Empathy Isn't the Problem: Untangling the Myths and Staying Engaged Without Burning Out

Empathy isn’t the problem—but lately, some voices claim that it is, arguing that empathy leads to irrational decisions or even “civilizational suicide.” If you’re someone who cares deeply, you probably reject the idea that empathy is a threat to society. In fact, you likely believe we need more empathy in the world, not less. Yet at the same time, you might find yourself struggling with empathy exhaustion and wondering how to stay engaged without burning out. This episode is to help you unpack how this flawed argument is connected to your exhaustion and how you can stay engaged in meaningful social change while caring for yourself as a compassionate person.

In this episode of Mindset Unlimited, I explore why empathy isn't the problem or the solution but a complex human capacity that we need to understand to avoid manipulation and prevent burnout.

Some of what I explore in this episode includes:

• Unmasking the manipulation of empathy in political and media narratives
• Breaking the cycle of empathy and self-erasure
• Understanding compassion fatigue
• Engaging practical tools for emotional resilience

EPISODES REFERENCED:

How to Avoid Overwhelm and Access Joy

How to Prioritize Your Needs (Beyond Maslow)

How to Navigate Societal Gaslighting and Stay Empowered 

LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE:

Darwin Misunderstood 

Interview with Sam Altman 

Suicidal Empathy critique 

Nazi Mind

Are Billionaires Good For Society? 

The People’s Media Project

From Compassion Fatigue to Resilience 

Hypernormalization  

Dr. Scott Lyons 

In Defense of Empathy

Why a Lack of Empathy Is the Root of All Evil

Social Change Now by Deepa Iyer

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This podcast was produced by Valerie Friedlander Coaching

