. And I love cognitive empathy. It’s a little bit easier than the other ones. It really is, because it doesn’t demand as much of you in terms of being boundaried and taking actions for self-care. Cognitive empathy is where you can be with someone with your mind and then it stays in your mind. But many analytic people have cognitive empathy. There are a lot of engineers, attorneys, I don’t mean to stereotype, but people who are brilliant in their minds, they love the cognitive empathy, it makes them feel good about themselves, as it should, and it’s a way to communicate to other people.
The only problem is, with cognitive empathy, the downside is if you’re listening to your spouse, let’s say, talking about some emotional event that happened, and the cognitive empath might come in and offer a solution too quickly. And that’s a problem because it cuts off the experience of the person expressing what they’re going through. And so when I work with cognitive empaths, I teach them to maybe go a little slower with the solutions, and just allow the person to be for a while and express themselves, not forever, you don’t want to let someone go on forever, you have to put a limit to empathy. But you don’t want to start saying solutions when the person is crying, or you just want to pace it a little bit differently. And the cognitive empath is grounded, consistent, intelligent, very mental, loves intellectual discourse. So there’s so many good things about them, but they’re not exactly emotionally as intelligent as maybe some of the other types, because it’s not really an interest of theirs. Now, it’s more the mind is more their realm. So do you want me to go on the second type?
TS: I do. I do. Let’s move on to the emotional or feeling empathic style.
JO: Yeah. The emotional empathic style is you relate to someone emotionally. They share something that’s going on in their life, and your heart opens to them, and your body starts getting closer to them, and you’re gushing with warm, loving feelings for them. But the downside of that is that you also may be absorbing their pain, which may be coming in with that beautiful openness that you’re showing with them. But the primary mode of emotional empathy is through the heart and it’s through the emotions, and the downside is, of course, emotional overload. And so you need to learn how to set boundaries, set time limits for listening with empathy, only listen to one subject at a time. I always encourage people who are developing empathic communication skills to stick to one subject at a time, one topic, because it’s too overwhelming if the door opens and you start going into everything that’s bothering you. You’ll never get through to the other person. It’s one issue at a time, to be patient with that, and communicate it that way.
The next kind of empathy is intuitive empathy, where you intuitively relate to people, you sense your gut feeling, you sense an aha, or a knowing, or you get information about people, clairvoyant information, or any kind of intuitive information that gives you more of an insight into the person that just may be who you are. But the downside of that is that you can go on intuitive overload, where many of my patients have just said, “I’ve opened up, but now, there’s too much information coming in too fast.” And so you want to be able to have an inner dialogue with yourself and say, “Please slow it down. This is a bit too fast for me.” And you can do that, you could have an inner dialogue, or depending on your spiritual views, you could connect with the creator to talk to. Because from my vantage point, there is a creator, the dao, the one path in Daoism. So it’s something I connect to regularly.
TS: And then the fourth style, Judith, spiritual.
JO: The fourth style is the spiritual empathy, which is seeing the best in people, their connection to the heart, and what’s beautiful, and giving, and service and a lot of clergy, our spiritual empaths… And it’s just more of a spiritually oriented lens through which you see the world.
TS: Now, interestingly, as you went through these four types, what I noticed, and you said this, is you could be more than one. How would you identify yourself? Which of these types applies? Maybe you could rank them for us, for yourself?
JO: Rank them?
TS: That must mean that I have some kind of cognitive empathy that I want them ranked, but we’ll get to me in a moment. Let’s start with you.
JO: I could rank them. I’ve never done it before, but probably, intuitive empathy is number one for me. Emotional empathy is number two. Spiritual empathy… oh, that’s a hard one, because that would be probably up with number one. And cognitive empathy, probably number four for me.
TS: So it’s interesting, as you approached it, and these four styles, you were very high in three of them actually. So that’s interesting because listeners may also have that response in listening to these empathic styles, that they’re very highly resonant with one, two, or three, perhaps styles, maybe even all four. Who knows?
