How empathy loss erodes your humanity
How empathy loss erodes your humanity
Empathy preservation as an act of resistance against evil
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Narcissists are not the only ones with low to no empathy. The Hamas massacre of Israelis on Oct 7 led to a worldwide response that shocked and shook the Jewish world. Witnessing professors, professionals and university students - adults - justify terrorism, rejoice in the massacre, and engage in hateful activities toward Jewish people led me to wonder how evil became distorted to represent moral righteousness and piety to educated people. What was the chain of events that corrupted their minds and hardened their hearts to all human suffering?
Before you read on, I want to be clear that I’m not writing as if I’ve mastered any of the things I describe. If you come across content that gives the impression that I’m judging you or others for doing the things that I describe, please know that I’m not. I have thought, been and done everything I describe that contributes to empathy loss and dehumanisation. I have a long way to go to develop immunity against empathy erosion.
I also use the words shame, empathy, narcissism and other common words in ways that are likely to differ from how you understand these words. I link to pieces that expand on the meaning of these words should you want to learn more about how I describe them.
Humans are easily manipulated by external forces. We are not smarter than these forces around us mainly because they are invisible before we become aware of their power in our own lives. Hate is invisible until it manifests in a group of extremists or in an individual posting antisemitic opinions. Greed is invisible until you see leaders of an oppressed group living in mansions and driving luxury cars. Or, you deceive others (and yourself) to build a following to support your mission, despite it being about building your own power. Vengeance is invisible until the person you trust targets you and your family for destruction.
We are sensing, feeling, intuitive beings with intelligences that extend beyond tangible, quantifiable, linear intelligence that our education systems have largely deprioritised or neglected. A lack of valuing and cultivating these other intelligences, absence of guidance from reliable influential authority figures and elders, and unresolved emotional wounds from life’s many betrayals have contributed to our inability to constructively respond to the sensations that specific emotions invoke in our bodies. Our dysregulated and dysfunctional reflexes to these sensations are mirrored in our societal institutions’ behaviours governed by the protégés and beneficiaries of our Cluster B world.
Intolerance to shame is a barrier to fostering and sustaining peaceful interactions, even when we disagree, because an intolerance to shame can thrust us into survival mode. Our body can interpret shame and its associated feelings as threatening and react as if there’s actual danger. This survival mode reflex prompts self-protection, protecting others and resources necessary for survival and continuity.
In a society where basic comfort, class privilege and security are satisfied, survival mode has evolved to also include doing what’s necessary to protect an ideology that preserves an identity, in-group membership, status, legitimacy and self-importance.
Survival rituals of wannabe elites involve using the right terminology, public messaging, justice industrial complex membership badges, sanctimony, glorification of violence and rationalisation of terrorism as resistance. Luxury belief knock offs become adornments worn by these guardians of the oppression hierarchy to signal their devotion to the ideological god, who can put in a good word to the supreme authority to grant them Liberation™.
Simply put, privilege-preserving survival mode is all about my entitlement to voice what I think, feel, need and want, to belong and virtue signal, exploit others’ suffering to indulge in the narcissism of me, myself and I without the inconvenience of considering the (unintended) negative consequences of my actions on others.
There are two main discourses for combating ideological extremism on either end of the liberal democracy political spectrum. 1) Arm people with critical thinking and reasoning skills and liberate our minds to become free thinkers with strong character 2) Acknowledge our developmental trauma and stunted emotional development that makes us vulnerable to others’ and Cluster B society’s psychopathologies, commit to healing practices that liberate our lineage and the collective from oppressive systems and embody our social responsibility to create a just world. While these approaches are not mutually exclusive, improving the quality of our thought processes and reasoning skills without resolving emotional wounds or healing developmental trauma without cultivating ethical characteristics are insufficient for outsmarting these powerful invisible forces bent on hijacking our empathy.
Those swept up by the current mass psychosis…will twist themselves into knots in order to support their cognitive dissonance. Their false equivalency of Israelis as terrorists, being just as bad or worse than Hamas, derives from their complete lack of moral clarity, their absence of true empathy, their inability to really understand human nature, and their failure to think.
- Evil comes from a failure to think
Empathy loss puts us at risk of dehumanisation which for some, is a gateway to radicalisation and participating in evil acts. I propose that by bridging these two approaches, we can protect against the invisible forces that attempt to manipulate our empathy, capture our emotions and destroy our humanity.
Empathy and what’s it’s not
A way to hack our own narcissistic tendencies is by continuously developing empathy and resisting activities that erode empathy.