Proud member of the Feminist Podcasters Collective

Transcript

Valerie Friedlander: 0:00

Hello, my friends and welcome to another episode of Mindset, unlimited. Mindset tips, tools and inspiration for women in a time of change, I'm your host. Valerie Friedlander, ICF, certified life coach, sociologist, intersectional feminist, truth seeker, artist, mom and nerd. Today we are talking about empathy isn't the problem, untangling the myths and staying engaged without burning out. There's a lot of reasons why I wanted to talk about this, and I have spent a lot of time digging in to various articles and just this is a super researched, chock full of references episode. If you want to follow along with me, all of the links to the things are in the show notes, so you're welcome to check those out as well. Part of the reason I wanted to engage this is because so many of the people that I work with are highly empathetic. They are people who really care deeply about the people in their lives, as well as making a difference, making a positive impact in the world and in this current climate, social, political climate, it's hard, it is hard to be one of those people. And there's also a lot of noise, a lot of talk, a lot of black and white thinking around empathy and the idea of empathy. You may have heard some of it in the news, and I wanted to engage that. I wanted to go, Okay, what is going on here? Why? Why is this a thing? I find that understanding stuff can help me make more intentional choices around how I both support myself as I deal with the impact of those things, as well as deciding how I want to show up to them and what do I need to help myself and the people around me do that. So just a short little breakdown we're talking about, why are we talking about this? So I'm going to dig a little bit into what's coming up and what sparked my you know, what I think we need to talk about this. I'm going to talk about what is empathy and break that down, because we throw words around. As you know, I'm a word nerd, and I want to know like, what are we what are we actually saying here exhaustion in this particular social, political climate, and what do we do? So a little bit more detail about like, what you're gonna get in this episode is we're looking at the manipulation of empathy, how it's being twisted in today's political and media narratives. What happens when we confuse empathy with self erasure, and how do we find balance there? How chronic stress and compassion fatigue affect your ability to show up and stay grounded? And of course, tools to reconnect with the things that help you show up and stay grounded like your values, understanding stress cycle and reclaiming your strength, in your compassion and in your empathy. So this is very, very full episode. I before I dive in and get started, I do want to encourage you. I'm working on the whole like back end SEO stuff, but with the rise of AI and search engine shifting and all of that, it's really hard to reach people just it's just a lot. So if you enjoy this episode, if you find this episode helpful, please share it with others. It would mean so much to me. I think this is really important information, so I would appreciate it also, if you feel inclined to leave a review, even just like clicking the stars in Spotify as an example, that helps the systems tell other people that this is something that people are interested in or might be interested in, So it raises it up in the search. So if you would be willing to take a moment to do that, I would super, super appreciate it. And of course, I always love to hear from you. So reach out if you have questions. Want me to dig into something further, whatever I love hearing from you. So all right, with all that said, without further ado, let's get started. Let's start with why I'm doing this episode. Now, I work with a lot of empathetic people, so anytime there's talk about empathy, I'm like, Hmm, what's going on there? What are we talking about? What is this looking like? And like many of you, I saw the quote running around that was made by Elon Musk. That was the fundamental weakness of Western civilization, is empathy. And that. Quote was in memes. It was all over the place, and I saw it in juxtaposition to a researcher who, well, a psychologist who worked with the Nazis who were to go on trial for the Nuremberg trials, and talking about how empathy was the thing that was lacking. And that kind of juxtaposition. And I was like, Okay, well, this is very one or the other. It's good, bad, good versus bad. And I actually think that that kind of juxtaposition is part of where we run into problems. It's where we have a tendency to lose the nuance of what it means to be human. So I decided to dig in and find out what was going on there. So that quote from Musk was from a conversation that he had with Joe Rogan on that podcast. And more of the full quote was, 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. So those are like, What the heck is that? So I dug into, what is this idea, this suicidal empathy concept, that he is referring to, and it comes from someone that both musk and Rogan have looked up to. Rogan's had him on his podcast before it's Gad Saad who is a professor of marketing at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He is the former holder of the Concordia University Research Chair in evolutionary behavioral sciences and Darwinian consumption. He pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior. So he defines this idea of suicidal empathy as the inability to implement optimal decisions when our emotional system is tricked into an orgiastic, hyperactive form of empathy deployed on the wrong targets. Evolution has endowed our emotional and cognitive systems with the capacity to deploy our resources strategically. This is why parents are willing to jump in front of a bus to save their biological children, but are less likely to sacrifice their lives to save a random child across the globe. It does not make them callous, but Darwinian beings capable of cost benefit trade offs rooted in universal features of our human nature. Okay, so some of the things that jumped out in that little paragraph to me had to do with emotional system is tricked, and the idea of wrong targets, but also the idea of Darwin and what he's I mean, the whole thing is just kind of a mess. So what I'm seeing in that is, how do you decide who the wrong targets are? I mean, his idea is, obviously that it is those who aren't biological. But how do you decide if the emotional system is tricked? And I'm saying this as somebody who, again, I've worked with people who have dealt with being gaslit, who have dealt with narcissistic behavioral type, things that are people pleasers and have struggled with that overload of empathy, and we're going to talk about that