Brené and Adam Grant on Empathy vs. Enmeshment

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1:05Hi, everyone.

1:06Brené Brown:I'm Brene Brown, and this is Dare to Lead. And I am back with my good friend, Adam Grant. And we are digging into strong ground, lessons on daring leadership, the tenacity of paradox, and the wisdom of the human spirit. Welcome back, Adam. Thanks, Brene. I've been thinking a ton about our last conversation. and the difficulty that so many people have finding empathy for others, which seems to have gotten worse in the last few years. What do you make of that? I mean, are we just really just going to go right here, right now? Like, we're just going to start right there. I love it. The attack on empathy is so interesting to me.

1:52Brené Brown:Especially, you know, there are kind of like far-right conservative churches that are saying actually practicing empathy is a sin. I read an article about it. Yeah. And then I think Elon Musk said that it was going to be the end of Western civilization, that empathy was the primary driver of the end of our civilization. Now, on the surface of things, you could make a very easy argument that...

2:28Folks who are using power over to lead, including occasional bouts of cruelty to make sure people really understand they're someone to be feared, would not be a fan of empathy, right? You would not want us to turn on the television and empathize with immigrant families or LGBTQ community. You could understand that at a very primal level. but I think it's actually deeper than that and this is a good conversation for us to have because it's not just there are criticisms of empathy from I guess you could say both sides of the aisle in some way and for me at one level I think you've got people saying and this is so like this is such smart Machiavellian politics to me to say, you shouldn't feel bad.

3:31How dare people make you feel uncomfortable when you witness something? You shouldn't have to go through that. And then on the other hand, you've got a school of people saying, no, wait, wait, wait, I'm not saying that. I think you should not only be moved by people suffering, but you should move to help. And that's compassion. That's different than empathy.

3:59Brené Brown:So what I, yeah. So what I'd like to say is for the people who want to get away with shit by making sure that we don't feel and observe and have reactions to other people's suffering, I think my academic response would be, fuck you. But for people who really want to engage in a serious debate about this, I think we need to make the distinction between cognitive empathy and effective empathy. And that's where I think people don't understand what empathy is and what empathy isn't. And so I do believe that understanding the different types of empathy makes the argument much fuller. I think that's really important.

4:54I've been very persuaded by Paul Bloom's research on empathy versus compassion, which I think really speaks to the cognitive-affective difference. I think the affective part of empathy, the I feel your feelings, can be weaponized and misused. We know that it tends to be biased, right? That it's much easier to empathize with people who come from our own group and look like us. we know that a lot of people suffer from empathic overload that and actually ironically then end up less kind and generous to others because they they feel so much of other people's suffering they just have to escape or withdraw and i think that that's that's obviously not healthy or sustainable i think the cognitive part of empathy um and i guess the behavioral part too the action involved in compassion i would love to see more of that in the world i do not need to feel your feelings or know exactly what it's like to be in your shoes in order to care about your feelings and want to alleviate your suffering.

5:57Brené Brown:So this is so interesting. I will start here. Disagree with Paul Bloom. Oh, interesting. Tell me more. I think empathy and compassion in my research, I think, are very different things. And I think we actually need both. What I think we need, though, is I think we need cognitive empathy and compassion, not affective empathy. So I think this is the problem when we spend more time scrolling and less time reading, more time judging, less time learning. And so affective empathy is very related to burnout. It is also related to just kind of a numbing that I've desensitized myself from really without any of my cognitive awareness, I've desensitized myself to, I don't give a shit with intention.

6:52Like it's just to feel what people feel is not a good idea, but it is not, it is a very specific type of empathy. There's another type of empathy, which is cognitive empathy, which I think is important and as important as compassion, which is, I'm thinking of Teresa Wiseman's scholarship on this. She's a UK scholar, comes out of nursing, studied empathy across every profession where people rely on connecting compassionately and with empathy to patients, dentistry, medicine, psychiatry. And so cognitive empathy is the ability to listen and believe someone's experience, to listen, understand, and believe someone's experience, even when it's different than your own.

8:02And I think that without it, I think compassion is almost bankrupt, to be honest with you, because I think compassion means to witness suffering and take action.

