Life is hard, sometimes unbearably so.

More people feel lonely and isolated than ever before, and a global pandemic only made it worse.

Despite our collective loneliness, many people feel uncomfortable reaching out – for comfort, advice, or even just conversation – worried that they are bothering their friends, family, or colleagues.

If that describes you, you might be an empath. 

An empath is someone who is highly sensitive to the wants and needs of others, and tends to not only listen intently but absorb others’ emotions.

Empaths, being characteristically high in empathy, are typically thought of as pure, good, and morally sound. 

They are the opposite of narcissists, after all. 

But what if empathy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? What if it leads us down destructive paths, and irrational decisions? 

What if it makes us feel like a burden, robbing ourselves and others of our true magic?

Toxic Empathy

In his controversial 2016 book Against Empathy, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom writes,

“If you absorb the suffering of others, then you’re less able to help them in the long run because achieving long-term goals often requires inflicting short-term pain.

 

Any good parent, for instance, often has to make a child do something, or stop doing something, in a way that causes the child immediate unhappiness but is better for him or her in the future.

 

… Making children suffer temporarily for their own good is made possible by love, intelligence, and compression, but yet again, it can be impeded by empathy.”

The key to Paul’s argument is in his distinction between cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. Emotional empathy is when you feel what someone else is feeling, while cognitive empathy is when you understand what they’re feeling, without feeling it yourself. 

Emotional empathy is what gets us into real trouble, he argues, because it shines a spotlight on fleeting, short-term feelings, and therefore blinds us to long-term ripples.

When I feel your pain, I want to alleviate it by any means necessary. But when I understand your pain, I want to help you in a way that makes it less likely the pain will continue, or come back.

I once accidentally broke a butter dish given to us as a wedding gift. My wife was upset, and so of course my immediate reaction was to order a new, identical butter dish.

To my surprise, it didn’t really fix anything.

By feeling her pain, I tried to make it go away. But what she really needed was to be upset about losing that particular, irreplaceable dish connected to our wedding day.

My emotional empathy triggered a short-term solution, when what I needed was the cognitive empathy to simply let her be upset, and apologize for my clumsiness.

What makes life so interesting and wonderful is that every person has a different internal life of hopes, dreams, worries, and concerns just as real and vivid as your own.

We should strive to understand what others are going through in order to support and serve them, but not necessarily feel it as though it was our own.

Suffering is not a competition

I shouldn’t complain about this small thing, when there are children starving in Africa.

Those two things have nothing to do with each other.

Yes, donating to causes that support raising kids out of poverty is a good idea, if you can afford it.

But when you tell a friend or family member about the crappy day you had, or how you’re frustrated at work, or that you’re struggling with your depression more than usual, a kid in Africa doesn’t go into poverty as a result.

I don’t want to ask for help, because I know they’ve got their own stuff to deal with.

 This line of thinking feels selfless, but it’s not. It’s selfish.

What your friends and family really want is for you to thrive. The idea that you are burdening them by reaching out to talk, share, or ask for help simply because they have their own issues is to believe relationships are either give or take, but never both.

Vulnerability begets vulnerability. 

When you ask for help, it shows them that they can ask you for help, too. When you share your anxieties, insecurities, or even struggles with mental health, you open the door for them to feel comfortable sharing with you.

We yearn for connection, even those of us with walls up – sometimes especially so. 

The key is to do for others what you need them to do for you. To lead and be a model of deep connection.

You understand they’ve got their own stuff, so don’t only reach out when you need advice or need to vent. Also reach out when you don’t need anything and give them to the space to ask for advice, vent or unload.

The best way to build a bridge is to meet in the middle.

2 Ways to Avoid Being a Burden

Gemma Scopes wrote a wonderful blog post about this in 2019, in which she gave 5 tips to avoid feeling like a burden.

I would argue these tips not only make you feel like less of a burden, but actually make you less of one.

Here are two of my favorites. 

Tip 1: Ask if you can speak about something. Instead of launching straight into asking for a favor or advice, venting or unloading, first seek permission to do so. 

I would leverage the ‘no’ technique from negotiation expert Chris Voss here, i.e., “Would it be totally inconvenient for me to vent to you about this thing that happened for about 10 minutes?”

When they say ‘no,’ you’ve got permission. Now just stick to the agreed upon parameters. If you ask for 10 minutes, don’t go over 10 minutes. Then, give them a chance to do the same, or open the conversation to a new topic of their choosing.

Tip 2: Be specific. It can be difficult to explain exactly what you’re feeling, especially when you’re upset or anxious. We often use flowery, metaphorical language as a distancing tool.

The problem is, no one really knows what you mean except you.

Your friends and family really do want to help, but they need to know how. It’s impossible to help if they don’t know what you need help with.

And I can’t stress this enough: If you really just want to vent, and are not looking for advice, then tell them that before you start talking!

My wife, a therapist, taught me this years ago and it makes a huge difference. Whenever somebody starts venting to me now I ask, “Would you like advice, or an ear?” 

Read Gemma’s full post here:

https://www.howtomakefriends.co.uk/2019/03/05/i-feel-like-a-burden-to-my-friends/ 

Asking grieving families for organ donations

We’ve heard a lot about COVID’s devastating direct impact on the global healthcare system, but less about its indirect effects.

Elisse Glennon is the executive director of the New Jersey Sharing Network Foundation.

The NJ Sharing Network is a non-profit organization for the recovery and placement of donated organs and tissues.

In New Jersey alone, over 4000 residents are waiting on the transplant list. So when COVID threatened the entire national healthcare system, Elisse and her team of 180 committed professionals plus volunteers had to navigate incredibly shaky seas.

The big question was, would donations plummet, devastating the chances of everyone on that list, desperately in need of a transplant?

Not on Elisse’s watch. Instead, the NJ Sharing Network had a record year. I sat down with Elisse on the Beyond Networking podcast to find out exactly how they did that.

To my surprise, it was a simple mindset shift:

“You know, you could get into a space, which is,

 

“Oh, everything’s so scary in the hospitals right now.

 

I don’t want to approach this family and offer them donation for their loved one who just passed because they can’t even be by their loved one’s side.

 

Let’s let them deal with their grief. We will not bring up organ donation.” 

 

But we know we know the power of organ donation. And we know that organ donation doesn’t just heal the recipient.

 

We know that if their son was able to donate organs and save someone else’s life that that would help.”

Had Elisse and her team succumb to emotional empathy, and felt the weight of these families’ pain in the moment, they might have chosen not to open a conversation about donation.

Instead they called upon their cognitive empathy, and understood that their pain could be transformed in the long run by donating their lost loved-one’s organs, even if it would be a difficult conversation in the short-term.

They saw that difficult conversation as a gift, not a burden. And saved a lot of lives because of it.

Listen to my full conversation with Elisse Glennon here, or watch below: