The Curse of Empathy

It must be genetic, this inability of mine to separate myself from the circumstances of others--be they real people or characters in a movie.  My oldest child suffers from this same condition. I sense her hesitance to watch even the most mild sad or scary scene in a movie.  She deeply internalizes the character's pain or fright.  She can't stand it when someone is mean to the main character. When we took her to a play last week, for example, she crawled in my lap halfway through and asked if we could leave because the teacher in the play was "yelling too much."  She wants to flee such things because, like her mommy, she can't get them out of her head for weeks.  I can tell you the scariest or most heart-wrenching part of almost every movie I've ever seen because, chances are, it has haunted me for a while.

This deep caring, this empathy is, at root, a good thing.  A God-given gift, even.  It evokes compassion when we see someone hurting.  It calls us to action when we see injustice.  It allows us to mourn with those who mourn and to laugh with those who laugh.

But there is a point where empathy ends and anxiety begins.  Where one person's tragedy becomes my paranoia, leading to fear that someone I love will meet the same fate, suffer the same diagnosis, make the same mistakes.  Where I harbor fear and allow myself to become hopeless.  I teeter on this edge.

It is virtue to look at someone laid low by their own doing and say, "There but for the grace of God go I."  It is self-involved and faithless to look at someone laid low and say, "How does their pain affect me?  What if that happened to me?"

I want to encourage my daughter to care deeply about other people.  But I do not want her to fear.  When she sees something scary or sad, I want her to know that we have hope and peace.  Only then will she be able to offer that hope and peace to someone who is hurting.