8:17Brené Brown:But I think the problem with empathy is when I see your struggle or you tell me your story and it doesn't match my lived experience. Without cognitive empathy and some perspective-taking skills and some skills of staying out of judgment, I have a hard time believing that was your experience. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think cognitive empathy is critically important. And for wholesale dismissal of empathy, I think you don't know what you're talking about. I think you've taken one strain of it and vilified it because it fits your compelling, provocative title of a book or an article that empathy is bad.

9:11That's what I think. Yeah. Yeah, you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater there. Yeah.

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10:44What's interesting about that, though, is what you outlined. I actually think it's, as I understand it, Paul Bloom's argument, which is that affective empathy is where we get, the double-edged sword. Agree. But that we need the cognitive understanding of, you know, I may not agree with you, but I get where you're coming from and I think it's an understandable or reasonable position to hold. And the compassion of, yeah, I've seen your suffering and I want to do what I can to support you. If I can't make it go away and I can't make you feel better, I can at least help you feel seen.

11:16Brené Brown:Then I would have loved some work from him that said cognitive empathy plus compassion is the way to go. So, yeah, but we're not going to do that because we're going to underestimate the public's ability to understand. And it doesn't make for a great headline. That's exactly the challenge here. Cognitive empathy and affective empathy already are more they're a bit of a mouthful. I think I don't know. I've wondered if if we need a rebranding here of saying, let's just call the affective part empathy. let's rename the cognitive part perspective-taking and talk about how we need perspective-taking and compassion.

11:54Brené Brown:Hold on, let me think through it. Pausing. I'm here, but I'm thinking. I need a wheels-turning sound machine. Say it one more time. Tell me what your rebrand is. Yeah, I'm wondering if empathy is the affective part and we agree has some problems associated with it. do we stop trying to rescue cognitive empathy and just call it perspective taking and say, you don't need the empathy of feeling other people's feelings. What you do need is the perspective taking of understanding other people's feelings and the compassion of responding to them. I hear your argument, Honorable Adam Grant, and I— You don't want to lose the word empathy, do you?

12:37Brené Brown:No, and I disagree. Let's call this. Let's call affective empathy enmeshment. oh that's that's really good and it's much better than my proposal let's call that enmeshment meaning i don't know if i take on your feelings then i you know let me let me just let me tell you this let me share a story with you if you don't mind like when we teach empathy I have two people stand in the front of the room far away from each other with an outstretched hand and I have them grab that hand and say I asked the two people where do you end and this other person begins and they're they're clutching each other's hands and they're like we're like well it's kind of hard to say then I say if you do not know where you end and someone else begins you are not practicing empathy, you're in enmeshment.

13:39If you're clear where you end and someone else begins, because here's the thing, if you, the way I describe empathy when we're teaching it is you've got this kind of hole in the ground. And I'll link to a video on the podcast where we have someone drew a little cartoon of this, but that's really kind I think, helpful. And I come up to you and I see you're in this hole, Adam, and I'm like, hey, you okay? What's going on? You say, I'm in this really hard place. If I just jump in that dark hole with you, that just means you've got two people in deep shit. It's not helpful at all.

14:20Brené Brown:That's affective empathy. I'm going to feel it. Now we're both in the dark hell. I get it. It's shitty down here. My job is to remain whole while being curious about your situation and listening to your situation and letting you know that I see you, I'm glad you shared with me, and you're not alone. It's not about jumping in the hole with you. Does that make sense? makes sense. That's profound. That is such a beautiful encapsulation of what's wrong with affective empathy. And I think you crushed it. I've been teaching it for 20 years, but I do think, especially imagine in a situation where you've been teaching...

15:08Brené Brown:Interesting. I teach an MBA program now and not in a social work program, But we still teach empathy as part of Dare to Lead. And so many people think that the kind thing to do is to jump in the hole. and

15:32Brené Brown:it almost goes back to one of our earlier podcast conversations about generosity as other focused

15:46Brené Brown:when you're not taking care of yourself and your emotional sovereignty when you're not doing that

15:59you're not being other focused and that is a very difficult paradox going back to yet another podcast yeah it is do you understand what i'm saying though i i think that's brilliant i think we want empathy and compassion we don't want investment we do not want investment And Meshman is like, I don't know where I begin and you end. And if you feel good, I feel good. And if you're sad, I'm sad. And it's over-identification and it's secondary trauma.

16:35And it's, I'll tell a really personal story.

