The Limits of Empathy

Yesterday was my day off. I ran some errands, and I heard about a potential setback. I stopped to talk with Lawrence and told him about my frustrations about a certain business transaction, and  then I went out to run more errands.  Lawrence told me at the end of the day that after I left, Bow was really upset about the conversation he overheard about the business problem. He just would not go back to playing for a long time, and Lawrence had trouble distracting him.

Finally, Bow took Lawrence's hand and spelled: "Mommy is hurt."

Lawrence told him: "Momma is not hurt. Momma is mad!" After which, Bow calmed down and went back to his usual preoccupations: food, grooming, going outside.

Yes, I get angry sometimes. And yes, Bow would rather see me angry than hurt. If I'm angry then there is still a fighting chance. If I am hurt, it means we have suffered a loss. If I lose, Bow loses.

 I know a lot of people who are trying to control their expressions every moment of the day, to convince themselves and others that they only ever have positive feelings: happiness, joy, sympathy, fellowship, friendship. They try to avoid anger, fear, sadness and boredom. They don't actually avoid having those feelings. They just disguise them -- sometimes even from themselves.

Bow, showing affection

Chimpanzees are very good at picking up on other people's feelings. It's one of the things that distinguishes them from us. They see right past any attempts to disguise who you really are and what you really feel.

Does Bow have empathy for me? Sure. But it's got to do with the fact that we are on the same team. If something bad happens to me, then that means that his interests are jeopardized, too. And even though he does not understand the exact nature of every business transaction, he has a very clear gut feeling about when something is "for us" or "against us."

Believe it or not, that's actually what empathy is for. It's not so we'll stop to help our enemies when they are wounded on the field of battle or so that we will adopt that baby from the tribe that is making war on us, or so that we will give something we need away to a stranger because he needs it more. Sometimes empathy does work that way, but that's not how it evolved and that is not its main function. It evolved to help us figure out what is in our own best interest, even when we are not the one directly hurt or threatened.

There's been an article about the benefits of reading that has been going the rounds, and many pro-literacy advocates are touting it as very significant: it claims that people who read a lot are better at understanding other people's feelings. It claims that reading develops empathy. And the more literary the book, the greater the empathy.

I think that is patently false. All my life, I have observed that people with their nose in a book most of the day are less alert to the feelings of others, which may be why they get bullied so often. The ability to read others in my experience is inversely proportional to the amount of reading we have done. People who read literary fiction are more likely to be so out of touch with their own feelings that they don't even know when they themselves are angry, much less somebody else. And yes, there was a political bias in the article, because it mentioned that people who read literary fiction are the most sympathetic to the downtrodden and excluded groups. In other words, there was an implication that empathy is a tool to achieve a particular political result.

Perspective shifting is an important mental exercise. Our ability to shift perspective grows as we become more intelligent, more capable of abstraction and less immediately engaged by direct experience,  and it is better developed in  science fiction than in mainstream literature. In order to really shift perspective, though, you need to be able to momentarily disengage your feelings.  But even though you shift your perspective to identify with an alien race or a different culture, at the end of the day, your actual empathy is reserved for the people on your team. Just like Bow's.

Japanese Beetles attacking my peach trees

Sometimes it's not even about right or wrong or good or bad. It's just about them or us. Take those Japanese beetles that I have seen around lately. One can identify with their desire to find a mate and be fruitful and multiply. But when they are attacking my peach trees in their multitudes, my empathy lessens. I am determined to thwart their very understandable and natural desires.

The greatest discord in this world does not come from a lack of mutual understanding. Its source is conflict of interest. If anybody is trying to convince you otherwise, he probably has something he hopes to gain. Take care!

Bow Identifies Muppet Emotions

Today, Bow went out several times. The last time, he invited me to join him outside by patting me on the back in a friendly way and gesturing toward the pen where the ice on the floor was rapidly melting and turning to water. But I had no shoes on and wanted to finish something on the computer, so I said: "Thanks for inviting me, Bow, but I really don't want to go out right now."

After I finished what I was working on, I scanned the Facebook feed and saw a Sesame Street parody of Les Miserables.

I started watching the video, and Bow, who was lounging on the bench outside, was attracted by the music and voices from my laptop. He asked to come back in, and after he was in the inner pen he led me to the glass and spelled:
                                           תני לי לראות
                                           "Let me see."