JO: Right. And it’s important to know the styles of your family or your friends too, so you know how you can interrelate with them.
TS: What’s the downside? We didn’t cover that of the spiritual or divining empathic type.
JO: They risk getting ill, because they are so giving and almost a martyr-like sense, that they give too much of their energy and they become depleted. And they could become ill, but they might see it in a way that this is just the price you pay for loving. And I don’t happen to agree with that. I think you could be extremely compassionate and empathic without sacrificing your own health. But the downside is the sacrifice of the health and wellbeing, and feeling that that’s just part of the job description.
TS: So in listening to you talk about, in general, the downsides of many different aspects of empathy, it seems like this, whether it’s overwhelm, or over giving, or overextending to the point of being a martyr, and you’re saying, “Oh, you’re allowed to have boundaries. In fact, you need to have boundaries. You need to take care of yourself.” Give us some of Judith Orloff’s empath toolbox for having the boundaries I need to feel this much.
JO: Yes. Being able to say no is very important. And to be able to say no is how… If you say it with empathy, I could say an empathic no, “Oh, I wish I could do this, but I really can’t because I’m just too tired and I need to go to bed.” I could say it like that. Or, “I can’t do that. You’re asking way too much of me. Don’t you know how tired I am?” So do you feel the different tones of voice and where I would be coming from? So if you want to express a boundary, if you can do it from your heart at the same time as saying no, that’s very important. But you have to learn how to say no, you have to learn how to set limits, and you have to grow up in the sense that… I know many empaths are afraid of disappointing people.
They always want to please people, and they’re afraid and can’t tolerate if somebody is disappointed. And this is just part of being an adult, you are going to disappoint people. You are. It’s just part of the package of saying no. Someone might want you to do something really badly, but you’re unable to do it, they’ll be disappointed. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s something to get used to and familiar with so you can tolerate it. Because sometimes, people who are overgivers, they just sense a little tad of disappointment, and all of a sudden, they’re overgiving again because they can’t tolerate it. So it’s just something to remember. And it’s okay, you’re going to disappoint people. We’re grown up adults here, and you want to be able to accept that, that you need to set the boundaries.
Sometimes with people you love, you can’t be on call all the time for the people around you. You’ll never survive in terms of empathy, you’ll be so tired all the time. And so you have to find a balance in your life with empathy. Empathy isn’t about saying yes to everything, and I think people misconstrue it. It’s about saying yes when you can and it feels right, and saying no when you’re unable to give, except in extreme situations. Sometimes a loved one will get horribly ill, and you need to be there, and it’s beyond your energy level at that time, but you make the sacrifice because it’s necessary in that situation. But apart from emergencies like that, you have to find more balance for yourself. So giving and empathy can be joyful and it can feel good. It’s not meant to be a burden, it’s meant to be a healing force that comes through you.
So when you set the boundaries, I hope you can feel good about them. As many people feel guilty to set a boundary because they were taught growing up that that’s not okay to set a boundary, that it’s selfish, and that you always have to do what other people ask of you, which is not true. That is not what I teach. It’s about doing what you can to help yourself, to help others, to help the world, and knowing when you’ve hit your limit, and knowing how to take care of yourself at that moment to find yourself again. If you get lost or you get so tired, you can’t function, you have to come back to yourself. And the beauty of empathy is that you can start over and over again. And it’s not like I feel empathy all the time, every minute. Some days, I just feel like I failed terribly in that day because nothing seemed to have gone well and my empathy was waning.
And so what I do at those moments, and we’ll all hit those moments, is that I get a good night’s sleep. I just need to sleep. Sleep is replenishing for me, and then I start over the next day in a beginner’s mind. I say, “Please, let me follow the path and find my part again, now that I’m rested, and begin to show empathy again.” So it’s okay to have bad days where you can’t show any empathy. It just happens.
TS: Judith, you mentioned this notion of empathy being on a spectrum. And I think that’s really useful because we’ve been talking quite a bit in this conversation so far about the empathic person, the person who’s extremely high in empathy, let’s put them on one end. Can you articulate, describe the whole spectrum, the empathy spectrum?
