The Website of Dr. Mark Goulston

When you lose the capacity to empathize with human beings
people become objects to like when they make you happy
or become violent towards when they make you angry.

Empathy is the greatest deterrent to violence and even anger, because literally and figuratively, you can’t walk in someone else’s shoes and step on their toes at the same time. Glibness aside, the reason for that is because empathy is a sensory experience where you are feeling what another person is feeling (what jargon wielding psychoanalysts call “vicarious introspection”) while anger is a motor function where you feel and get angry at another person as a reaction to a real or perceived hurt or injury by them.

There are two forces that decrease or completely sever the capacity for empathy. This includes on the one hand being so criticized, ignored, betrayed or in other ways assaulted by the outside world that your ability to keep perspective and override your animal reflex to get even is lost. On the other hand, this can occur when your psyche so loses touch with reality (as we are discovering with the shooters at Virginia Tech and now Northern Illinois University) that you perceive the world to be against you when it may not be.

What are the solutions? Research has consistently shown that one of the greatest correlations to adult mental health, well being and even success is having family dinners together two to three times/week. It’s not exactly clear why that is so, but one could postulate that when such dinners take place where presumably there are conversations that demonstrate caring and interest more than criticism, this may have both an assuaging and ameliorating effect on children being able to get stuff off their chest, talk their concerns out, be listened to and feel cared about.

When children grow up bathed in the empathy and caring of a family that loves them, the capacity for empathy endures through teens and adulthood that enables them to endure the slings and arrows of everyday life without blowing a fuse and exploding back at the world in violence.

On a grander scale, empathy is becoming in shorter supply as we shift away from relationships which are about relating in order to connect and become closer to transactionships which are about negotiating in order to win and get your way.

Read more About Teenage Violence: It’s the Rage.

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Check out Mark’s syndicated weekly Tribune column: “Solve Anything with Dr. Mark” in the Job section of the Sunday Los Angeles Times and other Tribune papers.

© 2008 Mark Goulston

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