Most of us believe that we are empathetic and open-minded people, yet our beliefs about ourselves can fall starkly out of alignment with the experiences others have with us in real-world interactions.
It must be relatively easy to hide one's lack of empathy. That's what enables psychopaths to go unnoticed in society. However, misdirected empathy can be just as dangerous and harmful as a lack of empathy altogether.
I will disclose that I am no psychologist. However, I have found that nothing lifts the veil and reveals others' truest selves more than living with an obscure or newly-identified chronic illness.
There is a phenomenon seen throughout modern history, where new evidence and knowledge remain largely rejected if the facts do not align with the existing paradigm. This is known as the Semmelweis Reflex, and is largely noted as the reason that John Snow was ignored when he produced a map to identify sources of Cholera in 1850's London.
Ever since my Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) became painfully acute in 2020, I have been made aware that virtually nobody is immune to the Semmelweis Reflex. I was guilty of it before, and will be guilty of it again in the future.
The main problem I encounter boils down to one societal paradigm: "If you are cold, you can just put on a jacket!" This is a justifiable, fundamental belief rooted in millennia of primal instinct and tradition.
Now imagine, as a mind exercise, that some form of chemical warfare is dusted onto all of the belongings in your home. It contaminates everything, and whenever you are in your home, you get sick from it. Whenever you retrieve an item from inside, that item still makes you nauseated when you bring it with you into the open air with you.
This mind exercise is a reality for people like me who suffer MCS. Our government allows dangerously toxic products on the market and permits toxic practices to take place in our environment. Nearly every non-natural molecule floating in the air around us causes us inflammation and pain, due to our bodies fighting to keep out even more toxins than they can handle. The pollution around us is making us sick whether we feel it or not -- think about the 1 out of 3 people who will develop cancer -- but people with MCS are the ones who suffer instantaneously from the pollution in unhealthy products and polluted locations.
Why am I outside wearing only a T-Shirt when it is 36 degrees and windy? It's not because I'm forgetful, or poor, or stubborn like others might assume. It is because, just like the dusting of chemical pathogen in this mind exercise, there is no jacket that I can buy that will not cause me a migraine and nausea.
The conversations go down pretty much the same way each time:
"Where's your jacket?"
"Are you crazy?"
"Here take my jacket..."
To which I reply -- as kindly as possible --
"I don't have one."
"I can't wear one."
"No thank you, you're too kind but..."
I watch in real-time as these lovely people feel rejected and grow disturbed when their gesture turns out to be a misfire. An inability to own or wear a jacket does not align with the common knowledge that people ought to own adequate Winter clothes and bundle up in the cold. Clothing a cold stranger sure seems like a simple solution to a simple problem. When this does not work out, suddenly the door shuts and the empathy is revoked. I know that these people think I'm stupid, but I can tell in this moment that they now also think I am bizarre or mentally unwell.
This Closed-Minded Empathy like this fails to adapt and remain intact and productive when presented with nuance. It is quickly revoked when the reaction falls short of expectations. Worst of all, people are unaware that they are falling into this trap, resulting in Empathy-Blindness that only the receiver is able to see.
I do not feel that I am owed any empathy, but it does hurt when the reason for the denial is just that the reality of my situation is too hard to handle or comprehend, and is therefore undeserving.
An alarming amount of people I speak to about my MCS tend to exhibit this Empathy-Blindness and the Semmelweiss Reflex in one way or another. The conversation takes a sharp turn from "I empathize with you" to "well I don't have empathy anymore if you're going to be that weird about this."
It is not the case that I want empathy from anybody. My point here is solely to point out the effect this quick abandonment of empathy can have for both the giver and the receiver. By denying the nuance in the situation, a potential connection is lost, and the reality of the receiver is once again denied. Both parties walk away unhappy and unfulfilled.
All of this together leads to some pretty awkward interactions, where empathetic-presenting individuals instantaneously reverse track and turn off their emotions once they see that it is not being received in accordance with their expectations. It always leaves me to speculate whether this individual only cared when the end result was going to make them look or feel good.
For the most part, follow-up questions about my illness in these incidents end up challenging the logic of the illness rather than an attempting to seek a greater understanding of it.
There have only been a handful of examples of what I believe to be the perfect handling of my situation. For example, a client of mine asked me to come into her house to see some landscape photographs. I told her that I was unable to come inside "due to a weird chronic illness." I was shocked that for the first time ever, no explanation was demanded of me and no challenges were made to my reasoning.
"Okay! That's fine. 'Weird illness' is all I need to hear. Let me go grab those photos and I'll bring them out here to show you!"
This interaction felt right to me because there was no questioning of my logic or validity. The emotion of empathy was carried out by the client adjusting to my needs by bringing the photographs outside, rather than the emotion being abandoned altogether. If this situation had played out like they usually do, the client would feel put-off by my refusal to enter their home, I would not have had the pleasure of seeing her photos, and she likely would have continued on to find a more normal landscaper.
We must introspect and evaluate our own empathy not by how it makes us feel or any sort of satisfying outcome, but by the feeling of empathy being overall useful and non-weaponized in the end. Instead of feeling rejected when our empathy is accidentally misdirected, we must use the empathy as impetus to gain a greater understanding of the situation in order to formulate a better plan of action.
Perhaps we can borrow from the principles of improv to form healthy pathways for our empathy. When presented with an opportunity to empathize or to act on our empathy, we ought to remember "yes, and..." as a way of accepting the situation for what it is, and admitting that we have more to learn before fully understanding, and subsequently acting.
"You are cold but you can't wear my jacket? I accept that, and I must not fully understand the scope of the problem."
"You can't enter the store? That's alright, and I'd definitely like to hear more about why."
A truly open-minded individual operates under the wisdom that they don't know what they don't know, resulting in a truer empathy that turns out productive in the end. The current epidemic of close-minded empathy is not only received poorly in the end, but results in unproductive negative emotions for the empathizer. Worst of all, on a large scale, this leads to the Semmelweiss Reflex causing the widespread rejection of valuable medical information, like John Snow's Cholera research in the 1850's. Only seeking the truth -- wherever it leads you -- can produce any outcome where empathy can be acted on.
For the personal-growth junkies out there like myself, understanding things like the Semmelweiss Reflex can help us to avoid the innate traps embedded in our human minds. Taking from Improv, we can change the way we utilize our emotions to act on creating a better future. Who knows what new illnesses and hardships our polluted, toxic future will bring us -- from environmental refugees to pollution-induced illnesses. What we can control is our reactions when presented with new evidence that contradicts our worldview, in order to seek truth and make optimal use of our emotions for the greater good.
I no longer leap to any conclusion or make any assumption based on what I see. I have learned through this that the most satisfying application of my empathy in most situations is in firstly learning new things through the experiences of others, especially when they defy my understanding of reality. Listening is actually one of the best medicines you can give someone. It is only through gaining knowledge and understanding that we can act accordingly and carry out the natural progression of our emotions productively.
Sources:
Vipin K. Gupta, Chhavi Saini, Meher Oberoi, Gagan Kalra, Md Imran Nasir,
Semmelweis Reflex: An Age-Old Prejudice, World Neurosurgery, Volume 136, 2020,
Pages e119-e125, ISSN 1878-8750, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wneu.2019.12.012. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878875019330402)
Zucco, G. M., & Doty, R. L. (2021). Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. Brain sciences, 12(1), 46. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci12010046 <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8773480/>