in a little bit, but I just that whole thing was like, what part of it is, you know, the misunderstandings of Darwin, the two pieces that are commonly utilized around Darwin have to do with natural selection and survival of the fittest. Now, natural selection is the idea that there is a prescient directionality to evolution. So this is where he's talking about, like the Darwinian beings capable of cost benefit trade offs, as though it's this logical process that we know that this is going to benefit us, etc. But the problem is, natural selection is non prescient. It cannot be looked forward to anticipate what changes are going to be needed for survival. Truly, it doesn't make any sense, because it assumes that we have so much more control over our environment and what's happening in our ecosystems than we do. Certainly we have an impact on it, but in terms of the trajectory of it and what we're creating and impacting, we can't predict like that. This is one of the problems with humans, is that we are one of the only, I believe, creatures that can project ourselves into the future. But we do it really badly, because we do it based on where we currently are, not where we will be. So it assumes that we have power that. That we don't really have, and it also focuses in on individuals, like the idea that we individually protect our own biological children more than other children, which isn't necessarily true, because there are plenty of adoptive parents who would have a big issue with that conversation in the first place. And additionally, we're talking species evolution, not individual evolution, so applying darwinianism to individuals doesn't work and is just another example of our own conditioning around hyper individualism run very amok in our own philosophical understanding of ourselves and the idea of survival of the fittest. This idea that survival depends entirely on cutthroat competitive fitness has been very much debunked. It is been shown that species practice both mutual struggle and mutual aid. So there's like a dual disposition of selfishness and selflessness, competitiveness and cooperativeness that all lead to evolution. Most of this is from an article from Scientific American that is linked in the show notes. And this was a slight digression from the primary focus of the episode, but I really felt like it was important because of the way Darwin is utilized in these conversations. As I was digging into all of this, I came across the work of Dr Jabra Ghneim. I apologize if I didn't pronounce his last name correctly. He is a Doctor of Education at Brigham Young University, and he wrote a paper looking at this argument and exploring it and his background. His research focuses on the role of entrepreneurship education in promoting the social inclusion of refugees, particularly through communities of practice, and I really wanted to dig further into his work, but only so much time he emphasizes the core criticism of this idea of suicidal empathy is that suicidal empathy is being used as a rhetorical tool to delegitimize policies aimed at equity or humanitarian aid. Labeling certain actions as quote, unquote, suicidal empathy can become a convenient way to avoid grappling with the structural injustices or historical imbalances that such policies attempt to address. So it was helpful to have that concisely identified in his critique. He explores a variety of philosophical, sociological, psychological aspects of the dynamics going on, and I have that linked in the show notes too, if you want to read through the entire paper, it's very interesting. In his critique, some of the core questions that he is exploring is, can a virtue like empathy become a vice? Can compassion for others overshadow efforts to uphold societal values, enforce laws and maintain security? Part of what he brings up in this is the idea of empathetic distress. Empathetic distress is a term that psychologists use for the phenomenon that occurs when individuals become so consumed by the suffering of others that they make decisions that are considered irrational or counterproductive. And of course, this ties into that idea of suicidal empathy that societies can also get so caught up in the suffering of others, they make decisions that are irrational or counterproductive to the social well being. What this brings up to me is a question of who decides what it means to be well. Who decides societally, what it means to be well, if we're talking individually, theoretically, the individual would have that deciding factor. But what does it mean for a society? And in Dr Saad's view and his examples that he gives of where we have suicidal empathy. It really is a limitation around what society can be. It is a reduction of possibilities and this scarcity mindset, like there's no room for everyone, and it ties into that idea of survival of the fittest being a competition amongst people. One of the examples that he gives is the idea that migrants to the US receive greater aid than veterans. And even if that were actuality, what is a solution to that? Is it to take aid away from other people, or is it to extend aid how we think about each other and how we are well together has a lot to do with our values. The example that he gives on an individual level is about if you feel empathy for a person who is struggling, and you let them into their home and then they steal from you, and that would be an example of suicidal empathy, where your empathy harmed you. But this turns to the idea of, what are our values. I think of the story of Les Mis and in that story, if you're not familiar, the main character has been convicted of stealing bread and served time, and he is released, and he is struggling, and one of the guards has decided that he will steal again and is following him to wait to re arrest him. And he is helped by a priest, I believe, who opens his home to him and and lets him stay. And then he steals from the priest, and runs off with, I think it's two candlesticks. And the guard catches him and goes, I've got you. And the priest comes out and says, Oh, no, no, I gave those to him, and you forgot these other pieces of silver that I also gave you. And so that's the thing that comes to mind is like, what values are we upholding? Another thing that comes to mind, you know, when we think about values, when we think about what our capacity is and where our capacity is being constricted, in terms of our ability to care for each other and the well being of each other. And we're going to talk a little bit more later, about like in group, out group, and money and things like that, but this idea of scarcity, of what we think we don't have, but where we might actually have more than we think. And I did an episode A while back on Maslow, and I talked about the Blackfoot tribe. And in the Blackfoot