I’ve written about empathy here, here and here. I have spent thousands of hours facilitating workshops, training and reflecting on practice for people in human, health and early education services to harness, develop and preserve empathy. I have learned that empathy used properly is necessary for cooperation, reciprocity, negotiation, problem solving, co-learning, character development, harm prevention and collective flourishing. I think you’d agree that it’s pretty important for healthy relationships.
The definition of empathy I use is this. Empathy is an attempt to understand another’s position, thinking and feelings and to respond appropriately. It requires curiosity to wonder about what makes someone think, feel and act the way they do, even when they have performed the most vile and sadistic acts on others.
In the process of attuning to another person to learn about their perspectives, you might notice an emotional contagion where you start to experience a similar emotional state to them. Empathy is not feeling another’s feelings, though this is how empathy is often described. It’s the ability to attune to someone’s emotional state without it taking over your own emotional state. Depending on your emotional literacy, you might be able to articulate the specific emotions that the other is feeling along with the impact those emotions appear to have on that person.
There are various empathies that have been defined that broadly fit under two categories: emotional/affective empathy and cognitive empathy. I have found that these distinctions have contributed to more controversy about the word than clarity. I break empathy down further:
Empathy has purpose. Showing empathy has a purpose or an end goal. In a helping situation, you might aim to connect with the person to help them feel heard, understood and less alone, or discover their priorities and support them to meet their needs. In a business situation, you might use it tactically to negotiate a deal or discover multiple perspectives to make sense of an incident. In a narcissistic relationship, you might use empathy to build the other person up so they become dependent on you as you slowly destroy their confidence and self-worth. In online situations, you might be looking for your people, using empathy to connect with others who think like you. In a workplace bullying situation or hostage situation, you will use empathy to think like the bully and hostage taker so you can take control of the situation and free yourself/the hostage.
Empathy is not only about suffering. Empathy is not only reserved for those who are suffering. You can show empathy regardless of the other’s emotional state. You can show empathy to someone’s excitement indifference, neutrality, contentment or pain.
Empathy is not about you or your experiences. Another aspect of empathy is that your efforts are entirely focused on learning about the other’s experience, not about what you would think, feel, or do if you were in their position. Empathy is other focused, not self-focused. Therefore, empathy requires a set of communication skills that enables you to ascertain and accurately describe the other’s beliefs, thoughts, feelings, strengths, challenges and impacts.
Empathy doesn’t mean you agree. Empathy doesn’t involve agreeing with the other person’s perspective even when it doesn’t resonate with you. Their experience and perspectives is theirs whether you agree with it or not. Many also think showing empathy can be scripted with statements like “I feel you, I understand you, I hear you.” These statements attempt to convey empathy but fail to make the other person feel genuinely empathised with. If you were to demonstrate empathy, you would use interpersonal and communication skills to help the other person tell and explore their own story while you attempt to convey your understanding in a meaningful way back to them.
Empathy is not always possible. Empathy is a social skill and a quality that enables you to attune to another’s emotional state. Many people can’t attune to other’s emotions or feel overwhelmed by other’s emotional states, and they’re neither narcissists nor psychopaths. They lack the ability to read social cues and know how to appropriately respond without specific training. Those who have been badly betrayed or harmed would have a hard time wanting to attempt to understand the rationale for their abuser’s actions when the wound is still fresh.
Emotional distress is not empathy. Looking at someone or trying to empathise with someone who is having a tough time will trigger your own feelings of discomfort, moral distress, pity, anger or sympathy. These feelings are bi-products of empathy, not empathy itself. If you’re not a psychopath, this will also happen when someone is rejoicing about an evil action or when someone describes their pleasure in taking advantage of or hurting another person. You will feel the same discomfort and emotional distress from being exposed to anything your body interprets as threatening or dangerous.
If you’re unaware of this discomfort, you will experience the self-protection reflex I described above. If you’re aware of the discomfort and the judgments you’re making about the person’s experience, you can regulate your emotions to dampen the distress and suspend your judgements by shifting your attention to them instead of reacting to what’s occurring in you.
It’s the discomfort, moral distress, pity and sympathy, bi-products of empathy, that can get captured by those external forces.
Emotional capture
Online content is more than a collection of media, resources, and articles. Content is infused with intention, agendas, purpose, emotions - external forces - that you can perceive if you pay attention to the effect that some content has on your mood, emotional state and inner dialogue.
Content is filled with traps and temptations to capture your attention and emotions, whether you feel morally ambiguous, indifferent or firm about a cause or current event.
Emotional capture is when an external stimulus (ie. headline of an article) captures your attention by arousing threat/pain or excitement/pleasure. The stimulus - exposure to specific content - can either cause you to feel drawn and connected or aversion and anger/outrage to the stimulus. Either way, your activated emotional state is held captive by the attention you are giving the stimulus and you begin to view your experience through the lens of that emotional state.
