Can you view your own life fully with empathy, while being detached from it at the same time? We are taught seemingly contradictory ideas: to be detached in order to stay strong, and to give ourselves compassion. Is it possible to do both at once? The ability to separate from your own experience and objectively observe it, is not only compatible with self-empathy, but integral to it.
When you are struggling with emotional pain, can you fully enter into your own shoes? Take a pause and ask yourself this.
This question may seem strange, but it is not something many people can do. This is because they interpret detachment to mean the dismissal or suppression of feelings, and the depreciation of one’s own perspective on the story. “What I think and feel—my own experience,” they tell themselves, “Is silly, unimportant, and invalid.”
We say such things, understandably, to protect ourselves and stay strong. This is how we imagine detachment to work. It is common to believe that detachment is supposed to protect ourselves from our emotions, and this is what we do to try to help ourselves the best we can.
But let us ask ourselves, what really happens when we do this? The dismissal, suppression and depreciation of our own thoughts, feelings, and experiences cause them to push back and call out to us with greater force. They strive to be heard by us, and we end up struggling with them more. We start to feel more intensely trapped in our own subjective perspective the more we try to push it away.
Self-empathy is what releases us from the trappings of our subjective thoughts, feelings, and perspectives—and help us to come to a more objective viewpoint. Objectivity is not merely about coming to a fuller understanding of the larger point of view outside our own, but also coming to a fuller understanding of our own point of view. The ability to view with healthy detachment the fuller story outside of our own subjective feelings, thoughts, and perspectives, is the same part of us that is capable of fully understanding and being with our own subjective feelings, thoughts, and perspectives in the present.
This is similar to what a counselor does. What they do is hold space for their clients. What holding space means is fully allowing for their stories, thoughts, and emotions to safely come out, without judgment towards them. At the same time, it also means not getting caught up in their clients’ stories, emotions, and thoughts themselves. Empathy is the capacity to be a compassionate witness to someone else’s pain without getting caught up in the pain. I can tell you time and again, as a counselor, when I hold space for a client, it becomes much easier for them to release themselves from their subjective perspective and start exploring an objective one.
Here is how you can hold space for yourself: you can recognize the part of you that is caught in your own story, thoughts and feelings. Instead of banishing this part, you add a second part of you that stands outside of your own story, thoughts, and feelings. This second part allows the first part to not only fully exist, but to express itself and be understood. This second part, like the counselor, is the mindfully detached part: it is detached because it bears witness to your experience without getting swallowed up by it. It strives to fully understand where you are coming from, and how your thoughts, feelings, and perspective arise from your own experience.
When we do this without trying to invalidate our own thoughts and feelings, or try to explain them away—a spontaneous and unforced, genuine self-empathy emerges. This empathy is not sympathy, which merges and gets lost in one’s own experience. At the same time, it fully allows for that experience to be there, without rebuffing it, and is present to it with compassionate presence. When it does this, a simultaneous experience of empathy and detachment emerges.
There can be one part of us caught up in our own thoughts, feelings, and perspectives—and we allow for that. There is a second part ourselves that is outside of our own thoughts, feelings, and perspectives that bears compassionate witness to the first part.
What we find is that empathy and detachment are experienced as one in the same. One does not have to come at the expense of the other, and we do not need to find a middle ground to compromise between the two. Detachment is what allows for the full and spontaneous, genuine experience of empathy.