tribe, the idea of wealth was how much you had to give to the community. So it really has to do with the way we think about society and the way we understand ourselves, and what values we choose to uplift in our interactions with each other. So this sets the groundwork for what we're talking about in this episode. I know there's like a long groundwork setup, but I think it's important to be aware of the ways in which this conversation about empathy can be manipulated, in ways in which our empathy is being manipulated, and how do we start to think and engage intentionally in an empathetic way? So in order to do that, let's back up a minute and talk about what is empathy. So there are two types of empathy, there's cognitive empathy, which is also known as mentalizing or perspective. Taking this type of empathy involves consciously adopting another's perspective and trying to understand how they are thinking or feeling. Then there's affective empathy, also known as emotional empathy, emotional contagion, vicarious experience or empathetic sharing. Affective empathy entails feeling elements of another person's emotions. This is a somewhat automatic process involving mimicry, where another's expression or demeanor is mirrored. This is what I resonate with personally. I used to think it was such a superpower, I could sit next to you and feel your emotions, and then I was like, Wait, is that? Like, maybe that's not actually good. And that led me to a lot of people pleasing force, helping, controlling kind of behaviors, because if somebody was upset around me, I needed to fix them so that I could feel better. So it wasn't actually about taking care of them, it was really about taking care of me through them, partly because I didn't, I didn't have a sense of self or boundaries. So this is, I think, where we can run into issues with empathy, and I'm going to get to that in just a very quick second. I did appreciate Debbie L Stoewen's outline of the difference between sympathy, empathy and compassion. She says, sympathy is I care about your suffering. Empathy. Is I feel your suffering, and compassion is I want to relieve your suffering. And I would say compassion, I want to relieve your suffering, has to do with caring about the suffering, not necessary. And it could be because of feeling the suffering the empathy part, but it can also be like I have that separation between myself and my feelings and you and your feelings, which I do think is a healthy thing to have, and I wanted to separate those three things, because so often we use them interchangeably, particularly empathy and compassion. And so what is? What is the difference? Sometimes empathy leads to compassion, but I do question, is it compassion? If it's because you're trying to fix yourself through fixing somebody else? So that's where we can run into some problems with empathy. It's and the difference of the problems with empathy that I'm going to dig into versus the problems of empathy that the professor and musk have identified is it's not about emotional blindness. It's not about just automatically doing things that are counter to your well being. It really has to do with stress response patterning and attachment patterning that all tie into social conditioning. So that's where I'm separating what I'm going to talk about from what they think is the problem is, it's it's not, it's not breaking us down because we're just being dumb, being blind, it is an issue that we need to look at in terms of how we've been conditioned societally, as well as individually, in terms of safety and belonging and what works for us. And so this is another place where we differentiate values, our conditioned values, to our chosen values. I talk about that in another episode. So, so let's, let's touch on, like the two big, big things around empathy that I notice in terms of difficulty, one is empathetic assumption. So if I'm sitting next to you and I'm picking up that you are upset, what often can happen is that my experience gets super imposed upon your experience. I don't necessarily know why you're upset, what's going on that you're upset what you need, but I would make assumptions on that based off of what I would need and what's going on for me. So there's a projection of how I would feel and what I would want versus asking. And this is that differentiation between the idea of the Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and the platinum rule, which is Do unto others as they would like done to them, so separating those out and getting curious instead of assuming, is one of the things that we can do when it comes to a problem related to empathy. Another aspect of that same empathetic assumption is also knowing empathetic capacity. When people are tired or stressed, they tend to show less empathy than when they're calm and rested. So knowing what kind of energetic capacity you have around holding space for someone else's feelings and your own ability, so when we're holding space, we're not necessarily taking on somebody else's feelings, but we're allowing room to feel them, to pick them up, to recognize them and sit with them and be with them. If I don't have the capacity for that, that's where I can lose myself in somebody else's feelings. I can take them on and own them as my own, and make assumptions, and then I'm not showing up well for that person. So I need to make sure that I'm caring for myself in that. Okay, so another aspect that is a challenge in empathy is in group empathy. And actually Saad speaks to that, but in kind of the opposite way that I'm going to talk about it, in a lot of ways, what He's emphasizing is this idea of only having in group empathy, and when we have out group empathy is when we're creating suicidal empathy is essentially what I understand from what I'm reading, in terms of what he's saying. So in group, empathy is where we have a narrow focus, and we are prioritizing the suffering that you're familiar with over other suffering. So that's instead of extending moral obligations to all people, you're only extending them to those that you happen to naturally empathize with. So this is where I would say the suicidal empathy idea plays into the propaganda machine supporting oppressive systems and taking us down the road to genocide because it only upholds in group empathy, instead of valuing empathy for all people and the effort that it takes to extend empathy to people that you don't necessarily naturally empathize with. Okay, so that's a lot. I know it's a lot to take in. I covered a number of things, and I'm recognizing, as I'm going that this episode is going to be kind of long. So this is a good place to just kind of take a breath and sit with all of the facets of empathy. It has a lot of nuance to it. It is not good or bad. There are things that we need to