At a personal level perhaps it’s worth remembering that those feelings of outrage—you know the kind, the ones that fill you with such anger you just have to speak out right now, the kind where you’re summoned as if by strings to contribute your little piping neuronal voice to that huge ongoing mind of the internet—those feelings could not be yours at all. Rather, they might just be a glimpse of something larger and darker passing like a giant out of sight.
- The Egregore passes you by
When your emotions are activated, your brain’s amygdala is hijacked, impairing the rational thinking function of the prefrontal cortex. This means that your ability to use empathy to seek out and consider other perspectives is compromised. You revert to a childlike state where your instincts or emotions take over your actions. When your emotions are captured, your emotional state becomes the tool of these external forces to do its bidding. You’re now more likely to believe narratives that resonate on the same emotional frequency of the captured emotion. Since you’re now attuned to that exact emotional frequency, information carried on that frequency is perceived as safe, trustworthy, affirming and reliable, bypassing the need for rigorous examination and analysis of that content.
Here’s a scenario to illustrate the process of emotional capture…
You are a Free Palestine feminist living in the US. You participate in women’s marches, read the works of feminist critical theorists, oppose the patriarchy and other systems of oppression and believe women when they say they were sexually assaulted. You experienced shock when you saw the news about the Hamas attack on Oct 7. You were sickened by what Hamas did to Israeli women at a festival for peace. You want to go online and declare your condemnation of the sadistic treatment of Israeli women but you remain silent. You feel morally conflicted because you are a feminist who supports Palestinian liberation, but feel upset about Hamas actions using rape as a weapon of war. That crosses a line but you’re not outraged enough to say anything because you want to make sure you have all the facts first. You feel for the women and their families, and worry about the victims who were kidnapped by Hamas.
You chat with friends and look online to see what your tribe members are saying about Oct 7. You discuss this with friends and most of them agree that what happened was wrong. You come across posts of condemnation and posts asserting that these are justified actions of decolonisation and resistance to oppression. Both make sense to you but you aren’t saying anything public yet because you’re still conflicted.
Then the counterattack began and Palestinian civilian women and children are being killed, humanitarian aid is blocked and hospitals are being bombed. Your social media feed starts to fill with condemnation of Israel, interpretations of historical events that affirm Palestinians as the oppressed, evidence of Israel as settler colonialists and occupiers, Hamas as resistance fighters, anti-Jewish sentiments, and denials of the Oct 7 raping and execution spree of Israeli women, children and babies.
You also see other posts from Jewish people condemning Israel and you begin to follow them. You feel terrible about what’s happening and wish you could do more to help. You avoid following pro-Israel posts because they’re brainwashed Zionists and unfollow or block a number of people you used to follow for their pro-Israel stance. You feel disgusted at them. You see graphic images of dead Palestinian children and babies and choose to not look away. This is what genocide looks like. You’re angry as hell. You conclude that Oct 7 was a ruse to justify attacking Gaza. You feel betrayed that Israeli propaganda used women to garner sympathy. Your empathy for Israelis is lost.
You can feel your blood boil at the prolonged cruelty of Israel - Zionists - against the Palestinian people. You start seeking out evidence of the Oct 7 attacks but you mainly encounter posts, links and media that suggest the Israeli government and army faked the massacre. Your heart aches at every post that mentions death rates and shows dead baby images. You don’t question the source because the evidence of Israel as oppressors is overwhelming. You join the chorus of Free Palestine at protests and online, and your heart is warmed by the solidarity you feel within the diverse group that also includes anti-Zionist Jews. You see yourself as empathetic while ignoring the hypocrisy of selective empathy. You feel justified and hopeful about the future knowing that you’re on the right side of history.
This is a similar process to how you get hypnotized or spellbound by a person or group who provides the right suggestions that arouses a specific emotional state. The situation could involve a person who takes an interest in you and through the way they demonstrate their interest and attunement to you, you receive a message through their behaviour such as “You’re important, you matter, you’re amazing!” carried on that frequency. While these messages could be true, they don’t know enough about you to be able to have this effect. This is the mechanism by which people become groomed and exploited by someone who embodies narcissistic traits.
The narrative of that emotional frequency is “when you feel this, you are safe, loved and important”. Or, “when you feel this, you are compassionate, caring and promote justice for all”. You are primed to being manipulated by images of children suffering even if they’re AI creations. You might believe you’re making a rational decision to ‘choose’ the right side of history, but your emotions are doing all the decision-making.
Your Will, whether you believe it’s free or not, is not engaged in this process at all because it’s been dampened through emotional capture. Once you’re captured, your ability to challenge your own biases or to even observe them are also compromised. When this critical thinking function is compromised, so is your capacity for genuine empathy for anyone who doesn’t think like you or share your ideology.
