Can you have a big heart without drowning in everybody else's pain? Yes, and the difference is where you put it down.
My daughter was about six or seven, watching a film with us while we cried, and she asked why we were crying. We are not born with empathy. It arrives later, and it arrives in stages. First your own pain. Then the person in front of you. Then the group, then the news, then the child washed up on a beach in Syria. The wider it goes, the heavier it gets, and on a tired day you drop back a level or two. That is not failure. That is a system with a load limit.
One thing to try: Feel it fully while they are with you. Then put it down before you walk into the next room.
In this episode
(1:18) My daughter at six, asking why we were crying
(2:32) We are not born with empathy
(3:50) A baby's tears are not about you
(5:37) Feeling what they feel, at our own scale
(8:01) They lost a cat, you reference a hamster
(9:21) The child on the beach, and the whole world feeling it
(11:27) On a tired day you drop back a couple of levels
(14:00) Feel it with them. Do not carry it to your kids
With gratitude to
Angela
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Can you have a big heart without drowning in everybody else's pain?
Yes. And the whole difference is where you put it down.
The heart of it
Empathy arrives in stages and each one is heavier than the last.
Feeling it and carrying it are not the same thing.
On a tired day you will drop back a level or two. That is a load limit, not a failure.
I watched it happen in my own house. My daughter was about six, watching a film with her mum and me while we both cried, and she asked why we were crying. She genuinely did not understand.
About a year later we heard her from the kitchen. Not crying. Sobbing, the kind where you cannot catch your breath. We asked what had happened.
The dog died. At the end of a film.
That is the first stage, and it is the only one anybody is born ready for. Your own pain, felt so completely that you have to get it out of you somehow.
Then comes the second. Somebody tells you they have lost something and you can meet it, roughly, by reaching for the closest thing in your own history. A dog for a cat. A hamster when you were five. Your mind does not distinguish very carefully, it just finds the nearest match.
The third is where it gets heavy. It widens out past the person in front of you to the group, the town, the country, the news. The child washed up on a beach in Syria, and everybody felt that one.
This is the stage where a nurse or a doctor can be finished by the job. Not because they stopped caring. Because they are carrying every one of them home.
The fourth is what lets somebody do that job for thirty years. They feel it, fully. They do not take it as theirs. From outside it looks like coldness and it is the opposite.
And nobody parks permanently on a level. Get run down and you will slip back a couple, and take on the whole world for a few days.
One small thing to try
Watch the news for twenty minutes, then turn it off and leave it there.
That is the whole practice. Let somebody tell you about their week. Feel it properly. Then do not take it to your children, or into tomorrow.
Somebody cuts you up and gestures at you. That is their fear and their bad day. Have some compassion for whatever has them in that state, and then let it go with them.
Let it be a visitor. Open the door, and let it out again afterwards.
Questions people ask
Am I heartless if I stop carrying it?
No, and this is the bit people get backwards. Nothing you carry between visits ever reaches the person. What reaches them is you being in a fit state to turn up.
Should I protect my children from pain?
Understandably you want to, and you cannot build any of this for them. Every stage above the first is grown out of having been hurt. Sheltering them from all of it leaves them stuck on level one at thirty.
What if I slip back?
You will, and usually when you are tired or unwell. It is not a fall from grace. Notice it, take the pressure off, and it comes back.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
empathy · compassion · boundaries
Read the transcript
Hey.
Welcome to the stillness in the storms of life.
I'm Stephen Webb, your host, and this podcast will help you to
navigate the turbulence of life while remaining calm when you
need it most and you have it least.
On today's show, I'll be talking about how do you live in
a world that sometimes really is difficult when you've got a big
heart and you really do care?
Sometimes it feels like we're drowning.
Sometimes it's just really difficult.
All the narcissists and all the people out there that seem to
only care about themselves, you know, we're talking about the
development of empathy, more importantly, the levels of empathy
and how we can grow a deeper caring, you know, without being taken
advantage of and without becoming a victim of all the narcissists
out there.
But before we start, I want to say thank you to Angela and another
anonymous person.
They bought me a coffee this week, and it helps support what I
do.
It helps me to produce more.
And if you would like to treat me to a coffee just the same as Angela
and somebody else, just head over to stephenweb.com there's a
link at the top of the page.
So empathy and this big heart.
I remember watching a movie with my daughter.
She's now 21, but.
But she was.
When she was about six, seven maybe.
I remember watching a movie, and it was quite upset, and I was
crying, and I think her mum was crying, and she looked at us
both and said, why are you crying?
