Empathy: Tonic or Toxic?
One of my favorite parts of a trying story from the Old Testament comes from Job and his friends. Job’s companions get so much wrong in the story. They offer shallow answers to bottomless pain. They espouse theological misunderstandings that only add to Job’s misery. They offer platitudes when there are no answers. What the friends get right in the story appears when they only sit with their grieving friend and offer no words or advice. They carry out a ministry of presence that offers better help than attempts to fix or explain. For some time, that picture defined empathy for me, entering the pain in a way that communicates caring. Such a positive view of empathy makes a diatribe against it sounds counterintuitive, even wrong.
In a second engagement with Friedman’s seminal work on leadership, A Failure of Nerve, I reread a chapter about the “fallacy of empathy.” My reason for returning to this topic centers on a positive trait titled so negatively. Friedman, a pioneer in family systems theory, shatters soft notions of empathy when he states, “As lofty and noble as the concept of empathy may sound. . .societal regression has too often perverted the use of empathy into a disguise for anxiety, a rationalization of the failure to define a position, and a power tool in the hands of the ‘sensitive.’”[1] Friedman contends that those who lack power introduce concern for empathy as a way to force those with power to adapt to their anxiety. What sounds like a comprehensive rebuke instead eviscerates empathy gone wrong. If one lets Edwin Friedman explain, he gives valuable and relevant insight into a lofty ideal misused in the hands of the unhealthy.
Friedman rails against the corrupted expressions of empathy expected by those entrenched in a nervous system. Sensitive sounding calls for empathy can hijack agendas and suppress personal responsibility. Empathy goes wrong for the leader when he or she holds themself responsible for the feelings of others who cannot distinguish between opinions and feelings nor hurt and harm. Friedman offers a rationale for the growing perversion of empathy as “symptomatic of the herding/togetherness force characteristic of an anxious society.”[2] He does have a place for empathy, but other dynamics must accompany it. When a leader presents a “well-defined presence” and “regulates the systemic anxiety,” they are leading to thwart efforts to remain locked within a nervous system, “they (leaders) can afford to be empathic.”[3]
In my leadership journey, the kind of harmful misuse of empathy described by Friedman expressed itself with a recurring phrase: “People just want to be heard.” On the surface, it seems hard to argue with that desire. To listen, understand, and communicate with people, mark appropriate responses by any leader. In the hands of the unhealthy, however, a positive desire masks attempts the halt needed change. In the fable The Frog and the Scorpion, a pleasant-sounding scorpion convinces a naïve frog to ferry him across the river. Concerns over being stung by the poisonous scorpion are allayed, and the journey begins. Halfway across, the scorpion does sting the frog. When asked why he did what he said he would not do, the scorpion answers, “What can I do? This is my nature.”[4] I wonder if Friedman might say, “Leaders, beware. A scorpion is a scorpion no matter how well words sound at first.”
With some exceptions, “people just want to be heard” meetings came in times of leading adaptive change. Those meetings included people “concerned” about the changes proposed or underway. In the early years, I believed I could bring anyone around to support any change if I had enough time and opportunity,. Experience knocked the wind out of those optimistic sails. No wonder the pastor who hired me called me Pollyannaish in my first review.
It did not take long to comprehend the veiled threat: if I am being heard, change will cease, or else. On one occasion, one frustrated member left my office, and called the regional executive asking how to remove a pastor. My thinking over time about the principle darkened to assume that people who want to be heard want their way. Edwin Friedman’s insights into empathy and personal responsibility reinforce a more nuanced position. Healthy people do want to be heard, and leaders should listen to them. Unhealthy people do not want to be heard. Leaders need to guard against entering their anxious state or withholding personal challenge due to hurt feelings and accusations bound to follow.
If I could ask Rabbi Friedman a few questions, they would include:
- How do you define empathy and sympathy? I have understood empathy to “feel in” with someone while sympathy means to “feel with” someone.
- Assuming a difference of definition, can sympathy also be corrupted like empathy?
- Can I sit in your office as a fly on the wall during a counseling meeting with someone to see you confront anxiety with personal responsibility?
[1] Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Ag of the Quick Fix (New York: Church Publishing, 2017). 142.
[2] Ibid., 145.
[3] Ibid., 146.
[4] “The Scorpion and the Frog,” Bedtime Short Stories https://www.bedtimeshortstories.com/the-scorpion-and-the-frog, accessed January 26, 2022.
About the Author
Roy Gruber
Husband, father, pastor, student, and sojourner in Babylon10 responses to “Empathy: Tonic or Toxic?”
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Roy, great post and reflections. I appreciated your thoughts on Friedman and empathy. I am still wrapping my head around by what he means, as it seems quite controversial this day in age. However, I think your assessment is right: it is empathy gone wrong. So, I like you, am forced to ask: Okay, so what does empathy gone right look like?