JO: Yes. The other end of the spectrum is the part where people have no empathy. They have empathy deficient disorders, and there’s a chapter in the book on people with empathy deficient disorders because you need to know about them. They’re the narcissist, sociopath, and psychopath. And you have to know the signs and symptoms of who these people are so you can identify them right away and not get involved with them, no matter how much they love bomb you. They send out incredible energy of love all the time, which is crazily confusing to people because they have no idea. And the people that have been starved for love, they feel this love bombing, and then they’re connected. And these people have no capacity for empathy. And I want you to know that. And I know some of you are listening, have experienced that, and you’ve had your experience with the narcissist or the sociopath.
The sociopath is somebody who basically doesn’t obey the laws and is always scheming, and trying to get you involved with schemes, and stealing people’s money, and not caring, and having no conscience because they have no empathy. Or the narcissist who seduces you into a relationship. And then the minute you’re hooked in, then they become cold, withholding, and punishing, and start gaslighting you, and make you think you’re crazy. And if you have empathy, you just want to try and understand them. But what happens is that you start blaming yourself and you start thinking, “It’s my fault. I’m lacking something.” And so your self-esteem goes down. So these are very toxic people to get involved with who are full-fledged. They’re people with, let’s say, narcissistic traits. That’s different than being a full-fledged narcissist, is you could work more with that, there’s more of an openness with people who have those traits. They can go to therapy, and they don’t blame you with all their problems.
The other kind of narcissist blames you. If you go into therapy, it’s useless most of the time, because they’ll blame you, they’ll go in, “Oh, no, they’re the problem, not me. No, I’m fine.” And so you can’t do anything with that really in therapy. You can’t go anywhere with it. So you want to be aware, as empathic people, not to get involved with these people, and if you are involved with them, to have a strategy, in terms of how to deal with them. But sometimes, like if you have a narcissistic boss, it’s very hard. That’s one of the hardest situations because you can’t really assert yourself, because you’re not in an equal position with them. But what you can do is lower your expectations and not go to them for any kind of emotional nurturing, and frame things in terms of ways that it will serve them. Then they might do something you want, but who wants to live that way?
So I always suggest, if you can, find another job. Because there’s no working with the person, it’s not going to change. It’s just going to get worse. So those are people to be aware of when you’re developing your empathy, because you want to move towards people who are going to support your empathy, who are trustworthy, who aren’t going to say, “Oh, you’re so sensitive. Why don’t you try to get stronger?” Or, “You’re crazy. Why don’t you change the way you’re thinking?” Or, “You’re stupid.” And empathic people might say, “Oh, they didn’t mean to say that. They were just under a stressful day. No, they did mean to say that.” So I really would like everyone to be aware of these types at the bottom of the spectrum.
Then in the middle of the spectrum, that’s everyday empathy that humans have, not necessarily empaths, but humans. And it’s a beautiful form of empathy, “Oh, I’m so sorry that you hurt yourself on that.” Or people who are just good people and they want to give you a little love if something happened. Or if somebody’s happy, you can feel happy along with them, “My happiness is your happiness.” There’s no greater happiness in the world to get to that place. It’s a beautiful place to get to, and you want to be able to share that. And then higher up on the spectrum, as we discussed, the highly sensitive people and the empaths.
TS: Now, I think this idea of the spectrum is really, really useful, and I want to ask a couple more questions about it. It seems to me that one of the places where people can get a little like, “Hmm, I’m not quite sure,” is when the person has some traits of empathy deficient syndrome, disorder, but they’re not full-blown. It’s not a lost cause, “I don’t quite know, should I give up on this person or should I give them another chance?” How would you discern that?
JO: If they were willing to go to therapy with you and actually work on the issues, or go to some kind of a coach or counselor, and when they arrived, they didn’t blame you, that they were willing to look at their part in what was going on. If they were, then I would give them another chance. If they say, “No, I’m not willing to go, but everything will be fine,” I would be suspicious.
