Is empathy toxic?

0:21It's Explained It to Me from Vox. I'm John Quint Hill. and I've always thought of empathy as a good thing. You should be able to put yourself in someone else's shoes and understand their feelings. That's what being compassionate is all about. But despite all that, it feels like empathy has a weird reputation right now. It's become a meme. 11 unusual things that empaths experience that normal people don't. There's even a group of people who've been arguing lately that empathy is morally wrong. If my empathy for them, if my feeling how they feel leads me to affirm lies or to validate delusions or to support sin, then my empathy has become toxic.

1:07So what's going on with empathy right now? Who are its critics? And is there some truth to the idea that empathy can be not completely good? Last week, I asked you to call in with your thoughts on this. And a lot of you are thinking about what empathy means to you. including the toll too much of it can take. Hi, my name is Erica, and I've been a couples therapist for the past 15 years. And, you know, I've been really thinking a lot lately about the darker side of being someone who practices empathy on purpose as a career all day, every day. And there's been some really hard parts of it that I was not prepared for.

1:55Okay, so when I hear therapist, I think almost to a degree you're a professional empathizer. What does empathy mean to you? And what role does it play in work for you? I agree. I do feel like I'm a professional empathizer. And then with the added requirements of helping folks solve problems in their relationships. Yeah, so you called in and you told us that you have complicated feelings about empathy. Yeah. What complicates it for you? Those of us in the helping professions have been trained to sort of increase our capacity and the ease at which we can empathize with others. But nobody trains us to put brakes on that.

2:37For example, if I'm seeing clients all day and it's been, you know, a pretty difficult day in terms of relating with my clients or empathizing with couples. how do I turn that off or turn it down when I go to dinner with friends or watch a TV show that's really dramatic or read a book that tugs on my heartstrings? I didn't learn how to put the brakes on that. And I didn't realize that I needed brakes until I was so worn out. I didn't realize I could run out of compassion or, you know, run out of that ability to put myself in another person's position and understand their feelings. How do you see this impacting people who aren't therapists?

3:19Do other people kind of struggle with this empathy exhaustion? I ask myself that question a lot. I mean, I talk to my clients about this, you know, so I imagine, you know, maybe somebody works retail or something. And throughout the day, they deal with some angry people, some disappointed people, and they have some regular interactions all day. But they're also chatting with their coworkers, and one of their coworkers is telling them about a really difficult thing happening in their family. And another coworker is talking about the stress of school. And then this person finishes their shift, and they get in the car, and they listen to the news.

3:56And they're hearing about Gaza. It really strikes rock this high-rise building in Gaza City. Or they're hearing about, you know, deportations. and maybe they're a pretty empathetic person and they're imagining what it would be like to be in that situation. And then they get home from work and they scroll TikTok for a while and, you know, happen to see a video of somebody who's recently lost a pet. Was the love of my life. He just... And they happen to see a video of somebody who's been diagnosed with a terminal illness or something, right? Okay, well, yeah, it's cancer, guys. And along with that, they're seeing cute videos and stand-up comics and all that, right?

4:32I like an escalator, man, because the escalator can never break. It can only become stairs. And then at the end of the night, they watch their favorite Netflix show, which is maybe, like, kind of heavy. Maybe it's Squid Games. Green light. Red light. And they're, like, again, sort of putting themselves in people's shoes. And I just don't think someone going through that day is thinking about how much vicarious grief, and vicarious stress, vicarious anxiety they've been around. So I don't think they have maybe that conceptualization of why their mood has changed, why they're so exhausted, why they don't feel like talking to anybody, and what they need to do to level it out.

5:25That's Erica Steenbergen, a marriage and family therapist in Chicago. ago. We'll come back to Erica later in the show because we have some answers for her and anyone else feeling empathy burnout. All about how to manage our empathy so it benefits us and other people. But I want to go back to that scrolling she talked about for a second because in between TikToks about stuff like hot dogs or first dates, there are also plenty of videos out there of people talking about empathy itself and saying something kind of extreme. That empathy is a sin. Next, a surprising argument against empathy from the Christian right that's gaining traction and starting to shape all of our lives in the process.

