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Compassion in a T-Shirt
Are You Feeling Too Much? The Hidden Cost of Empathy at Work | Tanya Cooper
00:56:29
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- [00:01]
A
Hi, I'm Dr. Stan Steindl and welcome to Compassion in a T Shirt. Today I'm joined by Tanya Cooper, a clinical psychologist, trainer and member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of trainers based in Melbourne. Tanya brings a deep curiosity to the emotional landscape of helping professionals, especially how we sustain empathy without burning out. Drawing from her own experiences during the pandemic, as well as the work of Jamil Zaki, Babette Rothschild, Kristin Neff and others, Tanya explores empathy as an internal ecosystem and what it takes to keep that system in balance. And so I bring you Tanya Cooper. Yeah, well, Tanya Cooper, welcome to Compassion in a T shirt.
- [00:53]
B
Thank you. Excited to be here.
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A
Lovely to be here. And I think I've noticed your T shirt actually. Have I? It says Love.
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B
It does go. I'm going to be on Compassion in a T shirt and I should wear my favorite T shirt.
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A
Love it.
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B
Which, you know, I'm all up for a cue and thanks to Organic Crew. They're the ones that made it. They're a local, a little, little local place down here in Melbourne.
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A
Love it. Excellent. Well, you're wearing Love and I'm wearing Compassion. So we're loving Compassion. There you go.
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B
Yeah.
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A
You've arrived at the concept of empathy, of an empathy ecosystem, which is sort of fascinating. And I wondered, it's mainly through your own experience and through sort of self reflection and so on. So what prompted this development in your thinking about empathy?
- [01:43]
B
Yeah, thanks, Dan. Oh, look, I think, you know, I've been working as a psychologist for about 25 years, trying not to give away my age. But you know, when I started in the, in the late 90s, early 2000s, I felt like I had missed that day at school. I was like, hang on a minute, how many times am I going to be emotionally pushed off my chair in the space of a, of a psychology session? And I didn't really know just how moved I was going to be. And then when you add up how many clients you have in a day, you know, maybe three or four, sometimes six, sometimes a few more if you're really pushing it. That's a lot of space to kind of have your heart kind of slammed onto the floor and then you pick it up and you try and put it back and then you try and be of service to people. And so I think this has been a question for me, Stan, my whole life maybe about how can I use, how can I hold my big heartedness in a way that can serve people, but also in a way that is not kind of to my detriment? And so I think when the pandemic hit, so I live here in Melbourne in Australia, and some of you might be aware that Melbourne had some of the hardest lockdowns in the world. And so things got pretty, pretty isolated for us. And I started noticing some stuff and it kind of forced me to pause and have a really good look at trying to work out. Hang on a minute. Everything has shifted and I need to kind of adapt and I need to calibrate and I think I've missed the bar. I don't know what happened, but I felt stuck. And so I started to search again.
- [03:38]
A
What was it about that period really, that brought empathy just into sharper focus for you? Because I really appreciate what you said before and I feel it too, that when we sit with someone and know with them and with their suffering, it's very, very moving. And sometimes the tragedy of it and the heartbreak, you feel it too. But there was something about the period and the Melbourne lockdown that really brought that into sharper focus. What happened there.
- [04:12]
B
Yeah, I was feeling it big time, like it was a tidal wave, you know, because. And, and, and I will share that. So I actually had two jobs at that time, so I was working at a university with some postgraduate students where I was teaching them motivational interviewing and communication skills. And, and I was working in a private practice, so working clinically. And what I realized was that on any given day, in a, in a normal kind of, particularly in private practice, but on any given day you have a balance of clients, presentations, sometimes people are doing great, sometimes you're celebrating a breakthrough or progress or they're having, you know, they've tried some stuff or they're making more meaning. And some days are terrible and tragic and awful, but you get this cadence even on a really heavy caseload. Right. But then the pandemic hit and all of the resourcing, you know, if you used to go to the gym, that wasn't available, if you used to, if you had great family supports, they were harder to get to. And particularly if you were in Melbourne, like where I am, and it got to the stage where we were in a 5k radius. And so, you know, I wasn't allowed to go out of a 5k radius. It was like. It was apocalyptic, you know, and, and, and my family are an hour away, so I basically didn't see my parents very, for like a year. And they don't have tech, so there was no FaceTime for us. We had telephone, but I physically didn't see their faces for a Year. My dad's a paramedic, so he was at the front line and I had worries. So there was lots of. I think there was lots of saturation. But I've digressed. I'll come back to my point.
- [06:08]
A
Well, I think one of the things that you're saying there though, which I think is really actually important that I've sort of really realizing is that it was a bit of a we're all in this together feeling, I suppose, like we. It wasn't the clients coming and talking about a story that was very removed, but rather we could just really relate at that experiential level perhaps as well. We were all locked down in a sense.