TS: And then that place in the middle, the person who finds themselves someplace in the middle… and quite honestly, I’m going to put myself there just as a way to bring myself forward here, honorably and confessionally. Wouldn’t it be good to read books like The Genius of Empathy and develop more empathy and go further towards that high level of empathy? Wouldn’t that be a good thing? Or is it, “Fine. I’m someplace kind of in the middle, and that’s okay. I’ve got other ways I’m interacting with the world.” What do you think?
JO: Only if you’re attracted to go up the spectrum. This is something you’re drawn to do, it’s not something you should do. You don’t have to have any empathy, it depends if you’re drawn to it. You don’t have to, it wouldn’t be a very happy way to live, and your relationships wouldn’t be that good, but if you’re in the center, you’re happy with the center, stay in the center, it’s a beautiful place to be in the center. One place isn’t necessarily better than the other, it just depends on what you’re meant to do and how you’re meant to develop. If you have an attraction to becoming an empath, then you’re going to be going up. It’ll pull you. You’ll feel attracted to learning about it a little bit more.
And you may not want to go all the way up, you might want to go partially up, but you don’t want to go down. But what you do want to do is recognize those people who are at the bottom of that spectrum. You can’t afford not to. But the middle, Tami, is a great place to be, and it’s empathy however it expresses itself, it’s a beautiful healing force. And whatever suits your body and your being, then that’s it.
TS: And how much do you think of wherever we fall on this spectrum is something genetic versus just what we’ve learned, what we’ve experienced, how we’ve potentially covered over our heart in different ways for different reasons?
JO: Yeah. In the book, I talk about trauma, because trauma can glaze over the empathy and glaze over the feeling. And so you want to be able to look at past traumas, whatever they may be, in order to try and heal through trauma-informed techniques, how to open up… Again, it’s about reopening after the trauma, and it’s a very tender process. And part of that reopening can mean reconnecting to your empathy. But it’s a sensitive, beautiful process that if you want to open it up again, then you can, you definitely can.
TS: Do you think that there’s any genetic route for people who are on the empathy deficiency majorly side of the spectrum? Is there a genetic cause of that? Because then I feel more empathy for them, just to say.
JO: Yeah. There’s some research that shows that it may be genetically passed on in generations. And so that’s a possibility. It’s not only temperament and it’s not only environment. And so hereditary is thought to be one of the main factors involved, heredity. And so there could be a genetic component to this, definitely. And so that allows you to have more empathy with them.
TS: Yes, it does. For people who are on the far end of the deficiency part of the spectrum, it does.
JO: Yes, yes, yes. Interesting. Yeah, that’s true. However, it doesn’t change, in a practical way, in your life, for those of you who do want to develop empathy, your involvement with these people. It’s just really dangerous. And I just want to warn you, because they’re very seductive people, and they’re not good for you if you want to develop empathy. If you want to keep the relationship superficial and fun, they could be a lot of fun. You can go out with a narcissist and have a grand old time, but they’re not going to connect to your heart.
TS: I want to share with you, Judith, the two big transformations, if you will, that happened for me in reading The Genius of Empathy, and they’re both profound. And I want to bring them forward as gifts to our listeners, and those listeners who maybe find themselves someplace in that middle part of the spectrum. One has to do with how empathy can help us release longstanding resentments, stored resentments. And you teach about this quite a bit, can you talk about that, and how this healing force of empathy can really shift grievances we’ve been carrying?
JO: Yes. It’s almost counterintuitive that empathy can do that, but if you’re carrying around a lot of resentments for a lot of years, you’re going to be very heavy and weighed down. And you’re going to be carrying so much stuff, you’re not going to be able to be clear and free in the moment. But a way to begin to release a resentment is to attempt to have empathy for the person who did the harm. It’s not for their act, whatever they did, if they betrayed you, if they harmed you, whatever it is, that you don’t forgive that unless you want to, but that’s not what I’m talking about, you forgive the suffering and the crippling that’s within them that would cause them to do such a thing. And why would you want to have empathy for them?
