The Death and Rebirth of Empathy
I’ve slowly come to realize with the help of my therapist that there is a black hole in the core of my being that has swallowed up my ability to touch one of the most fundamental and unique traits that separate us from the animals or machines - empathy. By empathy, I mean the ability to feel the emotions of another human being within myself or the ability to more effectively connect to and recognize another’s mode of thoughts, emotions or moods. I’ve known forever that I’ve always had great difficulty connecting to people on an emotional level and truly understanding their perspective and feelings on things, but I always associated it with who I was as a person and I didn’t think I could ever change this and I’m still unsure if this can be fully changed or rehabilitated in the future. Time will tell.
What is clearer now though is that I’ve made the connection between recognizing empathy and recognizing my inability to experience empathy and in doing so I have on some level given myself a foundation to start from. I’ve partially disconnected from something that I once identified with and I now see it as a hurdle to overcome and regain as part of my life. I’m looking at it as a possibility now and not impossibility like I have in the past. A step forward I think.
I’m not sure if the inability to experience empathy is common for people with bipolar disorder, but I know the struggles I faced with the shifts in my mood surely didn’t help and I guess over time behavioral patterns developed until I completely lost touch with portions of who I fundamentally was as a human being. The extremes and intensity of mood shifts consumed my attention and robbed me of fully appreciating and participating in the minds, moods, emotions, and thoughts of the many great people that I shared my life with until now. Most of who are completely out of my life for reasons associated to my bipolar behavior and of course my inability to share the basic human trait of empathy. I’m glad I’m still fairly young and I’ve luckily made the connections where I’m beginning to regain some control over my life and I’m recognizing my flaws before it is too late. I truly hope that one day I can experience the rebirth of an emotion that has been dead to me for so long and potentially see the world truthfully through the eyes of another, where I will care about and feel their concerns, hardships and struggles like they were actually mine.
Tags: bipolar disorder, emotions, empathy, feeling
April 30th, 2008 at 12:52 am
First I’d like to mention that “empathy” isn’t an emotion in itself…it’s more of an “emotional resonance” with someone else.
Here’s a link for limbic resonance that might help explain:
http://sandhill.typepad.com/sandhill_trek/2004/05/limbic_resonanc.html
Another contributor could be issues with mirror neurons, also indicated in autism
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10108-spectrum-of-empathy-found-in-the-brain.html
I think you’re right, we bipolars have empathy issues..either too little or too much! I tend to be on the other end of the scale and can see everyone’s point of view and am sensitive to the feelings of others to the detriment of myself..in other words I have trouble defining boundaries between myself and others (it’s like they are part of me). I thnk this is what contributes to the “mixed state” when you see so many sides to something it’s hard to make a decision!!
April 30th, 2008 at 8:25 am
Wouldn’t you say that “empathy” is described as something that you can feel emotionally? Or would it be better to say that you experience emotions derived from the experience of empathy? What are you experiencing when you are empathetic?
April 30th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Yeah, I think it’s good to say you experience emotions derived from the experience of empathy. In effect though, you are experiencing other peoples emotions by use of your own emotional system.
So… say someone hits themselves on the thumb with a hammer and they wince, your empathathic system translates the painful expression on their face into a feeling within yourself, so by copying the expression you get their feeling in your emotional system. Another way of putting it, is you’re “reading” their emotions from their facial expressions or body language..in the same way as you’d read a book.
I’m interested to know actually whether you can get internal emotional responses from words easier than from other peoples expressions. (I have a friend who feels “empathy” with you if you describe how you feel in words, on paper, but in person has difficulty in “knowing” how you feel..and another friend who has difficulty with the “on-paper” stuff but know instinctively how you feel, sometimes when you’re not even aware of it yourself)
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:01 am
Perhaps it is a bipolar issue to have problems with empathy. I certainly experience empathy more effectively depending on my mood state. I’ve often times been told, or heard via the nasty family grapevine, that I severely lack empathy and am cold, heartless and unfeeling. That isn’t entirely true, but I definitely shut off empathy for certain people.
Having said that, I am better than I was a few years ago. I can empathise, I do empathise, and it when I do it’s an honest reaction not a feigned one.
I think sometimes the lack of empathy for others is also a safety net for ourselves and self-preservation. Especially for those of us who’ve come from dysfunctional or abusive upbringings. Therefore I don’t believe empathy is something that can’t be learned and eventually become a natural reaction.
Still…there are people I know who could smack their thumb with a hammer a million times and I’d watch it with a smile on my face!!
June 16th, 2008 at 3:25 am
My DH has the same problem–and at the worst times in his bipolar journey, he truly was only capable of considering the feelings of himself. It kind of seemed like he had no conscience sometimes, but somehow it was just that he couldn’t go past himself to relate in a giving way to anyone else. Now that he is on the correct medications, I hope, anyhow, we are starting to see a little more understanding of others’ feelings. And that’s exciting!!
August 16th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
The bipolar person in my life is probably a sociopath, with personality disorders complicating the picture. Empathy? None. A blank. Emotions? One: anger.
It’s one thing to lack empathy. It’s another thing to enjoy the suffering of others, and to be the cause of it. That is the bipolar sociopath. Raging for the sake of it, causing harm to others, and grinning like an idiot from the high of the self-induced rage and the sheer pleasure of harming other people. Creepy.