We're like, well, because it's sad.
It's not very.
And I cannot remember what the movie was about now, but it was sad
and she didn't understand at all.
And then it was about a year later, we were sat in the kitchen
and we were just having a conversation, and we just suddenly
heard Kembra start crying.
They said, are you all right?
And she come out around the corner and she was sobbing.
You know, the kind of crying that is.
You're really hard to catch your breath and all your face, the
tears are literally running.
Oh, are you okay?
Are you okay?
What's wrong?
And she said, the dog died.
And it was at the end of the movie, the dog had passed away, and
she felt this deep inner pain.
And at the time, I thought, well, you know, that's fine.
You know, we care, we feel pain.
But I did not understand the way we grow in and we develop it.
And what it shown me was we're not born with this caring empathy.
We're not born with these skills.
When we are born, we're Quite selfish.
We don't care that the mum's been up several nights and they're
really tired.
We're going to cry because we're hungry or we're uncomfortable.
The important things to us at that point is, you know, food and
comfort and warmth, security and safety.
And if we haven't got those things, we're going to cry.
We're going to make a fuss to get them done, to get our parents
to sort it or whoever is looking after us at the time.
And then as time goes on, when we start caring about things and
then things go wrong and we miss people.
Or like with Kember, that dog died in the movie, and we.
We suddenly feel pain.
And that's the first part of developing this new skill set of
the body feeling this kind of loss, this grief process.
And of course, that's the first sign of it.
We can only understand it from our own perspective at that point.
At that point, there's still no empathy.
There's still no understanding of someone else's pain.
It's just, I feel pain and I have to let this pain out.
I have to get rid of it in some way.
And that's why we have this outburst of tears.
It's a way of trying to get rid of this emotion that is overwhelming
us.
And that day, she was very overwhelmed.
And then as time goes on, we feel more of this pain and we get
used to what we like and dislike, and we realize it develops
on many levels.
And that would be the first level of developing the.
The empathy line of skill, if you want to call it that.
And the second one is being able to see somebody else's pain.
You know, when a friend comes along and says, you know, I'm hurting
because I lost my dog, and we can empathize with them, at that
point, we almost sympathize and go, oh, you know, that's not
very nice.
You know, that must really hurt.
But we don't actually feel their pain.
We just.
We're referencing our pain.
And if we haven't felt that same thing, we may not know what
it's like for them, but we're not bothered by it.
Well, that's their pain.
We have sympathy, you know, but we can leave it, we can walk
away from it, and then we move on.
And this normally happens more in adulthood.
And as we develop this empathy and empathy is the ability to feel
somebody else's pain.
So when you sit down with a friend and they look at you and go,
well, my boyfriend's left me, or something's gone wrong or I lost
my dog or something.
And we're able to then feel what they're feeling.
And we feel that grief.
And we feel all the hurt may not be to the same degree, and it
may be only based on our reference of what that would feel
like, but we are actually feeling it for them.
And then we.
We go deeper into that.
And when we go deeper into that, the problem is we then take
on that pain as if it's our own, especially for a family member
or a child of ours.
It's very common for parents to take on the children's pain.
And we try to avoid at all costs allowing our children to feel
only this pain because we don't like it.
So we don't want our children to feel this pain.
And we want our children to live a happy life without experiencing
this.
Unfortunately, if we don't allow our children to experience
it, they'll never develop through these levels of what I'm
talking about.
So the next level, we end up being dragged down by it.
We end up taking the pain of.
Because it's not only our first person.
We were talking about the second person, the other person in
our lives, somebody else coming along with our problem.
Well, the next development is the third person.
So we're not only feeling pain for ourselves, we're feeling pain
for the other and the group or the culture or the town or the country.
And then we hear on the news about something going wrong or some
war somewhere, some children getting kidnapped.
And we take on that pain as well, because we put ourselves in
their shoes.
And our minds cannot tell the difference between someone else's
pain and our own pain.
The body's just arising.
What did it feel like last time?
What's the closest thing I can do to reference this other person
or group's pain?
So it brings that up just the same as if we're trying a food or
something new.
We look to our reference, subconscious mind and our past experiences
for the closest match to the current experience.
So if someone's telling you about they've lost a cat, we may
reference to losing a dog or losing our hamster when we were five.
It doesn't have to be the exact reference.
It's just a pain in a very similar way of loss or grief.
Losing something you love, losing something that you're attached
to.
And at this point, you're taking on so many pains.
And this is where a doctor or a nurse might not be able to continue
in the job because they're seeing people die and they see people
get ill. And they see families treating these patients and things
like that in different ways.
