The Importance of Empathy

There is a disorder called “congenital analgesia,” in which a person cannot can feel physical pain.

Imagine a world without pain. You wouldn’t have to deal with the tear-inducing consequences of stubbing your toe, and spicy foods wouldn’t bother you, even if you had a cold sore. Waxing would be a breeze. Hangnails and paper cuts wouldn’t phase you. You wouldn’t have to worry about getting cold. You’d also be an unstoppable boxer.

A painless world, in theory, sounds pretty appealing. Until you realize those with congenital analgesia will not feel the pain of a broken bone, or the searing burn of touching the wrong end of a curling iron. They will not feel the heat radiate from an infection on their skin. They can’t feel a cavity festering in their mouth, or the immediate sting of accidentally slicing a finger while chopping vegetables. Hypothermia could set in, and they wouldn’t feel a thing.

Even though pain is inconvenient as hell, a world without pain is wildly dangerous. Physical pain is critical to our survival: it serves the sole purpose to keep us safe by letting us know something is wrong. Physical pain is part of the human condition.

Emotional pain is also part of is part of the human condition.

But emotional pain is an entirely different kind of pain. This pain is the anguish that comes from losing a loved one; the emptiness of a breakup; the loneliness of depression. It’s the kind of pain that numbs you and breaks you at the same time, the kind that makes you feel like nothing will ever be the same.

However, those dealing with intense emotional pain are rarely met with the same open arms and compassion as those dealing with severe physical pain. Physical pain is so much easier to understand; it happens when something in the body isn’t working properly. We can look at these people through x-rays, examinations, blood tests, and highly-calibrated medical instruments to find the source of their pain. Once it’s found, they are treated, bandaged up and sent on their way–problem solved.

Emotional pain is so much harder to understand because emotional pain often results when our emotions are working correctly–when nothing is wrong. We experience the depths of grief because we have had genuine human connections. We mourn the end of relationships because we loved someone with all our heart. We know depression because we once knew happiness.

Emotions like worry, fear, and sadness are just as natural as happiness, joy, and love. All emotions are simply natural occurrences in a life fully lived. And yet, we as a human race, have such a distain for the half of our emotional spectrum that causes us emotional pain. We deem these emotions as negative, and rush to repress them and “get over it.” This is detrimental to us because it prolongs our healing. No emotion is good or bad–they are complex and nuanced can cannot be forced into the binary of “good” or “bad.” It’s not a crime to feel sadness, or anger, or annoyance, or aggravation. It’s human.

Our obsession with the “positive” side of our emotional range prevents us from feeling the full range of human emotions, and reaping all of the benefits that come with a complete emotional spectrum. It’s hard to accept, but we need all our emotions–every last one. Just as physical pain keeps us safe, emotional pain keeps us centered. How would we know if something in our life was making us unhappy, if we weren’t actually unhappy?

Since we tend to struggle with our own emotional pain, we’re often ill-equipped to help others’ with their emotional pain. We have a knee-jerk reaction to distance ourselves from another’s pain. We respond with phrases like “It will get better!” and “Just stay positive–you’ll get through this!” These phrases are for our own comfort; not the comfort of the person in pain. These phrases minimize and distance the pain from ourselves, reflecting it onto the one in need. Let’s be real–no one’s hurt was ever erased by a well-meaning, but poorly timed, “It will all work out!” I think the pervasiveness of these types of responses show how adverse we, as a culture, are to emotional pain, and how as a society, we often lack the emotional intelligence and the vocabulary for true empathy.

True empathy requires us to resist our instinct to avoid pain so we can put the well-being of a fellow human first, if only for a moment. It takes us acknowledging our discomfort with seeing others in pain, to see our own vulnerability in another. It takes true empathy to understand when we sit with someone in their pain, we are not being asked to make the pain go away, we are being asked to validate their feelings and share in their humanity. Sometimes, it doesn’t feel good to be human. And that’s okay.