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9:12We're back. It's Explain It To Me. In the hours and days after Charlie Kirk was killed, lots of things he said made the rounds on social media. I thought I was familiar with most of his talking points already, but one six-second clip caught my attention. I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up New Age term that does a lot of damage. That was from an episode of a show back in 2022. And it turns out Charlie Kirk hasn't been the only one on the political right saying empathy is a bad thing. It's an idea that found its start in Christian evangelical circles where empathy has been described as toxic and even sinful.

9:48I wanted to find out more, so I called up Roxanne Stone. I am the executive editor at Religion News Service, and I am also the co-host of a podcast called Saved by the City, where we talk about how to navigate being an adult in the city and also someone of faith. Tell me a little bit about your religious upbringing and background. I grew up in a very small, rural, eastern Colorado town of about 100 people, and it's a very Christian place. We have one church. It's basically in my backyard. It's a Southern Baptist church. Although growing up, I didn't really know that was Southern Baptist. It just was like, oh, this is my hometown church.

10:31Yeah. So I want to get into this idea of empathy as a sin. I hear that. I'm like, wait, what? Well, you were not alone in thinking that. I also was like, wait, what? It just seems like empathy is, of course, a Christian virtue. You assume that, you think that. And all of a sudden, there's sort of been this conversation happening about like, okay, empathy is toxic. Empathy is even sinful. The two most prominent voices on this, you have Alliebeth Stuckey. She's a writer, a podcaster. She's sort of a former Fox News person. And she is the author of a book called Toxic Empathy, How Progressives Exploit Christian compassion.

11:17They use toxic empathy by employing our language, our Bible verses, our concepts, and then pervert them to morally extort us into adopting their position. And then you have Joe Rigney, and he's a pastor within the communion of reformed evangelical churches. Joe Rigney is the author of The Sin of Empathy, Compassion, and its Counterfeits. Most people have a hard time imagining how empathy could ever be harmful. And therefore, if I'm the devil, where am I going to hide some of my most destructive tactics. It's under the thing that nobody expects to be bad. I think what Rigney and Stuckey and others who are arguing against empathy, what they're really trying to do is say is make a distinction between sympathy and between empathy.

12:03One of the really common metaphors that they'll use is, in particular Rigney uses this metaphor, you see someone who's in quicksand, who's sinking in quicksand, and you need to try to save them. And what empathy wants to do is jump into the quicksand with them, both feet, and it feels like that's going to be more loving, because they're going to feel like, I'm glad that you're here with me in the quicksand. Problem is, you're both now sinking. And the sympathetic response is to throw a rope or throw a tree branch and haul this person out of the quicksand, but you are staying on the shore, and you are staying on solid ground.

12:39Rigney argues that solid ground is objectivity. From a Christian perspective, it is the authority of Scripture, the authority of Jesus. And that is giving you the strength and the sort of solid ground to be able to pull someone in. And both of them, you have seen them on, you know, a number of podcasts kind of all over the place talking about why Christians in particular are susceptible to this toxic empathy, to this living out of a sort of what they would again call a twisting or a distortion of the true Christian virtues of compassion and sympathy. Okay, so this is a way different concept than what I grew up with going to church and even what I hear from the pulpit when I go on Sundays.

13:28How did you become aware of this argument that empathy can be sinful? When did you first hear about it? Well, like so many things these days, I first encountered it on the internet. And mostly as like an insult, a clapback on somebody's tweet or X post about something that felt kind of progressive, kind of anti-racism or pro-DEI or pro -immigration. and there would sort of be this, you'd see a tweet. And I just started seeing more and more of them that was like, this is toxic empathy. This is empathy gone too far. And I think a lot of people probably first encountered it with Elon Musk on Joe Rogan, talking about toxic empathy and it being one of the most dangerous things in the world today.

