I Feel You by Cris Beam

Author:Cris Beam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

· Part III ·

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Forgiveness

8

Fall from the Tree

When I began this book project, I knew I would have to venture into a territory I found particularly distasteful—a realm I had an almost knee-jerk negative reaction to. It’s a category of empathy around which a whole industry is now cranking. I just didn’t know how deeply I would have to enter it, and for what reasons.

This branch of the empathy tree is self-empathy, and the fruit it bears is forgiveness, both for oneself and for others. Essentially, the thinking goes, forgiveness is a self-serving act, as carrying around anger and resentment only hurts the self. So one needs a healthy dose of self-empathy to merit even the desire to forgive another. But I felt self-empathy smacked of narcissism. Self-empathy was code for selfish, one more link in a long chain of American entitlement.

I didn’t buy the line—preached explicitly or implicitly by Nonviolent Communication, twelve-step groups, or any of the other large-scale peace and recovery movements, and already practiced by thousands—that in order to have empathy for others you have to first have empathy for yourself. To me, this sounded like indulgent, self-help mush, akin to taking a bubble bath when your child is hungry.

Besides, I didn’t know what it meant, self-empathy. How could one step outside her skin and administer first aid? It seemed hokey, forced, or childish. I wanted to get on to the real empathy, the difficult empathy: the empathizing with enemies or psychopaths or impossible others.

I didn’t want to climb out onto that branch and explore it, but as I pushed further into this book project, I realized I would have to. This third section moves beyond small-scale empathy practiced between individuals, or even the variations that emerge in courtrooms and classrooms, and into the kind that people muster for those who have committed gross crimes against humanity. And I found this kind of empathy, by definition, flows in two directions at once: people who practice it must both humanize an outsize, stereotyped “other,” often dubbed as evil, and they must dig deep personally, enacting a psychic self-care to protect themselves from such potential danger.

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