The Art of Empathy Read Online Free PDF Page B

people who love to talk aboutemotions and social relationships (but hate math), while little boys are urged to stop crying at a certain age, even when they’ve been hurt deeply. Boys are given guns and trucks and told to man up, stop crying, there’s nothing to be afraid of, stop being girly, stop talking about feelings, and basically stop being fully alive. When we enforce gender stereotypes, we actually reduce the intelligence, the emotional capacity, the empathic skills, and the very humanity of little boys and little girls. We also throw most of the emotional awareness tasks in heterosexual relationships onto women, which might seem helpful but which actually further reduces males’ emotional skills.
    Enforced gender stereotypes can certainly interfere with the emotional and social development of human beings. And yet we all have the capacity for emotional and empathic awareness. All of us—males, females, and everyone in between—can intentionally learn how to identify and work with emotions and empathy at any age and from any position on the gender continuum. Empathy is a human skill; it’s not gender specific.
    As we grow up, our brains do change, and adult women often have different emotional skills and neurological profiles from adult men. But the brain is a highly plastic organ, and it will change in response to any strong training. For instance, the brains of highly trained musicians or people who speak many languages look and behave differently from the brains of nonmusical people or speakers of only one language. But this doesn’t mean that music and language are forbidden to you if you weren’t trained early; your brain is plastic, and you can learn new things at any age. There may be some discernible differences in the brains of adult males and adult females, but the old myth about men being less emotional or less able to feel emotions has no basis in neurology. Even the idea that men have smaller corpora callosa than women (the corpus callosum carries information between the left and right hemispheres of the brain) was based on a study of just fourteen brains and has since been disconfirmed, as Eliot points out. But people hold onto this sexist idea, repeat it constantly, and write books and make whole careers around it, while males suffer silently (or act out) the emotions they clearly feel but aren’t invited (or allowed) to understand.
    Even so, males have always found ways to feel deeply, to become highly skilled in the social world, to create great art, to parent lovingly, to care for animals, to heal the sick, to fight for social justice, to love fully, to dance and sing and act, to communicate meaningfully, and to be profoundly emotive beings. So let me state this right out loud: males have all the human emotions,males can feel and understand all emotions, males have empathy, males can display empathy, and males are natural empaths. As such, there will be no gendering of emotions or empathy anywhere in this book. I enthusiastically welcome men and boys into the empathic community. (We’ll talk more about the trouble we create for males from infancy forward when we look at empathy and child development in Chapter 9 .)
    Another group of people who are tragically and unfairly excluded from the empathic community are people on the autism spectrum, whom I and others 7 have identified as hyperempathic rather than unempathic. In some areas of empathy research, the multiple hypersensitivities that many autistic people experience are not clearly understood, which has led to the mistaken assumption that because many autistic people have difficulty deciphering social cues, they must therefore lack the capacity for empathy. (When I describe people as autistic, I’m using “identity first” language very intentionally; please see the endnote.) This deeply unempathic assumption creates continual misery for autistic people, such that many otherwise caring people will