recognize within ourselves, and this is why self work is so key to support our ability to show up with other people and to live into our values we are naturally going to gravitate towards in group empathy if we have particular trauma experience. And again, trauma is not necessarily the big T trauma where something happened to us, but also where something didn't happen that should have happened, we are going to be more resistant. It's also where discomfort can come into play. If I am empathetic and I show up to you in a way that I think will be helpful, I may find that my intention is mismatched to my impact, because if I don't actually know if what would support me isn't what would support you, or if I am, turns out, projecting onto you certain things That make sense to me but might not fit you because of our own lived experiences related to our own identities, sexual, gender, relational cultural experiences, then I may get feedback that isn't what I want. It may not feel good to me. It may cause discomfort. And so my ability to sit in the discomfort of receiving that there was a misalignment between what I thought and what my intention was and what my impact was is key. It's so important, because otherwise, if I can't sit with that discomfort, then I can exacerbate the harmful impact that I didn't want in the first place, because I prioritize my comfort over the growth edge and leaning into the growth edge that I'm being invited to look at discomfort is an opportunity for growth. But if I can't sit with it and deal with my own discomfort, then instead of uplifting my intention and finding a different way to engage my intention, I am going to sacrifice the intention for upset and discomfort over the impact that wasn't what I expected, and this is particularly key for those of us with a greater number of societal privileges based on our identities to do this work because discomfort learning about oppression and harm is not as bad as being oppressed and harmed, and this is especially challenging when my locus of control is outside of myself, trying to make myself feel better by trying To make you better so trying to address my comfort by addressing you so my locus of control is outside of myself. That's where we often slide down that slippery slope and lose sight of what we thought we were trying to do because. We were actually trying to do wasn't what we thought we were trying to do. Let me say that again, this is where we get lost, because what we consciously think we are trying to do help somebody else is not what we're actually trying to do because of our own wounds that are being projected onto them that we are trying to fix through them, and if it doesn't work, then it feels like that wound gets bigger, is got salt in it, and that's where we start to lock down. So even just noticing, I'm even more activated now than I was when I noticed that there was something going on where I had that empathy. Empathy can be an opportunity to check in with yourself. And I would actually even encourage checking in with yourself first before you then extend. Because when we extend an assumption and extend to control, even if we don't mean to, that's where we get lost and we're not actually doing what we intended, versus if we've checked in, I do have capacity. I'm in a space where I can receive new information and I can reach out with curiosity, then I can receive what will actually be supportive and what actually is needed. So I can engage with compassion, because I experienced empathy. And then, of course, the ability to extend empathy to people who I'm not naturally inclined to empathize with because of my own conditioning, is another key component. Okay, so part two is, let's talk about the dehumanization of ourselves and of others. So we just talked a little bit about empathy and the dynamics of where empathy is actually problematic. And now let's talk about where this can get really lost and how it's being exploited in our current systems. So the people that are primarily uplifting this narrative around societal suicidal empathy are the people who are exploiting others for their personal gain. Those are the ones you hear mostly talking about this idea and uplifting this idea. I'll give you a couple examples. So let's talk about money. Some of these folks, like Jeff Bezos of Amazon, where the workers are being exploited, the poor are essentially paying for the work and making the wealthy super wealthy. There's Zuckerberg replacing people with AI on meta. And of course, it's useful to you know, we were using the people to build all these systems and replacing them with machines because they don't require health insurance, health benefits, sick leave, human things. So these are the places. These are the people that you're typically hearing from. Part of the issue that comes up here is they don't want us empathizing with the people that are being crunched under their boots, even if we are them. They want to reduce our empathy. They want us to use the products and aspire to be them. A good example of this is Sam Altman, who recently did an interview where he said we should encourage people to make tons of money and then also find ways to widely distribute wealth and share the compounding magic of capitalism. One doesn't work without the other. You can't raise the floor and not also raise the ceiling for very long. And I'd rather hear from candidates about how they're going to make everyone have the stuff billionaires have, instead of how they're going to eliminate billionaires. The problem with this is that it's not possible for us to all be billionaires. It's just, it's not it's not feasible realistically. But this is this idea that, like, well, you should be able to be a billionaire. You should be able to be like us, and we want you to want to be us and imagine you could be us and empathize with us versus the people that we exploit. Those people don't matter. They're irrelevant. Aspire to be me so that you can be relevant. Candice said, has a great article where she talks about billionaires are not your friend, and the high cost of excess wealth in society. And one of the things that she highlights is, let's humanize these billionaires. Billionaires have the same 24 hours in a day. Way as the rest of us, and that is often used as a weaponization of like well, we all have the same 24 hours, so you must not be using yours well. But here's the kicker, their immense wealth isn't a result of some superhuman time management effort or intellect. It's built on the back of our collective labor involving various levels of exploitation, and it's not necessarily even like direct wrongdoing. The system itself is designed to reward those at the top disproportionately, far beyond individual contribution, and of these people, there is a spectrum that moves from people being