Empathy divided

Over the last couple of days the word ’empathy’ has been flying around my environment like a malaria-infested mosquito in the middle of a sleepless tropical night.

I believe that Empathy comes from the id, and it is felt. Sympathy, on the other, comes from the super-ego and is thought, more so than felt.

I also believe that empathy is the result of a number of factors; observation, processing of the observations, and caring. Because there are three steps there are plenty of opportunities for idiosyncratic empathy profiles within humans. For example, a person can be a great carer but a crap observer; this gets in the way of empathy.

But that is not the story I want to tell here.

I want to introduce the concepts of micro-empathy and macro-empathy.

I have noticed that some people have the capacity to be extremely empathetic but only in ’emergency’ situations. When a friend breaks up with their partner for example they can be superb in their empathetic support. I call this macro-empathy.

But the self-same people can be short on every-day empathy, which is what I call micro-empathy. An example is being aware that your noisy child is annoying the hell out of fellow cafe diner. Or that the long winded explanation on a banal subject isn’t helping get the message across; just the opposite. Or that your pen-friend really wants more than a one line response to her deeply thought-through missive.

I would also suspect that many people automatically and intuitively suppress their empathetic responses. Either because it suits them to, or they feel too thinly spread, or they just want to be selfish for a change.

All up, empathy is very complex and it’s no mystery that collectively we often seem short of the stuff just when we need it most. In response, the rules and laws in our society are constructed to reward empathetic behaviour.

But it is a case of two steps forward and one step backwards with humans and empathy.