A “Rumination” on Empathy

(Sorry, it’s a long one…)

Cognitive vs. Emotional

Cognitive Empathy, or “perspective-taking,” is the intellectual ability to identify and understand another person’s emotions, thoughts, and perspective without necessarily feeling them. It is often described as “thinking with” someone, acting as a rational, logical understanding of their situation. This skill is crucial for effective leadership, negotiation, and building professional relationships. 

Key Characteristics and Examples

• Understanding “Why”: Recognizing the logic behind someone’s reaction, even if you disagree with it.
• Reading the Room: Intuitively understanding the emotional climate of a group.
• Example in Action: A manager understands a direct report is upset about missing a promotion, not by feeling their sadness, but by recognizing the effort they put in and the impact on their career goals.
• Anticipation: Predicting how someone might react in a situation, helping in social navigation.

Benefits and Challenges

• Benefits: Enhanced conflict resolution, better communication, improved leadership, and higher employee engagement.
• Challenges: It can be used for manipulation if not paired with moral, compassionate empathy, as it only requires understanding, not caring. It is also intellectually taxing.

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Emotional Empathy (or affective empathy) is the ability to physically and emotionally feel what another person is experiencing, creating a shared emotional state, such as feeling sad when a friend cries. It involves mirroring emotions, often rooted in personal, similar experiences, and is distinct from cognitive empathy, which is merely understanding someone’s perspective.

Key Characteristics and Examples

• Visceral Feeling: It is a deep, gut-level, or emotional response to another’s pain or joy.
• Emotional Contagion: Sharing the emotional state of others.
• Examples: Feeling your heart sink when a loved one shares bad news, or feeling overwhelming joy when a friend achieves a goal.
• Physical Response: Often accompanied by physical reactions like tearing up or wincing when witnessing someone in pain.

Benefits and Development

• Benefits: Fosters deep, trusting relationships, increases altruism and the likelihood of helping others, and reduces bullying.
• Development: Can be improved through active listening, practicing mindfulness, reading, and consciously putting oneself in another’s shoes.

Excessive emotional empathy without emotional regulation can sometimes lead to personal distress or burnout.

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The Boyfriend and I have very differing sets of “Empathy”… one could surmise the gender relation, he being a male, me being a female, and thus both of us being predisposed to the type that generally fits our gender. However, I think there’s a lot more at play than that. Could we be predisposed because of our genders?! Sure. But there’s also nature vs. nurture, personal experiences, neural networks, and cognitive ability, amongst other things (I’m sure).

Let’s start with me: I am very much in line with Emotional Empathy, even with Anhedonia (which has only been around 3-4 years). This is also despite my upbringing – the lifetime of abuse, traumatic events, and such. Or, one could even hypothesize that it is because of these things. However, I also have cognitive empathy. I am able to utilize both of these, though I definitely lean more towards the emotional side of things. And so, because of these things, I would posit that I have a pretty high Emotional Intelligence – at least when it comes to relating to other peoples’ emotions.

The Boyfriend: Solidly in the Cognitive Empathy camp. I believe wholeheartedly that, given time to process, he is able to logically understand what another person might be feeling. However, I also believe that this (and other things like his addiction) prevents him from being able to have emotional empathy. His [undiagnosed] Avoidant Personality Disorder plays a huge role in this, as well.

Together: A recipe for disaster (if mishandled).

Take last night, for example. We were watching Naruto and he’d made a comment (can’t even remember what, at this point), and I had responded. For some reason, this irritated him, and he snapped at me, talking to me like I was stupid. This caused an immediate and visceral reaction in me. Despite giving him a look of incredulity and to prevent starting an argument, I went silent and fell into the Void of Despair. After a few episodes (where I could see out of the corner of my eye that he knew my mood changed – because he glanced my way a few times), I paused to do cat swap, then got dressed and announced that I needed to go to the pet store to buy squishie (wet food) for the cats. He asked if I wanted him to go, and I responded that it was up to him, but since he’d just made [hot] tea… and that was that. He came down to give me a really intense hug and a kiss, but at that point I just needed to get the fuck away.

During the drive, I had to fight off tears while I recalled the previous night’s check-in, where he had relayed a work incident where he’d gotten upset, lashed out at a co-worker, left the room to compose himself, and immediately went back to apologize to them. It’s very difficult not to cry when the person you love does something to hurt your feelings and you feel like you rank below a co-worker when it comes to repair. All the same, I was able to keep myself from crying by distracting myself at Burlington’s – which is pretty much next to the pet store. I kept myself distracted through that and decided I wanted some ice cream from Culver’s. I considered “surprising” The Boyfriend with something, but decided against that and just asked what he might want.

When I got home, my mood had improved enough that we were able to joke around and watch more Naruto, until check-in time.

