The Empathy Everyone Is Arguing About Is the Wrong One

Executive Energy Journal — Issue #67

Welcome to The Executive Energy Journal, written for professionals who choose to lead with purposeful clarity. A grounded, science-informed take on managing subtle energy, spanning from neuroscience to spiritual connection.

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• What's measurable: what research and observable mechanisms support
• What's unknown: where evidence ends, and interpretation begins
• What I do pragmatically anyway: the simplest reliable practice I use with clients
• Your role: take what is useful and leave the rest

There is a loud argument happening right now about empathy. One side says it is collapsing at work, that people have less of it for each other than they did a few years ago, and that organisations are paying for the loss. The other side says empathy was always a liability, a soft spot that good judgment has to override. Both sides are certain, and both are describing something real.

And both are describing the wrong thing.

I want to be careful here, because I drew this line myself in earlier issues (EEJ #19), using slightly different language than I now do. And the public conversation has now arrived at a distinction I have been working with for years. So I'm returning and adding  some interesting research I've found.

1. What the two camps are actually fighting over

The thing that exhausts a perceptive professional in a hard conversation, and the thing the critics warn against, are the same broken mechanism wearing one borrowed name.

In research terms, there are two different responses to another person's state, and they run in opposite directions inside the brain.

Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki trained people in one, then the other. Training in empathic resonance, feeling with the other person, increased negative affect and lit up the circuits associated with pain. Training in compassion, feeling for the other person while staying located in yourself, did almost the contrary. It activated reward-related regions and increased the motivation to help, without the same depletion.

Same suffering in front of them. Two completely different internal events.

The follow-on point matters even more for anyone who works at the edge of what they can feel. Klimecki and Singer proposed that what we keep calling compassion fatigue is misnamed. It is not fatigue from caring too much. It is empathic distress fatigue, and its engine is the loss of the line between your state and theirs. The caring was never the problem. The blurred boundary was.

In practical terms: You burned out because somewhere in the exchange with others you stopped being able to tell which feeling was yours, not because you felt for people. 

There is a layer beneath even that. Before any of this becomes empathy, there is contagion. You catch a mood the way you catch a yawn, fast, bodily, with no decision in it. A room tightens and your shoulders tighten with it, before you have thought a single thing. This is older than thought, and on its own it is not a flaw. It turns into one only when a caught mood gets read as your own signal, so you find yourself acting on a feeling that was never information in the first place.

A great deal of what perceptive people call feeling too much is unsorted contagion still wearing the clothes of insight.

2. Where the evidence actually stops

I will not overstate this, because the honest edge is the whole point of these articles.

What the studies show cleanly is that these two states differ, that they are trainable, and that they recruit different machinery.

What no study can yet tell you is how you know, in the third minute of a tense meeting, which one you are in. The research was built in controlled conditions, watching videos of strangers' suffering. Your Tuesday afternoon is not a controlled condition. The signal is faster than that, more crowded, harder to label while it happens.

There is a philosophical tradition that gets closer to the our experience in everyday life. Edith Stein described empathy as unfolding in steps: you perceive the other's state, something of it re-enacts inside you, and then a third move recognises it as theirs, not yours.

That third step is the boundary. When it happens, you have read the room and kept yourself. When it fails to happen, you have caught the room and lost yourself, and from the inside the two can feel almost identical in the first instant.

So the open question is whether, in the moment, you can still locate the third step. People should stop arguing about whether empathy is "good" or "bad". That's like arguing if a hammer is good or bad. It is a tool, and we have it to use as we wish.

At this point, let's pause. For a second, don't think. Allow these ideas to either sink in or not. Just notice your jaw and shoulders, and breathe.

3. What I do anyway

I do not try to feel less. That was never the instruction, and it does not work.

What I do is keep one quiet line of awareness running underneath the exchange: is this mine, or is it theirs? Not as analysis. As a light, repeated check, the way you might keep one hand on a railing without gripping it.

Most of the time the answer arrives faster than the words for it. The feeling is accurate information about the other person, and I can read it without taking it home. Sometimes the answer is that it has already crossed over, that I have started carrying something that was never mine to carry, and naming that is usually enough to set it down.

This is not detachment. The signal stays fully on. I am reading more, not less. I am simply not confusing the reading with the residue.

The check works only because something steadier sits underneath it. You cannot run a comparison without a reference.