16:38Brené Brown:I'm trying to, I've been debating whether I should tell it or not because it's really hard. Um, when I wrote my first curriculum on shame, I collected research by going into, with clinicians, with therapists, I am not one. I have one, I am not one. But going in and co-facilitating the work with clinicians who were trained to do that. And it was a really hard experience because we were running one set of groups at the Houston Area Women's Center, which is domestic violence and sexual abuse, and a lot of women living in shelters. During this period of time, I don't know if you remember this news story, Andrea Yates drown her four or five kids in Houston.

17:31Brené Brown:Do you remember this story? Yeah, it was like really devastating. And I couldn't get out from underneath that story. I think Ellen was young. I don't think Charlie was born yet. I don't know what year it was. And I actually almost stopped functioning.

17:59and I was doing this like very serious visualization of what that process must have looked like and how it worked and like just really crazy stuff. And I think I was a relatively new mom, so it must have been, you know, Ellen's 26 now. So I went to go see my therapist and her name's Diana. And she asked me this really weird question that I felt like was out of the blue. She said, I bet when you're kind of co-facilitating these groups, piloting this curriculum at the women's shelter, I bet you're hearing horrific stories. And I said, I am. And she said, are you reliving those in your mind and putting yourself in those images and putting your daughter in that situation?

18:51And I said, no, no, no, no, not at all. And she said, why? And I said, because I don't know. I have a job to do in there. And she said, what's your job in there? You're not the clinician. And I said, well, at the very least, my job is to be empathic. And she said, let's stop right here.

19:18You cannot work from a place of empathy when you take on the suffering of other people. what you're doing with this news story is you're not being overly empathetic. You came in here telling me that your empathy has gotten you in trouble. Your empathy has not gotten you in trouble. Your over-identification and secondary trauma has gotten you in trouble. And I was like, what? Right. And I was like, I don't understand. She said, yes, you do. Say it back to me. And I said, I'm over-identifying. I'm taking on the feelings. I'm doing this really dangerous visualization. And I'm becoming traumatized by something that didn't happen to me.

20:01Therefore, I'm of no use. And she said, yes. And so that night when I got home, it was really interesting. I was telling Steve about my therapy session. And my husband's a pediatrician.

20:16Brené Brown:and he sees a disproportionate number of really hard cases because he doesn't use a hospitalist to follow his patients. He does all his own following. And so I said, what do you make of what Diana said today about I'm subjecting myself to secondary trauma and enmeshment versus boundaries and distance and empathy? and he said, when I have to tell a parent something heart-wrenching about a test result with their child or something, I have a rule and it is I walk up to the fence, I lean over the fence, I embrace, I hug, I often cry with, but I have a job in that room and I never walk through the gate because when I become that parent, I can no longer help that parent.

21:14Brené Brown:Do you think that's what we're talking about here? So powerful. Yeah, I think that's exactly what we're talking about here. And it speaks to a couple of things. One is, you alluded earlier to the problem of people just kind of scrolling and watching reels and short videos. as opposed to reading. And I've never realized it before, but this is one of the reasons that I don't watch the news ever. I only read the news. In part, I want to carry it in my own feed as opposed to letting other people show me what to watch. But I think just as much of it as I listen to you is not wanting to be enmeshed in the melodrama of other people's suffering, but wanting to think about it and think critically about it, which is much easier to do when reading than watching because I don't get emotionally overloaded.

22:13And I can ask myself, is there something I can do here to be helpful? I mean, it's so weird.

22:20Brené Brown:I didn't know that about you. I only read the news as well. And I read the BBC and I read Al Jazeera. I read across news and I I absolutely have a curated reading list that I read every morning. Multiple perspectives, but I read it. And one of the reasons I read it is exactly, I didn't even know why I did that. Because the whole idea of if it bleeds, it leads. And an emotional manipulation through visuals.

22:54When I read, this is weird.

22:59Brené Brown:This is counterintuitive. When I read, I am much more likely to understand how my daily decisions are impacting other people in ways that are not okay with me, ethically and morally. When I watch, my nervous system becomes so overwhelmed, I just shut it down and I go straight to fuck it. I can't do this. And I don't change my behaviors. This is also why I will never watch Schindler's List, but I've read a ton of Holocaust literature. And I feel like my worldview has been shaped heavily by reading Anne Frank and Viktor Frankl and Primo Levi. But I do not want the images in my brain that I can't unsee, and especially can't unfeel.

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