Eric, great question to ask after Friedman spends so much time exposing bad empathy and basically says, “if none of the bad elements are present, sure, be empathic.” As I understand Friedman, as long as the desire for empathy does not lure the leader into the dysfunction of a nervous system or withhold a needed challenge due to fear of hurting someone’s feelings, you can journey with people in their pain. I, like you, wondered how Friedman would be viewed if his material was new in this day. It’s interesting that his work is popular now when I would think he’d be called a “hater” by some. In ministry, the expectation of “caring” is strong and as I look back through my years of a pastoral role, I can see a number of the negative elements Friedman describes. The less I’ve done that through the years, the more people have called my “uncaring.” If I had met certain people’s expectations during that time, I do not think two churches would have been transitioned to new chapters of ministry.
Roy, incredible post and reflection here. I viscerally felt the stories and words you shared. I’ve often felt that churches are firing ranges for people’s projections, often from their childhood wounds. I feel Friedman’s concept of differentiated leadership allows for creation of a shield for these boundaries. Ok, in your wildness dreams, what would you rather do than be a pastor? 🙂
Well, after my Major League Baseball pitcher dream died, no, there’s nothing else I’d rather do! I agree with your statement about church and people’s wounds. I do wonder how Friedman would “come off” in today’s culture. I fear many would label him a hater. Perhaps that says a lot our culture and its increased anxiety since even the days when he wrote the material in the book in the 1990’s.
Roy – I’m interested to know what tools or experiences helped you navigate the road to being less “Pollyannaish” over the years. How have you learned to maintain a level of optimism in the face of the reality that you will not be able to please everyone at the same time? My initial thought would be that there is more of a focus on genuine hope than optimism but I could be off.
Kayli, it was more experience than tools that helped me become more discerning. One responsibility I had in my early years was working with a benevolence fund. I would deploy monies to help people with a crisis situation. At the beginning of the time, I thought everyone I encountered was telling the truth. After a year and getting taken advantage of by less-than-truthful people, I thought everyone was lying. The truth lies in between, of course. Working through a process of interview and gathering information from people helped. I tend to rely on my “gut” a lot but have learned to put objective elements into decision making.
Roy: Thanks for the thoughtful post. You have more experience than anyone in our cohort when it comes to having real-life experience in ministry and seeing how all these theories that we are reading about play out in the real world. It is the nature of leadership to know all this nuances of people that are healthy and people who are not. Sympathy and empathy are part of being human but there are so many dynamics at play with people as we try to minister to them. Friedman’s insights help out a lot.
Roy, first of all, much thanks for your insightful reflections on Friedman’s chapter on empathy. To be honest, knowing that empathy is a good thing, I was a bit confused with Friedman’s thoughts on the subject when I first read Failure of Nerve last fall. So, thanks again for bringing clarity to such an important subject. Your comments on the need for a ministry of presence against the backdrop of the good intentions/poor approach of Job’s friends are so pertinent in this era of woundedness among the poor and non-poor. I agree that integrating self-differentiation with compassion, prayer, wisdom and presence will help us foster an effective healing ministry to the Jobs of our time. I think that was the model of Jesus: well-differentiated yet moved with compassion.
Roy…I heart this blog!! From Job to the Scorpion….just so well connected!
I am so appreciative of your deeper reading of Friedman’s facet on empathy. It is a subject that gets many pastors trouble. I agree that Friedman makes a distinction about empathy in the “hostile environment”. How might discerning the nuances of self-differentiation vs self-regulation on the influence of the leader’s approach to empathy? How does the leader’s “need to be heard” penetrate unchecked self-differentiation? And if you were to compare Walkers conversation on the collusion cycle (page 18) to Friedman’s approach to empathy what an be gleaned and integrated for the leader to engage in healthy ways with empathy?
Nicole, wow, your questions are like an entire Friedman course! If a leader is self-differentiated, he or she needs to have some way to discern the healthy or lack thereof in those asking for empathy. If possible, it would be helpful to have some input from a trusted source about the health or lack of health of a person/group when that is in question. I learned the hard way that not every request for empathy is legitimate. Maybe that process of discernment came hand-in-hand to some of my own movement toward self-differentiation. If the leader encounters undifferentiated people, that leader needs to set appropriate boundaries (“we’ve already discussed this and you’ve heard why we are doing what we are doing,” etc.). There have been a few times when I’ve told a person or group that I was not engaging in further discussion and the Board backed that and acted as a shield so that the staff could continue to lead forward, not getting bogged down in attempts to stall forward movement. I don’t have Walker’s book here at home, but if I understand Walker and Friedman well enough, they both have a place for empathy and they both counsel resistance to unhealthy versions of it. One difference I see between the two authors is Walker’s stress on understanding your identity in God while Friedman stresses more of your own understanding of you self and your role. I do think Walker would come across as “nicer” about resistance than Friedman! The example at the start of chapter 4 of “Failure of Nerve” is cringe-worthy. I do wonder how he would be received in this day.