So the real practice is not the question itself, it is keeping a baseline clear and familiar enough that the question almost answers itself.

 

When your own ground is steady, anything arriving from outside it announces itself by contrast. You do not have to analyse, you simply feel the difference, the way you feel a change in temperature, because you know what the room felt like before.

This is the spine of my work. Everything I teach comes back to one move: stay fully in contact, and keep a clear, grounded sense of who is who. The aim is never to feel less, or to become less of who you are. It is to become more fully yourself, with less interruption.

The critics are right that something has to stay clear under pressure. They are wrong about what it is. It is not less feeling. It is an intact boundary inside full contact.

4. What it looks like when the pressure is real

I can tell you this holds under far more than a tense meeting, because I have been living inside a test of it.

For some time now I have been managing an animal-welfare crisis from a distance, in another country and another language, inside a situation with real legal stakes, a complex environment, public visibility, and a long list of people who do not agree with one another.

I care about the animals at the centre of it more than I can easily put into words. If feeling deeply were the liability the critics describe, I would have been useless to them. The feeling was not the problem. It was the fuel.

What kept me effective was keeping the line. Their distress is real, and it is mine to act on. The complexity around me is real, and none of it is not mine to absorb. The people closest to the situation have told me it has been handled well, that the commitment was enormous and that it is producing results. I mention that not to impress you, but because it is the cleanest proof I have: an intact boundary lets you feel everything and still aim straight, no matter the complexity. (If you're interested: Our website.)

Years ago I put it more simply in these pages:

The people around you do not have to be calm or grounded for you to be.

 

5. The part the argument keeps stepping over

Notice what neither camp offers. The recession side wants more empathy. The backlash side wants less. Neither one is talking about the only variable that actually changes the outcome, which is whether the self-other line holds while the feeling moves through.

You can have all the empathy in the room and still be fine, if the line holds. You can ration it carefully and still come home wrecked, if it doesn't.

6. The one thing you can actually test

Here is the honest problem with everything above. A felt distinction cannot be handed to you in words. I can describe the difference between a caught mood and your own read until the page runs out, and you will still only half know it, the way you half know a city from a map.

So do not take my word for it. Build the reference and live in it for a while. Here's how:

• Begin by bringing yourself to a clean, grounded baseline. If you already have a reliable way there, use it. If you do not, that is exactly what the Quick Preview is for: a short guided grounding technique, free and ungated, no signup, ready in about two minutes. 
• Then stay there, in that state internally. Not for the two minutes of a reset, but across a real stretch of the day. Half an hour. Two hours. A whole working day, if you have the appetite for it.

Keep a quiet thread of attention on the ground under you while meetings happen, while messages land, while people walk in carrying their states.

You are not trying to hold still or stay blank. You are letting your own baseline become so familiar that everything which is not yours becomes legible against it. The mood you catch shows up as a catch. The feeling that crosses over shows up as a drag.

That sustained noticing, held over time, is self-other differentiation. Not the concept of it. The actual skill, learned the only way it can be.

Take what is useful here and leave the rest. We do not have to resolve the public argument. You only have to find out, in your own system, which of the two things you are doing when a room gets heavy.

The Quick Preview gets you to the baseline. The full Meeting Reset is the same principle engineered for real time: two short protocols that close the previous interaction so it ends in your system and not only in your calendar, and let you enter the next one clear, anchored and steady, open to what matters without absorbing the whole room.

That is this issue made practical, in the body, while the room is still moving. 

This week, before you try to change anything, just watch for the moment a feeling stops being information and starts being weight. You will know it when you catch it. For now, only catch it.

Until next Sunday,

Niina

References

• Klimecki, O. M., & Singer, T. (2012). Empathic distress fatigue rather than compassion fatigue? Integrating findings from empathy research in psychology and social neuroscience. In B. Oakley et al. (Eds.), Pathological Altruism. Oxford University Press.
• Klimecki, O. M., Leiberg, S., Ricard, M., & Singer, T. (2014). Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(6), 873–879.
• Singer, T., & Klimecki, O. M. (2014). Empathy and compassion. Current Biology, 24(18), R875–R878.
• Stein, E. (1989). On the Problem of Empathy (3rd ed.). ICS Publications. (Original work published 1917.)
• Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1994). Emotional Contagion. Cambridge University Press.