14:15It's like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide. Charlie Kirk talked about it on his podcast. Empathy is a made-up New Age term that does a lot of damage, but it is very effective when it comes to politics. Sympathy, I prefer more than empathy. That's a separate topic for a different time. Said it was the number one psychological trick of the left. So it's often being used to sort of say, this is why progressive politics have gone too far. and you know and in particular you might see it being used to sort of say we've gone soft as a nation um we've gone soft as christians we got too empathetic on immigration and it caused us to open up our borders too much and we let too many people in or dei is just a problem of being too empathetic for the marginalized and the oppressed and trying to put yourself in their shoes and then blame yourself for their problems instead of like helping to fix from an objective standpoint.

15:19So this is all like this idea of empathy is at the root of all of these issues that also happen to be really prominent issues within this particular administration. Okay, it's it just, I'm wrapping my head around it. Like it's an argument that was is very different from what I hear when I'm like sitting in that pew on Sunday. Because, you know, like I hear about a Jesus that like ate with sinners and tax collectors and sex workers and, you know, healed lepers and was like in the places where people were scared to go. I mean, with this line of thinking, was Jesus guilty of this toxic empathy that they're talking about?

16:04I wonder the same thing. I mean, when I think of Jesus and I think of Jesus's teachings, in particular, say, the Beatitudes, where we're talking about like, blessed are the persecuted, blessed are the suffering, blessed are the poor. I don't know how to read that other than to say God does put a particular care and honor for those who are marginalized and suffering. And when I think about Jesus himself and the sort of tenets of Christian theology, we have a God who literally became human in Jesus, which it's very much akin to, anyway, jumping into the quicksand, like becoming the person that you are trying to identify with.

16:52And truly, like, what an act of empathy from my perspective. I wonder if we are in a particular moment that's fertile ground for this. Just the other week we did a show about just how kind of Americans are, we're kind of more rude to each other now. We're not as kind as we used to be. Do people seem less empathetic now? Well, I certainly think it's true when there's a political divide. I think there's a lot less impetus, a lot less desire to see from the other side's perspective, in particular across political divides. And social media helps us to amplify the worst arguments on either side or the most extreme arguments on either side.

17:37and you just very rarely hear or see nuance, which I think helps us be able to put ourselves in other people's shoes and to be empathetic. So yes, I do actually think that we are less empathetic than we used to be, or we are at least less incentivized to be empathetic. All right, Roxanne Stone, thank you so much for explaining this to us. Thanks for having me. It's been great.

18:02Coming up, I take the whole empathy is a sin argument to an actual empathy scientist, who scan many a brain and leaf through all the relevant studies to actually define what empathy is and why it's actually, spoiler alert, a good thing.

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19:46When it comes to empathy, we've talked about the feelings. But what about the science? To find out, we turn to someone who studies empathy, how people experience it, and how they can get better at it. My name is Jamil Zaki. I'm a professor of psychology at Stanford. I run a lab where we study human connection, and I write books about how people can learn to connect better. Okay, so we've been talking about these definitions of empathy, but what is empathy exactly? Like, what are we talking about here? Empathy has three pieces. The first is vicariously catching or sharing what other people feel, which is called emotional empathy.

20:25The second is trying to understand what life and reality is like for another person, which is cognitive empathy. And the third is caring about others and wishing for their well-being to improve, which is often called empathic concern or compassion. These three pieces are connected to each other, but they can also be separated. Mm. And, you know, there's this idea that we've been talking about that kind of got us in this conversation. And it's this idea of empathy being a sin, like this idea of it dragging you down. And I wonder how you think of that from the perspective of, you know, someone who studies empathy.

21:06I think this is so important, and I've seen this in a lot of the very recent critiques of empathy, is this idea that if you empathize with somebody, you're sort of giving up your own perspective, that you will end up agreeing with them or just condoning whatever they do. That is not true at all. I do think there are certain ways in which empathy can lead us to make decisions that we probably don't want to make. For instance, favoring somebody who we empathized with versus somebody who we don't know. Favoring people who we're close to because we understand their emotions more. But that said, the idea that empathy is always toxic or that we should remove it from our lives seems quite misguided to me as well.

