Empathy and Boundaries Intact
In This Post
The Middle Path of Empathy: an essay
Half Magic: a new weekly feature from my workshops.
The Middle Path of Empathy
Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, was born into a life of sheltered indulgence; he was a Hindu prince. When he convinced his chariot driver to take him outside his palace, he was exposed to suffering in the form of aging, illness, and death. And he was exposed to a possible path to escape the cycle of birth and death in the form of a wandering holy man, an ascetic. Siddhartha abandoned his wife and infant son; he abandoned his indulgent life to become a wandering holy man. He practiced extreme asceticism and deprivation. When he sat meditating under the Bodhi tree, he became enlightened, and he found a middle path between indulgence and asceticism.
This idea of finding the middle path between extremes is one that has long fascinated me. My own middle path was discovered over years of forming relationships, including encounters with patients. Once, a patient, one I had known for many years, recounted a story in which he’d felt slighted. He was upset and angry. When he looked up at me, listening calmly, he became even angrier.
“How can you sit there so calmly? How can you be so cold? I thought you cared about me.”
I was taken aback. I had been empathizing deeply with his pain. But I wasn’t getting pulled into the whirlpool of his drama. I wasn’t crying and raging with him. “Jim, I do care about you, and you know it.”
He calmed down and apologized. Later, I thought, what if I had followed him into his vortex? Who would have been there to pull us both out? Much later, I learned about polyvagal theory, about how one regulated nervous system can set the tone for a dysregulated one to return to baseline. I was happy to learn the science for what I knew to be true.
Another time, I called a patient who was angry and upset because one of his medications had not been refilled. My initial instinct was to return anger with anger, resentment with resentment. My voice rose as I became defensive, but as I heard him begin to escalate out of control, I felt it. I stopped myself and said to both of us, “Calm down. Take a deep breath. I’m trying to help you.”
To my amazement, it worked. We worked out a solution, and we ended the call with laughter and thank yous. We are all human, but sometimes we can become more skillful at it.
Balance
In both of these encounters, I was practicing balance, but instead of balancing asceticism and indulgence, I was balancing my empathy and my boundaries, making my heart not too hard, not too soft.
Not only was I practicing taking a middle path, but I was strengthening my resolve to follow Don Miguel Ruiz’s Second Agreement: Don’t Take Anything Personally. Just because my patient said I was uncaring didn’t mean I had to accept that label. And the patient wasn’t angry at me; he was frustrated about the process to renew his medication.
I left both encounters with my empathy and my boundaries intact.
Half Magic
When I was in fourth grade, one of my favorite books was Half Magic from Edward Eager’s Tales of Magic Series. Four siblings find a coin in the street, which, when wished on, gives them half of what they wished for. To get a full wish, they have to wish for double what they want. It’s a great premise.
What I’m offering here is half the magic of attending one of my workshops. I’ll link you to a weekly poem and then give you a writing prompt to go with it. If you want, you can set a timer for twenty minutes and write something. I’ll also offer a sample of something one of my workshop participants or I wrote in response.
This may not feel magical, but that’s because you’re missing the other half. When you hear yourself read your freshly written words aloud to a trusted group, and then hear them echo back to you what’s strong and good about the writing, that’s the magic of becoming a better writer.
Half Magic #1: Summer Workshop Series #4, August 2023.
Poem: “The Feet Man” by Philip Dacey. Read it here or here.
Prompt: The worst job I ever had was…
Sample Response: The Worst Job I Ever Had
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Thanks for reading,
Deborah
As with so many things in life, balance is all, Deborah...
Thank you for sharing your wisdom and each of these powerful stories Deborah!!!!!! A shining example of the way our culture is shifting from one of based on fear to one in which actions are steeped in love. It requires that we step out of our comfort zone and share our unique brilliance, as you are doing so beautifully!!!!!! Thank you!!!!