This is when I was able to express, calmly and gently, how he’d made me feel earlier. I may not have handled the second half of that very well, since that part was, “…and this is what pissed me off about it” (ranking below co-worker). This was met with silence, but glancing at him made him actually tell me that he was trying to calm himself down. That hit me like a ton of bricks and I started to cry a little, wondering why he could be angry with me for telling him how I felt.

This devolved into a whole argument, with him telling me that the two situations (angry lashing out at co-worker vs. mild irritation snapping with me) weren’t even comparable. I stated simply that I disagreed and why – that the outcome and how it affected the other person is what mattered, plus the fact that he could completely dismiss how his behavior affected me and be disrespectful by talking to me like I’m stupid… and then throw it in my face that he’d “walked out to prevent losing the job that supports both of us.”

I finally asked him why he couldn’t just see that what he’d said and done had hurt me and Acknowledge, Validate, and Reassure me (or AVR – a formula created by therapist Carol Juergensen Sheets and used in our Recovery Program), instead of getting angry at me for expressing how I feel and turning everything around on me. And then he went silent, or more accurately, stonewalled me, while I sobbed.

Thus the title, “When Doves Cry” – and yes, I know that’s the title of the Prince song, but it felt really relatable, so take that as you will.

Anyway, I’m not sure how long I sat there crying, reliving all of the horrible shit he’s put me through because of this fucking addiction, feeling completely abandoned and worthless, but it was all made exponentially worse by the fact that he just… sat there. He didn’t speak or do what he promised in our Commitment Contract – provide emotional support (“a shoulder to cry on”). I cried and cried and, despite sitting right there next to me, I felt like I was completely alone.

After some time curled in a ball and trying desperately to catch my breath, I calmed down enough to be cognizant that he couldn’t possibly just be sitting there not doing anything, so I turned my head and could tell that he was on his fucking phone, so I asked, “Are you on your phone?!” He said yes, paused a moment, and told me he was “ordering stuff.”

Something inside me snapped. I stopped crying immediately and shifted myself into getting up, grabbing my shit, and stomping upstairs, with only a singular thought in my head, “That… inconsiderate, disrespectful, emotionally inept, fucking… asshole!” What kind of person does it take to sit like a fucking lump on a log and watch/listen to the person you say you LOVE bawl their eyes out and then grab your phone to do whatever the fuck else that isn’t comforting your partner after hurting them like that?!

I went to my bedroom to slam my shit down, then the bathroom to use the toilet and do my best not to do what I really wanted to do – which was to scream in rage and break things. I really did try hard to do breathing exercises to the best of my ability. I don’t typically get very angry (there’s a lot behind that whole mess stemming from childhood and The Plague), but when I do… I don’t know how to express it. Suffice it to say, I sat there until the anger absorbed itself into my body and I deflated, crying a little more and then going completely numb. I finished up and went to my bed, desolate and despairing.

He never came to me to apologize or repair. I got up to pee about 3 times before I was finally able to get comfortable enough to fall asleep, and that whole time he was on his computer, silent as could be. I thought for a moment that he was probably feeding his addiction, but I also dismissed that because at that point… I didn’t fucking care. Why should I, anyway?

I went to bed alone and I woke up alone, not that I expected – or even hoped (boo, hiss) – that it would be any different. And I’m here typing the fuck out of all this and can hear him rustling around in his bed, awake and probably fucking around on his phone instead of doing what’s right by our relationship. And you know what? It’s probably going to stay that way unless I initiate contact and apologize (for what?!) first. Or, maybe he’s listening to me typing furiously and thinking he should give me the space to do this before he comes to me? Wishful fucking thinking, that.

I might just go back to bed and play on MY phone. Not like there’s much else to do anyway. I mean… we’ve scheduled Program Work to happen in about half an hour, but I’m guessing he probly won’t even suggest doing that either.

It really fucking sucks being the one that’s holding all the emotional weight in this relationship, being forgiving and supportive while he “heals” through sporadic work in this Program, standing by him through ALL the shit I’ve endured… and not getting much in return. And yeah, I do understand that doing things for someone else and expecting something in return is shitty. But, do you know how long I’ve been doing things and NOT expecting anything in return? It gets really fucking old when that continues to happen and I don’t get the love and support necessary to maintain my end of things. I deserve to be treated better than this.

Oh, and no, it’s not like everything sucks. I wouldn’t be continuing to endure if that were the case. He is strides better than the toxic fucking relationships I’ve been in previously… but I also recognize that it isn’t great either. The consistency and effort are minimal, at best, even if it IS more than any other man I’ve dated.

Ugh… now I’m just rambling. I’m fucking tired of typing, so… C’est la Vie.

Guess I should’ve put “Rant” instead of “Rumination”… *le sigh*