The reason is if you can stretch to that point, out of your mind, your mind would say, “This is ridiculous. You don’t want to have empathy for them ever,” but your heart, if you can stretch and just say, “I have empathy for that poor soul who can’t at all find love and is so harmful,” if you could find even a little bit, what happens is that person begins to drift off away from you so that you’re not thinking about them, you release them energetically. And that is so important so that you’re lighter, and freer, and happier. And it takes that stretch to find empathy for something about them that will allow them to drift back off far away from you. And you will experience that as a chill and as a lightening of your load. And that’s what you want.
But it is a stretch from the mind to the heart, and making that choice, even saying the words, if you don’t even 100% believe them. But to say, “I forgive you for being so wounded and so hurt that you did these things,” and then you’re going to feel something. I could talk about it, but it’s an experiential kind of liberation, so you have to actually do it. And there’s resistance in the mind to doing it, which is neither here nor there. There’s so much resistance in the mind to doing so many things that you could just try it and then see what your experience is.
TS: I noticed in using the word empathy like, “I have empathy for the pain you were in when this event happened, for the suffering you were going through, for everything in your life that brought you to that moment where you acted that way.” When I went about it with that focus on empathy, it shifted it for me differently than other, quote, unquote, “forgiveness exercises” I’ve done.
JO: In what way did it shift it?
TS: I just felt a lot of understanding for the person and respect for their human struggle. Like, “Oh, they’re this struggling human, and that’s all they could do in that moment.” And empathy was the doorway, so that’s I think part of what you’re pointing out. Now, I want to read a quote from The Genius of Empathy about letting go of resentments, that I didn’t fully understand, and have you explain it to us. And here’s the quote, “A tricky part of healing resentments is that you must be willing to release them, and resentments also must be willing to release you. Resentments have a life of their own.” And you went on to compare them to a barnacle in some way. And I thought, what does that mean that resentments also must be willing to release you, to release me? What does that mean?
JO: It’s a two-way street here, there’s you and there’s a resentment. The resentment isn’t some inner object, it’s a very alive being that’s connected to you, in the sense that it is an energy that has grown over the years. And so it has a certain resonance. And so in an odd way, it has to be ready to release you. It’s liking being attached to you, the resentment likes it. But for you to let go of that, you could let go in your own self, and you could ask the resentment to please go on its way and let go of you. And I have never experienced a problem with that. They’re willing to go. They only want you if you’re suffering, they’re not too interested in people who are awake, and compassionate, and empathic. They want to go on to something else. That’s just my experience of it.
TS: That’s very interesting. So you’re almost making analogies of resentment to an energetic life form of some kind. That’s very interesting.
JO: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they’re powerful. They’re worth working with. They really are. Everyone who’s listening, you don’t want to be too unconcerned about them. You want to keep balance in your body. And building up a bunch of resentments is going to create a lot of problems for you in terms of your energetic balance, and your health, and your emotional wellbeing.
TS: Could you maybe give me an example, Judith, whether it was someone you worked with, or something from your own experience, where you had this sense of, “Oh, the resentment is itself some kind of energetic being that needs to move on”?
JO: Yeah. From my early life, my very first boyfriend, who I was so in love with, he was my first experience with love. And he essentially, after two years of professing love, of acting love, he dumped me for a cheerleader at school, and without any words, and never gave me any explanation. No closure. Nothing. I had no idea what happened. I just was walking down the street and I saw them making out in a car. Young girls tend to be very sensitive, and I was just stricken by this. And I was resentful for many, many, many years, and hurt, and resentful of him. And then at a certain point, maybe when I was 30, he contacted me and said, “Can we get together and talk?” Because he never talked to me about this. And I said, “Sure.” And we went to the Rose Cafe in Venice, and he says, “It was the worst mistake in my life to have broken up with you.”