blissfully ignorant to their impact or just really, really trying to feel like generous, kind people like Sam Altman. I've heard interviews with him where he really wants to think that he's thinking of everybody, and he wants the best for everybody, and he's a really good person and all of that, but he is not grounded in the reality, and he cannot receive any kind of accountability to that. And there's an interview that he did with Trevor Noah where Trevor, like, tries to get him to see stuff, and he's like, nope, and La, la, la, nope, nope. It's all fine. It's gonna be fine. Everything will be totally okay. And in that though, there's still active manipulation of systems to safeguard or increase fortunes, and that's often our expense. And again, some people are like, ah, and some people are like, I don't care. You know, those people don't matter. Don't be one of those people, except most of us are those people. So basically, as Candace says, the reality is that the staggering levels of wealth that billionaires amass necessitate practices like maintaining low wages, evading taxes through intricate global schemes, and prioritizing corporate profits over the well being of communities and the environment. So this is a place where the in group, out group, we're being encouraged and propagandized. Is that a word? I don't know. It is now to make ourselves the out group that we don't want to be empathized with the people that we should aspire to, and put ourselves down and make it an individual problem that we are not as successful, ie, wealthy, as these other people. So we're going to actively be encouraged to put down the people who aren't wealthy, including ourselves, with this idea that eventually we could be those people, which is just simply not possible. Sam's idea of the raising the ceiling and the floor, the problem is that there's no raising of the floor. So why are we raising the ceiling? Well, that's what we're doing. We're raising the ceiling and we're not raising the floor. And he's right. They do have to go hand in hand, but they are not, and that is the place that gets wiped from the conversation. Okay, so that's one aspect. Let's talk about another aspect of in group out group race, and this one is playing in, just like the money one is playing in in our current socio political environment. These are the two that really, really stand out. There are more, but they're the ones I'm digging into right now. The common view of race for a long time, and this ties to eugenics and everything, is that traits essential to race are inter are unchangeable. Now we know race is a construct. It's totally made up by people, so that doesn't even make any sense, but that is the narrative. So let's tie to another period of time where this in group out group, and the idea of empathy for the in group and dehumanization of the out group came into play for a very, very long time. There's continuous and there still is to be to be clear like there still is a continuous portrayal of Jews as duplicitous, malevolent and powerful as far back as the beginning of the 19th century, and that was harnessed by Hitler and his Dark Souls skillful manipulation of tactics to turn people's pre existing anti Jewish sentiments into hatred, initially via propaganda books, essays and speeches alluding to a Jewish conspiracy to gain world leadership, and later also by staging hoaxes of foreign attacks on Germans and the Nazi regime's benevolence. The idea being that if these characteristics are inherent per racial theory, then it would be impossible to unlearn them. And so the only solution is extermination. This is. Categorizing is an aspect of dehumanization, assigning and limiting the possibilities of a person based on contrived, perceived characteristics of their identity. And while this excerpt is related specifically to what was done to the Jewish people by white Germans under the Nazi regime. It is important to note that they were inspired by what was done to black people here in the United States, and this continues to be done against black people and Jewish people, as well as Palestinian people and Latino people, particularly right now, Latino migrant people in the US. It is done by the people in power, and particularly perpetuated by the use of things like propaganda. The main function of propaganda is to elicit strong emotions in a group of people in order to create a cohesive group organized around common values, and implicitly or explicitly define who are included from a group who are excluded from group membership, in order To mobilize the forces of group polarization. This is weaponization of empathy. This is these people deserve to have our empathy, and these people do not. This goes back to gad said comment about deployed on the wrong targets. Emotional system is tricked into an orgiastic, hyperactive form of empathy deployed on the wrong targets, who are the wrong targets, and looking at where his philosophy, where he places his philosophy, and where people who are uplifting his idea where their philosophy lies. It's within these propaganda machines of who belongs in the in group. The in group are the billionaires you should want to be in the in group. The in group are white people. The other people can't possibly even be in the in group. So those are just a couple examples of what is happening there and so how this idea of weaponized empathy is actually being weaponized. Okay, so let's move over to this idea of desensitization, what we normalize, we accept what is happening here. So within this propaganda in group, out group, we are wired for belonging. We want to belong. So if we have the ability to fit into the in group, or pretend that we could fit into the in group, that's where we are going to put energy to feel safe. So all of these tools are to make some people feel like by putting other people down, by devaluing other people, dehumanizing other people, they will become safer. So an example of all of this state sanctioned images of people in dehumanizing conditions. This is a tactic of psychological warfare to make examples of real people with full lives, peoples whose loved ones are looking for them and mobilizing for them to come home safely. These examples of people in dehumanizing conditions are intended to deter us all from public dissent, to scare us into compliance when we share state sanctioned images, whether we are the ones re sharing them or the people who are sharing them, we are not only participating in The planned campaign, but also doing their work for free, emboldening their allies, normalizing imagery of inhumanity into our feeds, and putting our communities in a freeze state. This all derives from the People's media project digging into this information and a 2023 review found that repeated exposure to dehumanizing prison