[This DrP article was first published on MindBodyGreen]
We often think of empathy as an amazing thing. Most of us believe that empathy is the solution to cruelty and aggression and generally leads to better outcomes, from sales to productivity to customer relationships. Hence, empathy training is recommended for anyone, from prisoners to doctors to teachers.
Indeed, deficits in empathy are thought to be at the heart of dark personality types such as psychopathy, narcissism, sociopaths, and Machiavellianism. But if a certain subset of dark personality types are successful in ascending their careers or becoming community and spiritual leaders, then clearly they have some empathy to charm their way around.
After all, that requires knowledge of what makes people tick or which buttons to push, in line with how researchers Marsh and Cardinale concluded that empathy is not entirely absent in psychopaths. And then, in a meta-analysis of 106 independent samples, Vachon and associates found no relationship between aggression and empathy.
These suggest that empathy isn’t the wonder miracle we’ve thought it to be. It is not the antithesis of dark personality types the way we’ve always thought about it as Camp Empath versus Camp Dark.
The darker side of empathy
Heym and associates recently found that Dark Empaths made up 19.3% in a group of 991 people. Traditionally, we think of people with Dark Triad personality types as being high in dark traits (DT) and low in empathy (E). In contrast, Empaths are low in DT and high in E, while everyone else—the Typicals—are low in DT and average in E.
Heym and colleagues found Dark Empaths to be high in both DT and empathy. When compared to Typicals and Empaths, Dark Triads and Dark Empaths are higher in aggression and DT traits and lower in agreeableness.
As compared to exclusively Dark Triad personalities, both had similar amounts of grandiose and vulnerable DT facets, and Dark Empaths are higher in extroversion, agreeableness, and well-being, and lower aggression.
Even then, Dark Empaths demonstrated higher indirect aggression than Empaths and Typicals, especially guilt-tripping and malicious humor.
How empathy can be weaponised
1. Cognitive empathy hijacked by dark personality types
Empathy isn’t just about being able to vicariously share someone’s feelings on an emotional level—that is affective empathy.
There is another facet, namely cognitive empathy, which is the capacity to know and understand another’s perspective. Put simply, to intellectually put yourself in someone else’s shoes.
Reports from my clients and personal experience have shown that many dark personality types obsessively watch films and television programs in order to learn “normal human responses” for emotional mimicry. In other words, to develop cognitive empathy.
This does not mean that they have affective empathy. As Decety and associates found, when participants high in psychopathy imagined pain to themselves, brain regions including the anterior insula, right amygdala, anterior midcingulate cortex, and somatosensory cortex showed typical response to pain, suggesting that they are sensitive to the thought of pain. However, these regions did not become active when they imagined others in pain.
And this explains why many have reported to me how dark personality types exhibiting the “correct behaviors,” like cuddling after sex or saying the right thing when someone is distressed, always feel off.
And this explains why many have reported to me how dark personality types exhibiting the "correct behaviors," like cuddling after sex or saying the right thing when someone is distressed, always feel off.
In other words, the empathy you think you are receiving from people who only have capacity for cognitive empathy is "fake empathy," or empathy that is potentially weaponized against you.
2. The sadistic side of empathy
Empathy goes beyond the resonant responses like sympathy and empathy; we need to consider dissonant responses such as sadism, schadenfreude, and scorn. Affective dissonance refers to experiencing contradictory emotional responses, as explored by researchers Vachon and Lynam via questions in the Affective and Cognitive Measure of Empathy (ACME) such as:
- I get a kick out of making other people feel stupid.
- People who are cheery disgust me.
- If I could get away with it, there are some people I would enjoy hurting.
- I love watching people get angry.
They found that affective dissonance has medium to strong associations with aggressive behavior and externalizing disorders. And in the same study by Decety and associates above, psychopaths had an increased response in their ventral striatum when imagining others in pain, lending neurological credence to affective dissonance.
3. Following the crowd’s evil actions
In his book Against Empathy, Yale professor Paul Bloom writes about how even well-intentioned empathy is a poor guide for moral reasoning and can numb us to the suffering of greater numbers of people. He states that empathy is biased and tribalistic—there are certain groups of people, for instance, those who are similar to us, who we are likelier to feel empathetic toward.
Second, empathy is innumerate, meaning that “it doesn’t attend to the difference between one and 100 or one and 1,000. It’s because of empathy we often care more about a single person than 100 people or 1,000 people, or we care more about an attractive white girl who went missing than we do 1,000 starving children who don’t look like we do or live where we don’t live,” as he tells Vox.
What this means in real life is that it skews our decision-making processes. For instance, you can be in a group that fans the flames of empathy toward a certain cause or group. Due to group dynamics such as pressure, your feelings can become polarized, creating an us-versus-them dichotomy. This ultimately can lead you to hate other groups or even engage in atrocities against them.
How your own empathy can hurt you
1. Empathy at your own expense
Sometimes, we have too much empathy for someone else. And so we explain things away for others, as we spare no expense in attempting to understand why they are the way they are and why they do the things they do, including hurtful behaviors like abuse. Combine this with Type A personality, where you seek to give more than your best in everything, and empathy becomes your kryptonite.
This lack of personal boundaries means that you forget to have empathy for yourself. Just because you understand a person's behaviors doesn't mean you should condone them treating you badly. It also does not warrant forgiving everyone who's hurt you—at least not as a first priority—or going back for more.
2. Empathy as an excuse for victimhood
Related to the above, there is a secondary gain to being overly empathetic and getting hurt when it’s entwined with your identity. Typical justifications include, “You know I cannot turn the empathy off; I cannot have boundaries,” “You know I’m an empath; I cannot help it.”
The problem with not having boundaries is that you will set yourself up for more suffering, and with time, you learn to feel even more helpless. Your life is a deteriorating train wreck, but because you see “being hurt because of my empathy” as part of who you are, you feel justified in seeing yourself as a victim of dark personality types and to keep complaining.
Or even worse, we sometimes think that because we are empathic and have gone through a lot, we can use it as an excuse to snap at others or exhibit bad behavior. Either way, victimhood is not a healthy place to live in.
3. Empathy that dissolves boundaries
The reason affective empathy can be so difficult to shoulder is because in our heads, there is a self-other overlap. This means that we conflate ourselves with someone else, as seen in how the anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula are activated when someone we are close to is in pain.
Without the boundaries between the self and other, we are likelier to feel personal distress. This actually leads many to withdraw socially to protect themselves from emotional burnout, meaning that too much affective empathy can reduce prosocial behavior.
What to do instead
The bottom line here is to be aware that empathy is not the cure-all for the world’s ails and that just because somebody appears to have some empathy for you doesn’t mean they are good for you. Most of us have run into someone with whom we have a toxic or ambivalent relationship but whom we justify their bad behaviors or our feelings of discomfort away with the fact that they have previously exhibited behaviors that suggest empathy.
As for not allowing empathy to be our kryptonite, there is a growing body of research that compassion is a far better practice. This means that just because you see someone in pain doesn't mean you choose to pick up their pain; you can still care about them and respect their concerns. That, fundamentally, too, is the essence of having boundaries.
Because compassion elicits concern and yet allows for enough self-other distinction6 so we don't get incapacitated by their distress, we're likelier to engage in prosocial behavior. Compassion also activates the dopaminergic network in the brain, meaning we feel rewarded and are likelier to engage in the same action again.
This, to me, is a win-win-win outcome—it benefits you, me, and the community.
Ready to have firm graceful boundaries that roll out of your tongue easily? You can, via a signature 8-week program that’s tailored to you. Book your free Chemistry Call here.