21:51Because empathy has enormous fundamental ways of supporting everything that we do well as a species. We often think of empathy as something that we do for other people, but it turns out that it actually helps us as well in many cases. In our lab, we find, for instance, when you empathize with others, that's one of the best things that you can do for your physical and mental health. So it helps us, the people who feel empathy, but it also helps the people around us. So physicians who are empathic treat their patients in ways that are more effective. Bosses who are empathic have happier and healthier employees.

22:31Parents and spouses who are empathic have healthier connections with family. And then finally, empathy helps us connect at a broad scale. People who feel it are more likely to volunteer, to donate to charity, and to see people who are different from them, free from the lens of prejudice, stereotyping, and bias. So lots of benefits.

22:53What happens when we're, I guess, more compassionate to each other? What's going on in our heads? Well, let's be clear that empathy doesn't always make us feel better. For instance, if you were in my lab right now and we were scanning your brain and you saw somebody else experience pain, like stub their toe or accidentally cut themselves with a knife, the parts of your brain that would come online would not be those associated with pleasure, but with pain. your brain would look as though you were going through the situation that this person was. But when we can use that empathy to make a positive difference for somebody else, that's when you start to experience benefits, right?

23:33So if I were to scan your brain while you instead did something kind for somebody who you felt connected to. Thank you, sweetie. Well, then the parts of your brain that come online when you eat chocolate would also be active. So it's interesting, right? Because I think a lot of us these days feel empathy but don't have any action. You go online and you see tragedy after tragedy, suffering all over the world, and you feel helpless. That's not a very healthy state for a person to be in. But when we can turn empathy into action, that's when it starts to benefit us. Yeah. I'm curious about, you've gotten into it a little bit, but what is the good kind of empathy and how do we know we're doing it?

24:16Generally speaking, what is difficult for people is emotional empathy, feeling what other people feel, especially if you are commonly around others who are suffering. So for instance, when medical students start their training, their level of emotional empathy, how much they catch other people's feelings, is a predictor of whether they will be burnt out a few years later. But by contrast, when we can feel what we think of as empathic concern, caring for people without taking on their pain, well, then that actually tends to benefit us. So the same medical students who report being high in concern and goodwill towards others when they start their training are less likely to be burned out.

25:02So are people naturally empathetic or is this something we learn over time? I think a little bit of both. So first of all, as a species, we are enormously empathic. We can care for people who are thousands of miles away, who we will never meet. That's something that no other animal does. So our capacity for empathy is fantastic. That said, it is a skill. And crucially, that means that by practicing the right habits, we can build our empathy on purpose the way that you would work out a muscle. So this is exactly what my lab works on most. So there's a couple of steps here. The first is just to know that you can.

25:45We've found, for instance, that people who think that empathy is a fixed trait are less likely to work on it and less likely to grow. But people who know that it's a skill and people who we tell it's a skill try to work on it, try to grow and actually do as a result. And then the second is to practice habits. So empathy changes not because you do some grandiose thing once, but changes because you just take a slightly different approach to what you do every day. So I encourage people, for instance, to put a daily calendar hold in for just five minutes where they can perform a small act of goodwill or service.

26:25Another really critical habit to develop is humility. Oftentimes, the reason that we can't empathize with other people is because we're too confident in our own perspective. So especially during disagreements, it's critical to say, what don't I know? What does this person have to teach me? And sort of shifting our goal in conversations from scoring points and dunking on people to trying to learn from them. How was your empathy going? Has studying this had any impact on how you think about how empathetic you are in day-to-day life? That's a really interesting question. So in psychology, there's this saying that research is me-search, meaning we study the stuff that's been interesting to us.

27:12And my parents are immigrants from very different countries. And I feel like my whole life has been an empathy experiment because I've had to bridge their totally different perspectives. And so that's, I think, kind of why I got into studying this. I think studying it has made me much more aware. I don't think it's made me better necessarily at empathy. I mean, I hope it has, but it certainly has made me aware of the barriers that get in its way. For me, it's stress. If I'm stressed and overwhelmed, everybody annoys me. I have no time for anybody. And I've become much more aware of, wow, this stress that I'm undergoing, my anxiety is shutting down my empathy.