In his life, he’d become a heroin addict, and all these things happened to him. And he wanted to fire up our relationship again in some way. And speaking to him, which was never going to happen because I could never trust him, I would never trust anyone again who treated me in that way, but I had the resentment. But then suddenly, when I heard his back story and I got a bigger picture, and I asked him, “Why did you break up with me? What happened?” And he said, “I just wanted to be popular and you weren’t popular.” Teenagers. You know what? I have more, in retrospect, understanding of it now. It might sound like a little example, but to me, it really shaped my life because it made me so afraid to get in relationships again, as I felt so hurt. And I found empathy for him in that conversation. And any attachment I had to the hurt, because I was still attached to the hurt of it, it’s just drifted off. And I was so happy for that. We had reached a closure.
TS: The other point that I wanted to emphasize about this healing power of empathy in our lives that I’m learning from you has to do with applying what you call self-empathy. And of course, like many people, I’ve learned a lot over the years about self-compassion, and even about self-acceptance. But I noticed the way you described self-empathy opened me up to something different. And I’m going to see if I can point to it and then maybe you can expand upon it. So I think in the past, when I’ve practiced self-compassion, I’ve done things to send myself loving energy, or I’ve talked to myself in a loving tone of voice, and I’ve put my hand on my heart. So I’ve done all these actions and I’ve said, “Many people in the world feel this way.” And I’ve said things to reassure myself.
When I just was reading The Genius of Empathy and practicing self-empathy, it was, “Tami, I get what you’re going through, makes sense, it’s tough. I empathize with you.” There was a directness, and just being with it, and it just being like, “It’s okay.” So I wonder if maybe you can say more about this notion of self-empathy and how, perhaps, it’s a little different than ways we’ve learned self-compassion.
JO: Right. It’s a subtle difference, but self-empathy is attuning with the self, compassion is showing compassion for the self. It’s different. The attuning is to become one with, it’s like a musical instrument, you become one with yourself. And when you’re showing empathy, it resonates. And so it’s a bit of a different posture than, “I’m going to show myself compassion. My hand will come here…” It comes more from the outside as opposed to the attuning with the self. And a lot of people are afraid of empathy and they criticize empathy. There’ve been books against empathy because they said it’s not as safe as compassion. Compassion, you don’t get burnout, you don’t get drained. And what they don’t consider is that with empathy, you have to learn self-care tools, you have to learn how to set boundaries, you have to learn how not to merge with people when it’s not appropriate and to take on their issues.
It’s not just like you have empathy and it’s just hanging there, you have to learn to work with it. So it’s a bit different than compassion. And whichever you are drawn to, again, some people are drawn to the deep attunement of empathy, and the self-empathy is so surprising because it is hard. It’s harder than one might think, because I can have empathy for you, but for myself… A lot of people find it’s harder with oneself, but when one has that, when you’re alone with yourself and you’re attuning to yourself, and you’re feeling that empathy, it’s very deep and complete, and it has a different quality than the compassion, but they’re both part of the picture.
TS: Can you tell me what you mean using this word attuning? What does that mean, “Empathically attuning to yourself”?
JO: Becoming one with. Imagine you have a vibration or a vibratory instrument inside of you, and you’re trying to mesh with that tune, the attunement, the same tone. And so by feeling the same tone as what’s going on inside, you become one with it. So when I tune into people, for instance, I can feel the tone inside of them and resonate with it as part of my empathy. It’s a way of getting on their wavelengths so I can feel their experience.
TS: And how about with yourself? If you’re suffering for whatever reason and you know you need self-empathy, how do you go about that, Judith?
JO: Oh, I just stop. And again, I’ll close the door and be by myself. I’ve just learned that as an only child. That’s how I replenish, close the door, be by myself, cry if necessary, because that’s a form of self-empathy, is allowing the tears to flow. It’s very healing to cry. I feel very positive about most forms of crying, where I’ll cry, I’ll moan, I’ll go in the fetal position in bed, I’ll either go to sleep, and I’ll finally, eventually, go in my meditation cushion, I’ll end up there. And I’ll just say to myself, “This was really hard today. This was really, really hard. And I’m sorry you had to go through it, but you’ll find a way to work through it with this person,” or whatever, if you had a difficult encounter with somebody, “Now, it’ll work out. It’ll work out.” And so it’s attuning with the self. It’s not just saying positive words, it’s about making it all okay within, that you’re okay and you’ll work it out. This is life, and it’s a way of maybe hugging the self. Maybe that’s a little too simplistic, but it’s about being there for you.