imagery, especially when stripped of context, lowers public empathy and increases tolerance for punitive policies. The more often people see prisoners depicted as sub human, the more likely they are to accept harsh punishment as normal or even necessary. That is the power of repetition. US media uses repetitive, demeaning images of black people, Hispanic people, Latino people, to justify systems of violence. It was done back. Think when we had slavery and Jim Crow promoting the idea that slavery was fine, segregation is appropriate, mass incarceration is necessary, it trained the public to accept and expect black and brown people's subjugation. Many of us know this is an issue, so I know that if you're listening to this, you are, I'm probably preaching to the choir here, and it is really important to pull these things forward, to be aware of the dynamics I often have talked about, like repeating things over and over again. We can't help but have it come into our being in some way, it takes even more conscious effort. So being really mindful of your consumption and what you share is key. We know these things are an issue. We push back and strive to overcome it, yet we are increasingly exhausted by design, and I think that's really important to remember that our exhaustion is by design, and we also want to stay engaged compassion fatigue, the classic symptom, is a decline in the ability to feel sympathy and empathy and accordingly, act from a place of compassion, our ability to care, to feel, to take action is replaced by an outwardly impassive, detachedness. Someone experiencing compassion fatigue becomes more task oriented, less emotion focused, and can increasingly pull away from others, becoming socially isolated, profound physical and emotional exhaustion are classic symptoms. So being really aware of what's happening inside of you, if that's something that's happening for you, then really giving yourself room to take care of yourself, this is where we have a continually activated stress response. And again, I'm going to reiterate, this is by design. A lot of people are expressing the experience that is defined as hyper normalization. This is a term that was articulated in 2005 by Alexey jorchak, again, my apologies if I'm mispronouncing to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia. Hyper normalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening. People are seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken, and the second is that for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people then carry on with their lives as normal, despite systemic dysfunction, give or take, a heavy load of fear, Dread, denial and disassociation. So this is where hyper normalization engages, that juxtaposition between the dysfunctional and the mundane. It's described by haraf harucha a digital anthropologist as the visceral sense of waking up in an alternate timeline with a deep bodily knowing that something isn't right, but having no clear idea how to fix it. It's reading an article about childhood hunger and genocide, only to scroll down to a carefree listicle highlighting the best dressed celebrities, or a whimsical quiz about what Pop Tart Are you? I wanted to highlight hyper normalization, because, similar to compassion fatigue, we start to shut down our ability to show up because there is an overwhelm of experience. So this is two different facets. We have the desensitization from the propaganda machine, from the in group, out group stuff, and then we have the spaces of the hyper normalization, where we feel this sense that something is wrong, but we don't really know how to engage it at all. So it's like an overwhelm of feeling versus a depletion of or numbing of feeling. So I think both of those are really important to recognize and engage and name because naming them and what we are dealing with when you're coming from a place as an empathetic person wanting to uphold your values and show up to the things that are going on, when we can name these two poles and experiences, it can create a form. Of psychological relief, as Caroline Hickman, a psychotherapist, expresses, the worst thing in the world is to feel that you're the only one who feels this way, and that you are going quietly mad and everyone else is in denial. That terrifies people. It traumatizes people again. This is that like something should be there and isn't there that is a type of trauma. People who feel the wrongness of current conditions acutely may be experiencing some depression and anxiety, but those feelings can be quite rational, not a symptom of poor mental health alarmism or a lack of proper perspective. So for those of you who are listening, part of the reason I wanted this part two to this idea of empathy is you probably are somebody who considers yourself to be a highly empathetic person. And when you are in this space of, okay, well, how do I function? I know all of these things, all of these polls, all of these dynamics. I know that what's being said is wrong. It's being weaponized. It's activating my empathy maliciously. It is playing on these very real dynamics around empathy to shut me down. Well, what do I do about it? And it's important to name it and also recognize that it's it's happened before this shutdown happens, not just because of a lack of feeling, but because of an overwhelm of feeling. In the 1955 book, They Thought They Were Free the Germans 1933 to 45 journalist Milton Mayer described a similar state of freeze in German citizens during the rise of the Nazi Party. Quote, you don't want to act or even talk alone. You don't want to go out of your way to make trouble. Why not? Well, you're not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone that restrains you. It's also genuine uncertainty. We just don't know. And this is where I think we're seeing a lot of it, in the world, or in US society, and people who care and they want to do something and they don't like what's happening, but they don't know what to do. And I would even say, I often run into this where I'm like, I don't know what to do. What will make a difference, what sacrifices but not too much. What do I need to give up or show up for? How do I engage the enormity and overwhelm is a state of inaction, and it happens when we feel like something is bigger than us. So it is a normal response. So I think first and foremost, really, truly, it is recognizing the feelings, recognizing the experience, and being with that, not telling yourself that something's wrong with you, or buying into sometimes we know consciously some of these dynamics that are happening around us, but we can't fend off all of it. So a piece of it gets in, and the piece of it that is most likely to get in is the over individualization, because we're all so conditioned around individualism that that piece