more brain stuff, but emotional this time

[mckitterick]

Something tmseay wrote about today got me thinking about the emotional spiral that often presages and reinforces depression. It's something I've witnessed in those I love as well as in myself.

People who grow up having to deal with traumatic households develop keen emotional understanding of others (and often themselves), sensitivity, and capacity for sympathy. This is often a survival technique - not necessarily physical survival, but emotional survival; at the least, it's necessary for happiness in a chaotic or stressful situation. If you get to really understand how the (for example) drunk, abusive father will behave when he smells like X and looks like Y, you can avoid much trauma.

This also lends great skills for (for example) writing or politicking, as you can imagine.

The down-side is that such people often feel much more pain in life than those who didn't grow up in that environment; for some, seeing pain in others actually feels like pain. When Clinton said, "I feel your pain," he might have been talking literally. When I was young, I experienced a period of severe depression after some pretty normal personal problems... but those problems aren't what put me over the edge, it was discovering that the world is full of pain and suffering: I had learned that all of those close to me had experienced abuse, much of it really severe, and I had witnessed some of it. Experiencing their pain - witnessing it, especially - caused me such sadness that I could barely manage once my own life went to pieces.

Does that sound familiar to you? Those of you who don't feel this way, does this make sense to you?

Best,
Chris

Comments

[tmseay.livejournal.com]

I should really lend you this book when I'm done with it. It mentions scientific studies that show, essentially, that the neurons that allow us to feel empathy for other people's emotions are exactly the same neurons responsible for our own emotions -- that, down to the cellular level, empathy is extraordinarily similar to feeling something for yourself. "I feel your pain," indeed.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

That's fascinating. No wonder it feels like that!

[astartes-girdle.livejournal.com]

It makes far too much sense. I grew up in an abusive home: emotional, physical, sexual, verbal and alcohol. It took a heavy toll and heavier on some of us. I find it very hard to read the paper or watch the news because I feel completely bludgeoned by the repetitive drama of horror, pain and terror.

It's not that I don't feel these things but that I feel them too keenly and slide into a dark mire if exposed over and over. I despair for all those who die senselessly, who I can't help, who never had a chance. I also don't want to become cold and calloused, no longer caring at all, which would possibly be the reverse side of that coin if I didn't just wither.

I listen to the radio because I can get the news, less biased and without the sensationalitic images that are repeated. To this day I have never seen even one picture of the Twin Towers falling on Sept. 11. I didn't need to. I felt that horror very deeply and very keenly but I don't know how bad it would have got if I had seen all the images. I became clinically depressed then, as it was.

But I do think that the reverse happens to some in abusive environments. They stop feeling, they stop caring and they can't politick or write. They just become broken. Those of us who can find those outlets are trying to mend and have found some outlet.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think my parents were very careful to try to develop my empathy when I was small, while traumatizing me as little as possible. I think they were also pretty clear that a certain amount of trauma had to be involved, and now it looks like they were scientifically correct: if I wasn't at least a little bit upset, if I wasn't feeling badly on someone else's behalf, I wasn't "getting it." But they did things like waking me up when we were on a long car ride and going through a really bad part of town, because they wanted me to see that not everybody lived nice lives like we did, and they talked about how unhappy it might make some people to have neighborhoods where they had to put bars on the windows, and how helpless they might feel in such circumstances. I was 4, and I've never forgotten it.

[subplot2.livejournal.com]

This is a great post, and unfortunately I can't respond to it just now, but I wanted to give you a heads-up that I sent a student your way for techinical editing and such.

Cheers.

[professormass.livejournal.com]

I tend to agree, though not entirely. In my case, yes, I understand what makes people tick, but I have little real empathy for people outside of my friends and family, if by empathy, you mean 'sharing their suffering'. I tend to view that as 'sympathy'.

I suspect this lack of sympathy is why I'm rarely depressed. I also strongly suspect it's why I've survived so much crap in my life.

[kalimeg.livejournal.com]

I've called it "feeling with Xxxx's nerve endings", and it happens even when someone has had a perfectly trauma-free childhood. I never saw a drunk until I was over 18. Didn't have an extremely dysfunctional family, unless being the oldest child in a Boomer household is its own kind of strange (and it is, but so many of us have it in common).

