« The Irreverend »
It has long been the fashion to honorifically style Christian clergy as “The Reverend,” that is to say, as one who must be revered by others. Such a label sails smoothly on a deep tradition of upward-aiming worship, and in that sense serves a valuable purpose in our world.
With all due respect, however, I would prefer instead to self-identify as one who reveres others. This alternative is not consonant with that culture of devotional surrender; but rather, it shares an accord with an amiable reverence that nurtures amicable relations.
English has no familiar word for such a person, although there have been notable attempts to imbue some of that meaning into such words as “friend” and “neighbor.” (The perspective of George Fox comes readily to mind, as does the parable of the Samaritan, plus of course Mister Rogers.) Taken altogether, the lack of such a word is not terribly important, given that “a person who promotes mutual attention with others” has little use for an honorific style anyway.
Still, I am left without a convenient, holistic term for people who are like me in that regard, which means that we’re gonna hafta take the long way ’round to get to the point that I wanna make.
So, will that exploration be worth your time? It might be…
If empathy is your effortless state, then you might be laboring under a false assumption that has been frustrating other people (namely that they just need to relax into their own empathy). Perhaps not, but that is where I came from, and if you also value the accuracy of your empathy, then at least checking in for a bit here would likely be worthwhile. Or, in contrast...
If empathy is effortful for you, and you are frustrated with an implication (from other people) that you are just not trying hard enough, then this description might help you out. You might not realize yet that some of the people who are annoying you (in this regard, anyway) are simply oblivious, and would be open to your comments. If you care about your relationship with them, then this information might be of value to you. Or...
If you find that learning to access empathy feels like a struggle for you, but not for others, and you wonder why that might be, then there is likely something for you here.
Otherwise, you might want to just skip this whole thing.
With that in mind, I will say the rest of this only for those who volunteer to continue…
Compassion fundamentally frames my sense of Self so intensely that I can become overwhelmed unless I take some care; in particular, harmonic resonance with others’ suffering is so effortless that it can become intemperate, leading to heart string fatigue. When those structures stretch, I need to willfully dampen that reflective process while I mend myself (or my systems will start to fail).
In short: I am empathetic at rest, exerting effort only when I need to remain withdrawn, but some other people are more naturally the reverse. (I assume that a multidimensional spectral space exists in this regard, and that some people are – for example – relatively neutral about all of this.) In my case, much of my self-identification is strongly influenced by my biological empathy assignments (which I discuss in more detail elsewhere<>).
My decisions around full exposure and strategic withdrawal are based on an unmeditated risk analysis: I choose to be most open with the people about whom I care, or about whom I want to develop care… and my default is to care about people in general.
In other words, love requires risk.
Because that sort of effortless empathy defines my personal reality, I had chronically been making an oblivious mistake, namely: I assumed (without examination) that other people who found compassion to be difficult just needed to drop their barriers and relax into a less effortful, more empathetic state.
What I write here is the result of having been genuinely and thoroughly corrected by a loved one whom I had been frustrating.
I’m sorry about causing some other people that stress.
More specifically, here is what I learned: For some people, empathy resides in the valley below, and to get there all they need to do is give way to gravity; but for others, empathy is up on the ridge above, and “letting go” just slides them farther away from their goal.
True, some people are not trying to approach empathy at all, but for those who are engaged in a climb, it can be discouraging to be told (often repeatedly) that the goal can be reached by just letting go. Effortlessly empathetic people are more likely to give such mistaken advice, as their biological assignments misguide their expectations about other people’s typical abilities.
For some of you, this is not news; nonetheless, it still might not be obvious to you just how non-obvious this is to others. Your news (instead) would be that bringing this to their attention can be very helpful.
The following example provides a more concrete illustration of people being misled by the biologically-based experiences that affect their assumptions about reality.
People are usually trichromats; that is to say, a human retina typically has three types of cone cells that are distinguished by their sensitivity to three different, overlapping ranges of light wavelengths, as follows:
Each type of cone gives you access to about 100 shades of the associated color. Multiply all of those shades, and you define a color space to which trichromats are sensitive, which would be about a million colors. This sensitivity is associated with 3 aligned photopsins, or photoreceptor pigments.
However, a few people who have two X chromosomes (~1-3% of them), have a fourth type of cone. (Most mammals used to have this biological assignment, but they have since lost it through genetic changes; in fact, many are only dichromats now.) In addition, perhaps as many as 50% of XX-class people, and 10% of XY-class people, also have a fourth photoreceptor protein. Among such people, some are functional tetrachromats; that is to say, they are actually sensitive to an additional range of wavelengths, greatly increasing their ability to distinguish shades of color.
Here is the important point:
Out of all of the people who learn about tetrochromatic vision, only those who actually enjoy a complete, functional biological assignment as a tetrochromat will actually have any chance of using the abilities associated with that knowledge; in other words, if you are a biological trichromat who reads this passage, you might decide to practice a sensitivity for finer color distinctions, but those additional colors would still only exist within the range that could be seen by a trichromat (like you).
That would remain true no matter how often a tetrachromat told you to just let go and keep your eyes open.
So why would those people keep frustrating you like that?
Well, most tetrachromats don’t even realize that their color vision is unusual to begin with. Of those who notice a difference, and therefore maybe offer advice, most don’t understand that their abilities are grounded in their biology. So they might not realize that their ability was effortless only for them, and not for you.
But maybe someone about whom they care would educate them, yes?
The same goes for empathy:
Compassion training, then, will strike some people as too obvious to be of value, others as a revelatory trigger of immediately profound change, and for yet others it will represent the beginning of a whole lot of work (that might not be at all tempting to pursue).
This all begs two questions:
1) How many people are biologically predisposed towards a less effortful access to empathy?
A quick answer is “about 20%,” which of course then gets complicated.
2) In what various ways might a person’s empathy be biologically assigned?
That answer gets mushy and involved, including an association with being a Highly Sensitive Person in general (plus distinctions between cognitive and emotional empathy), so we will have to discuss that elsewhere<>.
And I still don’t have a handy word to label the type of person that people like me would like to become; for example, I like to collect degrees and certificates, and I am interested in something very much like seminary study, but have no interest in becoming “The Reverend” anything. I feel strongly drawn to Compassion Cultivation Training, but the material that I have read – while important – seems entirely obvious to me… it would provide some opportunity for growth (particularly if meditation skills seem important), but maybe not as much as I could find elsewhere.
So I still need to figure out what to do next.
Writing this out was a good step.
2014-01
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