The Ripple Effect
Watching the Olympics is torture…if you are someone who suffers from empathy. Add being a mother to that, and the angst grows exponentially. After watching the women go through their routines on the balance beam - through splayed fingers covering my face - I scanned my legs for bruises. I could feel every blow as their legs slammed on the four-inch wide piece of wood. Why couldn’t I see bruises on my legs? I certainly felt them, and the gymnasts disappointment.
And it didn’t end with the balance beam. I ached with the divers who made too big a splash, the men who stopped in the middle of their pommel horse routine because of loss of momentum, and the archers who literally missed the mark. Don’t even talk to me about the athletes who were spotlighted with a short clip of their life leading up to the Olympics, and then fell short of their dreams!
To be clear, empathy is a far cry from sympathy. Although both involve strong feelings and end in -mpathy, they differ greatly. Sympathy is feeling for a person, whereas empathy is feeling with a person.
One of my first memories of the debilitating aspect of empathy happened at Tufts Dental Clinic, my second year studying to become a dental assistant. Each morning the instructors would give us our assigned specialty. Joy of joys, this one day I was sent to the oral surgery department.
There, a sixteen-year-old boy sat in the dental chair, awaiting third molar extractions. The instructors were aware of my weakness in all things involving oral surgery, but they were desperate. No one else was available so I was recruited to assist, assured by the instructor that she would be by my side the whole time.
My mind was far from the patient as the first incision was made. I was doing math in my head. This boy was sixteen years old. My brother was sixteen years old. Well; if a equals b, and b equals c, then a equals c. In a flash, my mind was back at the clinic, with my brother in the chair, getting his wisdom teeth surgically removed. And I had to watch! My imagination certainly did not help matters.
As I held the suction in his mouth, at least I think it was in his mouth, I tried hard to blur my vision by slightly crossing my eyes. It was hard to block out the sounds. I thought it would be way too obvious if I clamped my hands over my ears. My instructor, who true to her word was over my right shoulder, asked how I was doing. I turned to her and shakily answered, “Okay.” After that things got fuzzy, even without crossing my eyes.
I soon found myself reclined in a darkened recovery room with a cold cloth on my forehead, and a nervous instructor overhead, peering into my eyes. Apparently, when I turned to her she saw that my normally ivory-colored, lightly freckled face was green. Again, my mind started drifting away from my surroundings, and to the sixteen-year-old patient somewhere in the clinic. Here he was getting his third molars extracted, and I was in the recovery room. Now that’s empathy!
Suffering with empathy is why I can’t watch the news, and sometimes have to scroll a bit quicker on Instagram. When the news plays a clip of a plane crashing, the sensationalism of the event seems to override the fact that people are on that plane. Each person has a mother and a father, somewhere. Are they married? Do they have children? Everyone is connected and matters to someone. They could be only an acquaintance or someone’s whole world. And yet, here we sit, passively watching as someone else’s world is imploding.
Yes, we feel bad for each victim’s family and friends, but what if we felt bad with them? The front door will not be opening, with a greeting that they are home. There is an empty place at the dinner table, forever. There will be no more hugs or quiet whispers of affection from that person on the plane that we just watched crash into the side of a canyon. I could go on…
On the flip side, there are many positives to being empathetic. When an empathetic person says, ‘I know how you feel,’ it takes on a whole new meaning. They should say, 'I feel with you.’ Empathetic people tend to be more caring and compassionate, to see the humanity in those around them. And it has a tremendous ripple effect.
There is a commercial for kindness that starts with one person holding the door for another and follows people doing kind acts, triggered by that first one - the ripple effect. Now, think of a commercial starting with someone being compassionate, and following the ripple of compassion triggered from that first response.
Saint Mother Teresa said, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten we belong to each other.” When I looked up that quote to be sure I had the wording correctly, the tag words noted underneath it caught me by surprise: compassion, connecting, humanity, inspirational, love, and sharing. What I had just written!
If empathy has a face, it is Saint Mother Teresa. The ripple effect of her life continues to grow and spread. One small, caring act - one response of compassion continues to be felt long after her death. Imagine what our world would look like today if instead of saying, ‘I feel for you,’ each person could say, ‘I feel with you.’