In this article I happened to come across they speak about empathy having bright as well as dark sides.
At first sight this sounds strange, but actually it is quite convincing.
I try to give a short summary in English here:
There is a widespread opinion that only empathy, the ability to put oneself in someone else’s position, is what motivates us to help others. Some scholars question that and point to the drawbacks of this emotion.
Sometimes empathy can be so overwhelming when seeing other people’s suffering that it is hardly bearable, and the only solution is to look away.
Empathy can also promote the exclusion of those who don’t belong to the group which is often used by autocratic regimes in that they evoke or suppress empathy towards a certain group of the society and so indoctrinate people.
Empathy makes us sometimes make unskillful choices, like directing our effort not to where it is most needed but rather to a minor problem but which touches us emotionally; or empathy can also make people vote for (real or felt) political underdogs like Donald Trump.
Empathy is an emotion that can be used for wholesome as well as unwholesome purposes, depending on the person and the situation. For example a sadist can enjoy the pain of their victim precisely because of their empathy.
To show empathy does also not automatically mean to actually feel it. Sometimes people show empathy because it counts as a positive value and they want to present themselves in a positive way, not because they feel it.
Some professionals who in their work are supposed to develop compassion and empathy (like doctors, nurses, social workers etc.) can sometimes suffer themselves too much from their empathy. The “passion” aspect of compassion becomes too strong (lat. “passio” = suffering), and as a response they develop an attitude of indifference and cynicism.
There are also other means than empathy to put oneself in somebody else’s position: It is also possible to change perspective on a cognitive level which activates very different areas in our brain than emotionally feeling with the other.
The most striking point from a Buddhist point of view was to me that they contrast empathy on one hand with the development of loving kindness on the other. That means wishing the other well without identifying oneself too much with that person. This can especially be important for professional helpers in order to prevent compassion fatigue―and indeed, while I was still working practising mettā meditation was of great benefit for me!
There is this study where two groups of people were trained in two different types of “meditation”: One called “training of empathy” where the person was told to intensively put themselves in someone else’s position and reproduce their feelings as accurately as possible. With the other meditation type called “loving kindness” the person was told to develop a thoroughly kind and benevolent attitude towards the other. When after some weeks of training the two groups were shown movies with people in distress the probands of the empathy group showed much more distress themselves, whereas those of the kind attention group kept a much more positive spirit. And also the latter ones proved more ready to help others. To summarise, developing loving kindness is more eligible to promote altruistic behaviour than pure empathy.
From a Buddhist point of view this might not even be so surprising. If we look at the brahmavihāras, mettā is in the first position and karuṇā only in the second. And there is certainly a reason for that. We need to develop a firm foundation of mettā first before being able to develop compassion without overburdening ourselves. And just being able to feel what the other person feels can of course be helpful and necessary, but in and of itself it is not enough.