And they may not be able to cope with it because they're overwhelmed
by it.
It's.
They're taking on all of the pain.
It's a natural progression from your own empathy or your own
pain empathy, another empathy of the group.
But then you can move on to the next part.
And this part's often very much misunderstood.
And that is where, in the moment, we can feel the pain of the
other or the group or the collective of the world.
We can watch the news and we feel the pain of that refugee child.
Remember when that child was washed up on the beach and it went
around the world in Syria, and we all felt for the parents and that
child.
But some people on the third level will take it everywhere with
them, and they'll look at the world as a cruel world, and they
won't be able to look at anything positive for the next few
hours because they're feeling all the grief of that child.
But the next level fills the grief of that child, but doesn't
hold it as if it's their own.
So they're able to step in the shoes of perhaps the parents or that
child to the best they can with references they've got, but
they don't become it, so it doesn't overwhelm them.
They don't walk away with it.
And this is where doctors and nurses or vets can often have a very
difficult day, and they go home and they can watch Netflix or
they do other things.
I don't know what they would do to relax, but I should imagine
they would do something similar to that.
And they're almost seen as, how can you do that?
I couldn't do that job.
How can you just do that during the day and then go home and
as if nothing happened?
Well, it's not because they're not feeling the pain.
It's not because they're not feeling hurt or the empathy of the
family and things like that.
It's because they're learning that it's not theirs to carry.
It's not their pain to take on day in and day out.
Also, I would like to point out that these levels, even if you
get to a stage when you're able to take on the collective and
you don't carry it with you, and you're able to be angry about
injustices and things that are calling others pain and you're doing
something about it, even if you're that brilliant humanitarian
that is able to feel all these things, but yet distance themselves.
It doesn't mean you always stay there.
If you're not feeling very well or you're struggling one day
or you're tired, you might jump back down a couple of levels.
And at that point, when you're feeling run down, you might take
on the pain of the group or the collective.
It might be very hard to cope for a few days.
You know, it really is a center of compass.
It's not right.
I'm at that level now and that's it.
I'm done, complete.
And there's levels above it, I'm sure, but I cannot reference
them because I'm not there.
I can only see as high as I've gone or high as I've experienced.
So that's all I can share with you.
There's so much more to this, and I've probably gone into empathy
more than most people have ever heard in their lives.
But it's really interesting to see where we are and where we can
develop and moving through these levels as we go up, you know,
our skill and our ability to deal with life's problems when they're
thrown at us, to deal with life's curveballs and remain in.
In control and responding to life instead of being buffered by
life.
Now, this is what this podcast is all about, and this is what I
help my clients to do.
I cannot fix the world's problems.
It's not about creating stillness in the storms, is not about
me fighting the storm.
I cannot get rid of the storms in life.
I cannot get everybody to suddenly be nice just because you
and me want a little inner peace.
That's just not going to happen.
But what we can do is we can learn to be in that storm and we
can learn to feel these grief and pain but not allow it to chop
our legs off in a metaphor.
We need to have that foundation of developing this ability
to feel our own pain, empathize with our own pain, and
as well as somebody else, the third person.
And you know, the world right now is suffering a little, you know,
politically and nationally.
You know, there's a real rise of a certain type of fear at the
moment.
We can't take on the world's problems.
Turn on the news, watch the news for 20 minutes, and then turn
it off and leave it there.
When a friend comes over and tells you about what a hard time
they're having, allow them to tell you, feel their pain, have empathy
for them, but don't carry it onto your kids or don't carry it
with you the next day.
And the next week, you know, when somebody cuts you up in the
road, may scream and shout at you, they may flip you the bird or
whatever.
That's their anger, that's their pain, their fear.
Whatever they're going through, don't carry it on till later.
Have empathy for their life in that moment.
Because if they're in that kind of turmoil to want to shout
and flip the bird to you, they're suffering.
And I think that's what we all need to do.
We need to develop this empathy, but don't allow it to paralyze
us.
Don't carry it, just feel it.
Allow it to be a visitor.
Let it in, open your heart to the suffering and then let it go
afterwards, when it's no longer serving, when it's no longer
needed, when that person's gone.
I hope that makes sense.
If this makes sense, let me know in the comments.
And of course, buy me a coffee.
If it helps.
Head over to my website, StephenWeb.com and if you want a
shout out on the next show, every Monday there'll be a new show.
I took a bit of a siesta, but I'm back.
And if you buy me a coffee, you can vote on what you would like