Empathy can be pretty traumatic.

[kijjohnson.livejournal.com]

This all sounds and feels familiar. It's a hard topic to work through.

[everflame.livejournal.com]

I think it has to do with imagination for me. I didn't experience major trauma until I was 13, at least not on the level you're discussing. But I have always had an incredibely vibrant and detailed imagination.

When I think about suffering intellectually, with that block that keeps me from imagining the details, the feelings, the reality of it - I'm fine. But the moment I open that door that puts me there, physically, mentally, emotionally (even though I have no "real-life experience" to prepare for it) I break under all that pressure and feel awful, sick, depressed, etc.

I don't know that it's empathy - because when I imagine it, it's ME. So it's still relatively self-involved, even if based on someone else's reality. Does that make sense? Through my imagination, someone else's pain BECOMES my own.

[themitigator.livejournal.com]

That sounds familiar, to the tune of about eighteen months ago. And I wonder if Thomas's book gives instructions for how, exactly, one gives any credence to rational reinterpretations of emotionally charged negative thoughts.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

That's interesting, and I wonder how much imagination and curiousity play into empathy and sympathy. Kind of ironic, isn't it, if these emotions boil down like so many other things to simple, animal selfishness? We are a community-based species, social critters, so it would make sense that our imaginations exist to help us understand those around us.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

You mean, can we identify where self-destructiveness, suicidal thoughts, hatred, and so on come from? That would be a pretty big breakthrough in the psychological sciences. "Soft science" indeed!

[blzblack.livejournal.com]

Perhaps just the experience of depression can connect one's self to others emotionally. I grew up in a relatively "normal" household.

[starstraf.livejournal.com]

I think you are saying that those that have survived traumatic households have a uncontroled empathy when others feel pain. if that is what you are saying that that dosen't equate to my reality for me, but I do know some people that seems to be the case for. My guess is it is one way of learning to cope but not the only. Or it could be that I have stronger developed shileds.

[sparrowhawk433.livejournal.com]

Makes sense to me, too. But notice how different people, including me, will learn different reactions to an "abusive" situation. I think this is because there are many types of abuse requiring different coping skills. The drunk, enraged, physically abusive father (or the angry, abusing father who cannot communicate love but reacts tverbally or physically [the child often cannot tell the difference] to the slightest provocation, probably because of some abuse issues of his own), is someone of whom one needs to be wary and very attentive to his moods. Those children become good people readers, the "empathic" ones. (There are other reasons for good emphathy skills, thankfully.)

Another abuse might be the witholding of love to the child who, for various reasons, is in desperate need of attention. Coupled with verbal abuse, this can send a personality into hiding--always wanting, never getting. They don't become more empathetic, but more secretive and witholding--not so much interested in what another is like but rather what they are going to get out of a situation. I think they also feel a lot of pain, but because they have spent their lives keeping distant from their own pain, they are not so good at seeing the pain of others. And, what seem like normal problems can trigger ancient and deep feelings of abuse--with the same flight or frozen response.

Unfortunately, this response blocks the mirror neurons (the subject of the original concept that started this) from working well or at all. So forget being an extravert, and don't expect anyone to understand you very well either. That's my experience.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_starlady_/]

For whatever reason, I'm extremely empathetic. It is crippling at times, ex. after 9-11 I could not function at all for a period of weeks. I tend to not watch the news or read the paper. People close to me tell me what's going on (in small doses). It's pure self-preservation.

My grad student just posted a link to this article:
http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=410
She says it's more righteous to be depressed than happy in your ignorance of the world. Her world is black and white. I'm wrong. She's right.

Does my sensitivity stem from childhood experiences? Or is it ingrained from the moment of conception? Hopefully, we'll find out as we explore the brain and the human genomes. My dad is love, but remembrances of my mom give me images of a harpie, screaming and whacking everything in sight. Was it this that sensitized me? It seems like such a long time ago for the effects to have continued until now.

Maybe I should watch nothing but news coverage and infomercials about helping children in third world countries to try to "get over it."
You always have such interesting discussions on your lj. Thanks for sharing from the heart.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

That's fascinating, and I can see that, too. Thanks! All useful for better understanding what it means to be human... and for writing.