These are words from the Bible that challenge me. It’s not that I need to be instructed to weep; that my heart stays hard and my eyes stay dry when the world around me swirls in terror and chaos. But rather that I weep so easily these days. My heart breaks into a thousand pieces and cries out in anguish: “It’s too much.” Constantly weeping with the always—weeping world drains my tears and sucks me dry.
I know full well how helpless I am in the face of global trauma. In the presence of anyone’s trauma, for that matter. So the terror and the pain overwhelm and threaten a whirlpool of despair in me. The biblical words to “weep” challenge me because this empathy comes too naturally for me these days so that too often I sink into some dark place weighted down by the world’s pain.
“Empathic distress” is the term I’ve been hearing recently, a description that seems to name my struggle precisely.
Empathy seems like a positive, healthy characteristic: feeling the feelings of another.
- “Walking a mile in someone’s moccasins.”
- “Walking a mile in his shoes.”
- “Climbing into someone else’s skin.”
And, yes, empathy is a good thing, a positive ability to understand someone else’s situation and to share in their experience. Parents, caregivers, even actors sharpen their skills when they engage in empathy.
But of course there are limits to how much empathy any of us can manage. We wisely erect emotional boundaries, safeguards that protect us from merging too deeply into another person’s life and personality. Boundaries that save us from an unhealthy blurring of what we need with the needs of others.
When empathy finds its limit, when we find ourselves distressed and depressed by absorbing others’ emotions as our own, thank goodness we can still demonstrate care and concern. We can still weep with those who weep in the way of the biblical encouragement by feeling and showing compassion.
Adam Grant wrote an insightful essay for the New York Times in which he warns against empathic distress and encourages us instead toward compassion. “Empathy makes us ache,” he says. Empathy causes us to feel another’s pain while compassion helps us to see their pain—and then to reach out. To reach out and DO something.
The most basic form of compassion is not assuaging distress but acknowledging it. When we can’t make people feel better, we can still make a difference by making them feel seen. And in my research, I’ve found that being helpful has a secondary benefit: It’s an antidote to feeling helpless.
Sometimes compassion calls me to solidarity for people far away. Sometimes compassion makes me a near companion on someone’s difficult journey. Always compassion nudges me to DO something, not just to wallow in my feelings of helplessness.
That’s one reason why I volunteer as a Court Appointed Special Advocate for children (CASA). I can’t do much of anything for the children in Ukraine or Gaza or Yemin. But I can do something for (at least) some of the children in Paris Texas: I can see them, hear them, and not shy away from the discomfort of their pain.
When too much “I-feel-their-pain” triggers distress, when empathic distress overwhelms and threatens to numb our senses, let’s choose to “see-the-pain” with eyes wide open but from some healthy distance. Let’s keep hearing the cries, listening compassionately, and acknowledging the pain of the world without taking it all into ourselves and making it our own.
And then let us take the next step: reach out and do something for someone. Do what we can with what we have where we are. Weep with those who weep. Genuine compassion feels something and does something.
I would love to hear what you are doing in response to the overwhelming pain of the world. How do you cope? How do you help?