Empathy Loss
As the scenario above illustrates, emotional capture precedes empathy loss. But empathy loss didn’t begin in the fictional character’s life at that time. Empathy loss is something we all experience when we’ve been hurt and betrayed by a person or authority figure we trusted and steps weren’t taken to reconcile or repair the relationship.
Empathy loss, or compromised empathy, can begin in childhood and continue to erode throughout life from exposure to trauma, betrayals of trust, moral injury, dehumanising training and seeking power and status through upward social and professional mobility.
The progressive loss of empathy without empathy preservation and restoration practices, and positive relational templates with others stalls the emotional maturation processes required to build healthy interpersonal relationships. This can lead to relational issues such as narcissistic abuse, bullying, exploitation, socially acceptable discrimination and other oppressive behaviours as adults.
Things that contribute to empathy loss
I am aware that there are exceptions to every situation that you will read in these lists. Please see each topic as a broad overview. I’ll rely on you to share the exceptions to the explanations of these topics in the comments below.
Unresolved betrayals: Betrayals by trusted friends, family members, workplace colleagues, service providers and government institutions that do not undergo relational repair.
Empathic overload. Persisting empathic distress from immersing in other people’s stories of trauma and suffering without reprieve. This occurs when we are only able to see the person and their experience from a deficit-based lens.
Exposure to graphic content. Seeing other people getting hurt, harmed or killed through easily accessed media and graphic imagery can be traumatising enough to blunt empathy.
Increasing popularity/social status/influence. The need to be seen as an authority or influencer on a topic, professional context or movement creates an addiction to power. The status seeker will require an echo chamber/community to reinforce their ideas and to receive constant attention. Power seeking compromises empathy and entrenches narcissism.
Stereotyping the other. Ideologies that reduce humans to specific traits or pathologies can encourage you to label humans so that they/you fit into specific idealised and demonized categories. Sometimes labelling helps makes sense of irrational or evil behaviour. But if you can only see that person as the label, you're dehumanising them and that opens the door to dehumanising others, compromising your humanity.
Being stereotyped and treated as the other. Being on the receiving end of frequent devaluation and criticism because you don’t fit cultural ideals or expectations of a dominant culture can wear away at your empathy that mirrors how the other has dehumanised you.
Tribal mentality and tribalism. You are emotionally or ideologically drawn to actively participate in a cause or movement involving a marginalized group of which you are not a member. Or a cult. This alone doesn’t mean you lack empathy. Religious and ideologically driven communities entice people to assimilate in order to embody the preferred characteristics idealised by the leader. Assimilation that requires suppressing certain traits and enhance or perform other traits required for survival and status in the group, is an assault on your identity and potentially morally violating. When you start to enter into us vs. them discourses as a result of your allegiance to defend and protect the persecuted group, or your abusive cult leader, your empathy will take another hit.
Extreme hostility and aggressive behaviour. You spend a lot of your time thinking and talking about your cause of interest with others in 1:1 conversations or group forums dedicated to the cause. Your interactions with others involve provoking others, trying to expose others lies, fabricating conflicts, and threatening members of opposing groups. You are exhibiting behaviours of a bully or a bully’s Flying Monkeys because you’ve lost an ability to consider how your actions could be harming your targets of justice practice.
Signs of empathy loss
Selective empathy. You elevate a person’s or group’s importance over others when you relate to their suffering, their suffering abides by the rules of sacred victimhood and you invalidate another’s suffering by demonizing them. In other words, you’re re-enacting the Injustice Triad roles by being the Saviour rather than someone who can facilitate anyone’s liberation from oppression.
Indulging in victimhood. You are so consumed by your own suffering that you stop checking in on your close connections and expect their undivided attention remains on you.
Moral superiority and sanctimony. Belief in religious dogma, ideology, authority figures or academic theories as wayshowers of truth can be used to justify evil and harm, despite strong evidence of evil and harm. The justification is presented in a way to suggest that your evidence and facts are lies and fabrications, and theirs are superior.
Blaming and shaming victims. Condemnations of the Israeli civilian massacre by Hamas terrorism on Oct 7 were counteracted by justifications, denials, victim blaming and blame reassignment. Hearing statements such as “What did you expect?” “This is what decolonization looks like” revealed the dehumanized hearts of those with empathy loss.
Overemphasis on intellect. Some people who have experienced empathy manipulation and serial betrayals can put up a strong guard against feeling anything deeply. They develop a shield for their emotions to prevent emotional manipulation and losing control. They can come across as cold and detached to the suffering when exposed to the suffering others and rely on rational and logical explanations to make sense of situations. This shield is a barrier to connecting and attuning to another’s emotional experience.
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