TS: One of the things I wanted to ask you about, Judith, is, are you ready for this, your vision for training contemporary psychiatrists. Given the fact that here you are on the faculty at UCLA, what do you think needs to happen in terms of the evolution of the training of psychiatrists, informed by everything you now know about the healing power of empathy?
JO: Well, that’s what I do. I supervise a couple of residents each year, and I help them with their patients. And so I teach them how to incorporate empathy and intuition into their work directly with patients. So we have the patient as the example, and then they apply it, and then they come back to me. So it’s a wonderful experience for both of us. And they’re very grateful to have those skills to take into their practice when they graduate. But I think in terms of medical education, we need to have more speakers about empathy. I know in my medical training, I hardly got any teaching and guidance about this, but to have more dialogue about it… people used to think, and they may still think in a way that either you’re in your mind, or you’re somewhere else. You can’t have both intuition and your mind, you have to make a choice, and you really don’t.
I’m proof of it through almost 30 years of practice. Now, I integrate my intuition and my empathy with my traditional background. I love my traditional background. I have incredible memory for it, and I apply it with people. And so it’s not like it’s just in the past, but it’s integrating all of this and making beautiful practitioners, those who are interested in this kind of training. So just making it more available, and making it part of the curriculum, as people go through the four years of medical school, I think that’s probably the next step. I think it’s going there.
TS: I wonder how many people end up in a psychiatrist’s office experiencing various kinds of empathic overwhelm and other ways that they don’t feel mentally well, and it’s the result of not learning the kinds of skills that you teach in your teaching work in your books? What do you think about that?
JO: It’s true, it’s true, and they get misdiagnosed, and then they get treated with medications they may not need to be on, if they were diagnosed as being an empath or on an empathic overwhelm in the first place. If that diagnosis was even considered in the list of diagnoses, it could save patients a lot of misdiagnosis and suffering. If somebody’s an empath on overload, that’s very different than generalized anxiety disorder. You see, and people will get misdiagnosed and be given Valium and sent off, and who knows how long it’ll take to get off of it. But Valium doesn’t treat this issue. You have to learn some of the tools that I’m talking about, in terms of setting boundaries, and self-care, and learning when to tune into yourself when you go over that line of you can’t take anymore that day. You need to really practice self-care.
It takes some skills to learn how to do that, but it’s really important to diagnose people properly, otherwise, you don’t want to go down the mental health route when you don’t have to because the system’s… it’s rough. It can be a rough system to go through.
TS: Okay, just a couple more questions here. One of the skills you teach people is something you call shielding. And I wonder if you could share with us, for those of us who do find ourselves being overwhelmed by other people’s emotional material at different times, how we can practice shielding ourselves.
JO: And sometimes, I want to point out, you might be uncomfortable just around somebody’s energy field. You might not even need to have any interaction with them, but just simply by virtue of getting near them, it might not be something that you want to be near. So the shielding is helpful in either case. And the shielding is noticing when something’s off or noticing, “I don’t want any more of this, I’m not comfortable with it,” and just visualizing protection of light all around yourself, maybe six inches from the body going all the way around the feet and the legs. And so you’re inside this golden egg, basically, of protection, and it stops the negative energy or the uncomfortable energy from coming in. But it allows positivity to come in, for some reason, it doesn’t keep that out. But if you create this protection shield with that intention, then you could move more easily among different types of energy. Or if you have one particular person that you’re thinking of, you could put it up around when you’re around them, if you need to be around them.
