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
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.
Found this helpful? Leave a review. Finding something hard that isn’t covered here? Tell me, and I may make an episode about it.
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The transcript
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empathy · compassion · boundaries
Read the transcript
Hey. Welcome to The Stillness in the Storms of Life. I'm Steven 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 StevenWebb.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 she was. When she was about six, seven
maybe. I remember watching a movie, and it's quite upset, and I was crying, and I think her mum was
crying, and she looked at us 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 Kember 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's like um 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 that's fine You know, we care, we feel pain with But I did
not understand the way we grow in and we develop it. And what it showed me was we're not
born with this caring empathy. We're not born with these skills. When we are born, we're Quite self 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 gonna cry we're gonna we're gonna make a
fuss to get them done, to get our parents to sort it or whoever is um 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 realise it's 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 any of 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 or the next 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 personal 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 a 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 to the 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 and very much misunderstood.
And that is where, in the moment, we can feel the pain of the other or the group
or the collective or 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 now 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 then the next level feels 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 her 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 central compass It's not right. I'm at that level now and that's it. I'm done,
complete um
and there's there's levels above it, I'm sure, but I cannot reference them because I'm not there
you know I can only see as high as I'm 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
control and responding to life instead of being buffeted by life. Now, this is what this
podcast is all about this is what I help my clients to do. I cannot fix the world's problems. It's
not about creating the stillness creating stillness in the storms it's 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 this
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 of our own pain, and
as well as somebody else, the third person. And you know that 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 on to 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 or shout to 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
until 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,
StevenWebb.com and if you want to 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 the show to be about
next. Take care. Have a good one. I'm Steven Webb and take care bye