of it's a you thing, and you have to do things alone. Thing is what's going to get emphasized, and that is a core component of how we feel overwhelmed and we freeze. So understanding the role of stress and the stress response cycle is the next piece of this. So we can name these things, we can know these things are going on, and then we have stress and the stress response cycle. So I want to highlight something that in a training I recently did with Dr Scott Lyons, he highlighted, which is that stress is how we mobilize energy to meet life's demands. So it is important, and it is appropriate for it to be here there is energy being mobilized to meet life's demands. The problem is, and we have the uncertainty. We don't know what the demands are. We don't know what to do with energy, and it just sits in us, and it ends up turning inward, so recognizing that it's natural, it's normal for stress to be there. Stress is not something to avoid, it's something to complete. So we have an activization, we need to mobilize it and then allow it to deactivate and give ourselves room to restore so that we can then be ready the next time an activation is present, also recognizing what is real and what is not. What actually needs that activation and what is past and doing that healing work is really key, because then we are more able to access and assess a situation to know, yes, I actually need the stress response right here, right now, versus I need it just all the time, everywhere. One of the other pieces that comes up is fear of losing that stress energy and that ability to show up and falling into the desensitization and normalization. So we hold on to the stress to keep us from becoming desensitized or normalizing what's happening. Yet it is necessary to make room for being fully human, so that we can hold on to our own humanity. In order to hold space for others humanity, we do have to actually also humanize ourselves, which means access to a full range of human emotions, which includes joy as an example. How do you hold on to both? Okay, so I'm going to touch on that it's getting a little bit long in this episode. I do want to highlight that an episode I just did recently engages that it'll be linked in the show notes, but it is called How to Avoid overwhelm and access joy in a time of change. And I think that one I aimed to engage some of these pieces, because, again, we do need to have access to the whole range. So a couple things that can also help. One, all right, so we've talked about naming what's happening. We've talked about recognizing that stress is a normal response under our circumstances. The other piece is also recognizing that social change isn't good or bad, it just is. So this goes back to that whole thing we started with about like, ooh, change is bad. We want to hold on to what it is. No, it's not good or bad, it just is. It's what we do with it that matters. So empowered change versus disempowered change, our ability to show up to the unknown. So again, emotional overwhelm is not an indication of the need to shut down. We need structural change. So what are our collective values? Who do we want to be. What world do we want to create? Remembering the ends don't justify the means. The means create the ends. What are we seeding through our action, individually, collectively? So when we can tap into what are our collective values? What do we want to uplift in the world, then we start connecting to other people who have that same desire, and start working collectively, not individually, like, oh, I have an idea. Let's do these things, but communing with one another to be able to seek a way forward. What are we going to do together? Values are a grounding point of discernment. One of the things that Paul sagard, PhD in defense of empathy, speaks to is empathy without reason is blind, but reason without empathy is empty. So being able to access our brains and our ability to process and get curious and engage is important, but we also need to be able to care and extend ourselves in care beyond just what our in group, our standard in group says, but from there, and of course, that's where our values come in and moral reasoning. Okay, so to dig further into that, I encourage you to check out the recent episode again, how to avoid overwhelm and access joy in a time of change. I'm going to go through those points that I encourage, naming what's happening, feeling the feelings, understand the role of stress and the stress cycle that activation, mobilization, deactivation, restoration, and getting support to navigate that, because sometimes those go off, and the activation stays activated because of our past experiences as well as the moment that we're in. Part of that can be knowing what your values, knowing what's important to you, and connecting with community to help guide where that mobilization happens. Remembering systemic problems require systemic solutions. So knowing your part in that episode I talk about the book social change now, a guide for reflection and connection, written by Deepa Iyer. Take a look at that, connect with other people, so that you have a direction, even in the uncertainty of things, of where the mobilization can occur for you, that works for you, because otherwise we get spread too thin. We're spraying everywhere. We're not targeting the thing that actually needs the attention. And then once you. Know, what are your values? Where's the aim and who you're doing that with taking meaningful action. Taking meaningful action helps prevent burnout that is caused by helplessness. Tapping into meaning rooted in your values and your ability, allows you to mobilize that stress response so that it can be deactivated at least temporarily, you have space to restore and engage the next opportunity that fits within your values and the meaningful action that you take within the community that you're part of. Okay, I know that's a lot. There's a long episode. I appreciate you. I appreciate that you're listening. I hope this was helpful to you. If there's something that you felt confused about that you would like me to dig further in. I really kind of skimmed the top of a lot of things to try and give you the core pieces. Let me know. I'm happy to dive further in. If there's an aspect of this you want support with, reach out. I'm here for you. That is part of my role in this. Is exactly this, but also the coaching, support of engaging that stress process, engaging the pieces of, how do you move forward when you're in this stuck or freeze response, what does that look like? So helping you access that. And so please reach out lots of links in the show notes to check out. And if you found this episode insightful helpful, please share it with others. I would greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to you all next time.