TS: And then, Judith, what do you think about someone who feels empathically overwhelmed when they’re exposed to news stories of various kinds? Even if they don’t spend a lot of time on news sites, they still hear about different things that are happening in the world and they connect so much with the suffering that’s occurring.
JO: Well, my suggestion is instead of connecting to the suffering, you could send people out some energy of empathy and love. Instead of taking in, you give out, and you can send it… This type of thing, this healing at a distance can come through your body and it can come through your heart. If you’re feeling empathy for all of the war-torn regions in the world, let’s say you want to go for all of them, just send out, “I feel this empathy and I send it out to you,” and believe me, it knows where to go and what it’s doing. You don’t have to do anything once you sent it out, and then it will go where it’s needed and it will go everywhere. This kind of thing, it’s not limited by time and space because it’s so powerful. I’m not making this up. This is something that is very true energetically, and it’s much more productive to send out to people than to suffer along with them, because you’re not helping them, you’re just making yourself miserable.
And of course, if war is the cause of suffering, in the beginning of the book, I talk about The Art of War by Sun Tzu, and he was an expert in combat and defense, and he says, “War is only a last resort. And if we have to find war, we need to be miserable about it.” We can never be happy about it. It’s a failure. And so you want to try everything else, including empathy, he didn’t say this, I’m adding that, before you even go to war, to know that war is the last resort. War is a terrible thing. It’s not something to be happy about ever. And so you send this energy out to others and it will do good. Maybe somebody is despondent, and all of a sudden, they have a ray of hope. That’s how the energy works. And they don’t know where it comes from, but suddenly they feel better.
Or somebody was bedridden, and then all of a sudden, they are wanting to go to the bathroom and get out of bed. Just something like that. You must have faith in this kind of empathic love that can travel. And so in terms of the news though, you have to make a quota for that. And if people are speaking a lot about the news, you have to set a limit where, “I’m not really interested in hearing about that when I’m walking on the beach. I don’t want to hear about wars.” And I have become comfortable in really speaking up and saying things like that. And people will say, “Okay.” But you have to find out what your comfort level is. You want to be informed, but you don’t want to take on.
In the book, I talk about observing, not absorbing. You can observe and get the general picture of what’s happening, but to follow it beat by beat, you’re going in the belly of the beast, and you don’t want to do that. You don’t want to go into dark energy like that, you want to keep a respectful distance from it and not get overly interested in all of it so you’re sucked in and it depletes you. It’s okay to find out what’s happening, but it’s better for the rest of the day for you to live in the here and now, and do what you can in your own life to develop yourself, and that will in turn help humanity. I feel very strongly about that.
TS: And then finally, Judith, I know that your goal for The Genius of Empathy: Practical Skills to Heal Your Sensitive Self, Your Relationships, and the World is to help people appreciate and know empathy as a healing force. And you’ve talked about it here as a healing force that we can send out and we can offer to others. Tell me, with your MD hat in mind, how the more we’re in a state of empathy and feeling it, how it affects our health, what it does for our own healing journey?
JO: Oh, yes. Well, we’re talking beforehand about the Mother Teresa effect, and what this is that if you watch somebody do an empathic act, it will touch you. And if I were to draw your blood at that moment or during that time, your immunity would go up, your stress hormones would go down, and you would have all kinds of positive changes in your blood indices, just by virtue of watching an empathic act. So if you take that and you really get what that is, you’re not even being the empathic one, you’re watching it. Just try to extrapolate in terms of you did that. If you did the empathic act and you felt that kind of rush, that’s the healing energy of empathy. And you can understand it in a way if you look at your animals, look at the unconditional love from your animals when they crawl on your lap and they’re looking at you, that’s what you have to do to yourself. The way they look at you, you have to look at yourself that way. That’s why there are incredible teachers, but that’s the whole point of empathy, is to be like them.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Judith Orloff, author of the new book, The Genius of Empathy: Practical Skills to Heal Your Sensitive Self, Your Relationships, and the World. Judith, thank you so much.
JO: You’re welcome, Tami. It’s great to be here with you.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more, with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