I took the laptop in and played the video for him.

Bow had no trouble identifying the emotions of the muppets on the screen.  He could tell who was sad, who was happy, and what music was good for a rousing march. When Cookie Monster decided to share the cookies with everyone, Bow looked pleased.

Bow is definitely not autistic. He has a theory of mind. I can no longer watch serious movies with him, because the feelings of the characters in the movies upset him. But this version of Les Miserables  was just short enough and at the right level for a happy and successful viewing experience.

Floortime Methodology for Relating to Children who Process Differently

Did you know that all human beings are developmentally delayed compared to the average chimpanzee? Take the average newborn, the average one year old, the average toddler: the human is behind on all  developmental milestones, as compared to the chimpanzee. The difference is just as noticeable as the difference between a neurotypical human being and one who has been diagnosed as autistic.

When Bow did not seem to be making the progress I had expected in language acquisition by the age of three, I turned to Floortime, a therapy developed by Dr. Stanley Greenspan, to help Bow with his language progress. The truth is that many of my volunteers were better at Floortime than I was. In my interactions with my children, I tended to follow the model set for me by my father, rather than the equally functional method of my mother.

Because I had two loving parents when I was growing up, I got the benefit of my interactions with each, which were very different. My mother was warm and loving, and she bent over backwards to read my body language and to create a bridge from my world to hers, when I was not even speaking yet. Her method was to understand what I wanted before I could say and then to give me the words to express it. You might say, she facilitated our communication by meeting me more than halfway. I attribute the fact that I was speaking words at six months and sentences when I was a year old to my mother's encouragement and her openness to my communication. She also had me potty trained at one year of age, by anticipating my needs and creating the habit before there was any time to give the matter conscious thought.

My mother was a stay-at-home mother, and she was able to do this because she was a mother full time and with me twenty-four hours a day. My early years were a time of symbiosis with my mother and learning by osmosis.

My father, on the other hand, encouraged my logical abilities by not reading body language and not talking down to me, but rather interpreting what I said like a strict constructionist. He always responded to what I said, not what I meant to say. He treated me like an equal right from the start, and his respect for my mind was evident in everything he did.

I am a single parent. I wanted to give my children the best of both worlds, but you can't have a symbiotic relationship with your child and be logical and intellectually demanding at the same time. You can't respond to what someone meant and what they actually said at the same time. You can't show empathy and demand the very highest standard of excellence all at once. Or at the very least, it is hard to do!

My early interns were warm,  normal young women with a well developed sense of empathy and a less developed sense of logic.  It was easy for them to make the high-pitched noises and the exaggerated affect that were called for in Floortime sessions. They never felt that they were talking down to Bow, because that's how they would have spoken to any very small child.  There were times when I even got vibes from them suggesting that they secretly thought I was a refrigerator mom, because of the logical, respectful way I addressed him. My relative lack of affect, compared to them, seemed like a deficit.

However, Bow and I were together all day long, and he was riding on my back, and even if I didn't quite understand him, he had developed an understanding of me. There were times when in order to reach me, he would slow himself down to my speed, and he'd wait until I noticed what he was trying to point out to me. In order to do this, he had to lower his activity level to what must have seemed like slow motion, from his own perspective.

What we eventually learned, by watching the tapes of our communication with Bow, is that he wasn't the slow one -- we were! In order to communicate with him, we needed to speed up, and he needed to slow down. But since it's easier to slow down than speed up, it was Bow who ended up doing most of the accommodating.

A primatologist friend of mine, when I asked her, had this to say about Floortime: "Yes, it does seem to help some parents to communicate with their children, but not in the way they think. It teaches them to notice what the child is saying. It doesn't really change the child."

Here's the secret to communication: if there's a mismatch in speed or communication style, each party should try to meet the other somewhere close to half-way. It doesn't matter who is the "normal" one, it's just two people, and they have to  find a place where they can reach each other. Too much attention to the norm and too little attention to the needs of the individuals involved creates an unviable channel for communication.   

It doesn't matter who is the slow one and who is too fast. The place to meet is somewhere in the middle.

I just read what I have written above to Bow. He spelled: "Why Mommy? Every mommy is good."