- [06:33]
B
Yeah, thanks for saying that. Thanks for pausing me, Steph. Yeah, it's. And that was very pertinent to me. And there are a couple of things that I really. And I'm immune compromised. So I live with two really pretty full on chronic health conditions which can be life threatening if it's not, if I don't have stability. So there was quite a lot of fear there for me about what would happen if I got Covid. And so there were lots of kind of precautions that my husband and I had to take that was even kind of before the lockdown happened and then also in reemerging. So there was lots. Yeah, there was definitely lots on my mind. And for the first time, as you said, Stan, people in helping professions like us were also in the crisis with the people we were trying to help. And I wasn't so sure, kind of certain that I had come across the magical formula of how to cope yet either because everything happened so quickly and, and so here's the other thing about what I wanted to come back to, the caseload is that what I noticed was that a disproportionate saturation of distress, suddenly everybody's distressed. There's no good days. I think there were tender moments. But a lot of my sessions then, you know, if you had an eating disorder, it got worse during the pandemic. If you had depression or anxiety, typically it got worse, not better. Just because we. Because of the lack of resourcing, because of the fear and because. And particularly in Melbourne because of the isolation. So I really started noticing that. And then again coming back to my personal resources, like just thinking in the space of a day what are all the incidental contact points that we might have with other people. So that I didn't realize was a part of my resilience. So if I'm at the clinic, I'm Saying hi to the admin team, and we're cracking a joke in the morning, and I get a coffee and I talk to the local barista and we smile at each other. My mirror neuron system's working where I'm feeling connected. It's almost like my social engagement system has warmed up for therapy before I've started. And I didn't really have to try hard for it because the way that my day is lined up kind of incidentally provides me with the nourishment to kind of get into therapy and be ready. And so then, you know, and even, you know, seeing people in the staff room or just walking up and down the stairs to get my next climb. My body's moving, I'm breathing. And now I'm sitting here at my kitchen table and I'm not moving. I mean, like, I'm seeing clients back to back, and my body is really stationary. So I'm. I'm noticing that I'm feeling more immobilized. I'm feeling a bit of a freeze response. I'm hearing a lot of helpless, hopeless fear. And I'm starting to notice that my nervous system is starting to kind of freak out a bit. And I. And. And the realization, I guess, Stan, that it's all this kind of implicit scaffolding and support that we have in our day that warms us up to be socially connected as a. As a therapist that suddenly wasn't there. And I was like, why am I not coping? I'm resilient. I'm deliberate. I'm. And I'm like, oh, it's not cutting it. And so. So, yeah, these were kind of. Yeah, these were the things that were kind of on my mind. And so I guess that's kind of. I was like, oh, Tanya, you better sort some stuff out here. Now you've worked out some of the patterns and the. And the contributors. Let's do a bit more of a deeper dive and work out how you can help yourself.
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A
I mean, it's such an interesting observation. Just the cadences, the various cadences, you know, the ones where, yeah, the different people come in to see you clinically and they are at different stages and feel differently. And there's a sort of a helpful cadence across the day there. But then there's other things too, like bumping into the coffee guy or sort of seeing. Seeing the colleagues at work or let alone, you know, having a sort of family touch points along, you know, through the. Through the week and so on, and just all of those sort of lovely cadences especially around social connection just got so smashed, you know, and not only was social connection out of reach, but social safeness took a hit. We started to feel fearful of people, not just that we weren't able to see them, but we felt fearful of getting too close and all that sort of stuff. And it just created a whole threat system, nervous system activation around social connection itself. And. And we started to, you know, kind of feel so much more isolated.
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B
Yeah, multiple hits, right. And at the same time, there was this real humility to it. Like I had a giggle to myself going, well, there you go. There you go. Tan. You've been working on really kind of resourcing yourself as a psychologist to be present and available and emotionally kind of robust. Because this has been on my mind a long time about how to hold my heart in the work. And then the realization is like, oh, okay. So I've also been really leaning heavily on this kind of incidental stuff. And then, so when the, when those structures went away, I was like, oh, okay, maybe I need a. I need some more of this deliberate support. I didn't realize how much maybe I was relying on the structures that just happened to be around me.
- [12:28]
A
Well, you started to turn your mind, too, to this internal empathy ecosystem that you started to really think about. So, yeah, tell us some of your, I don't know, theory there or what. What is it that's. That you've arrived at with that?
- [12:43]
B
Yeah, so I know, you know, you've had plenty of people in your podcast kind of talk about this idea of the technicalities. I guess I'll share with you my experience and if that resonates for people that, you know, take. Take what you like. I started reading a lot that, you know, we, I know people joke in Melbourne about. Did you make sourdough or did you start, you know, taking up felting or something? Me, I. I started reading more and I went back to some books that really provided me with comfort. So Kristin Neff's, you know, Self Compassion, and I really loved her fierce Self Compassion book. That was a game changer for me. And I read Jamil Zaki's Wolf Kindness and Elaine Aarons, Highly Sensitive Person. And then I went back to Rick Hanson's work and. And as I was kind of being a sponge and absorbing all of this stuff, it occurred to me a couple of. A couple of things. So one is that this idea of experience sharing at a neurobiological level, you know, or that sometimes people call that feeling empathy. And that I really resonated with that concept quite a lot, because I think when I look back, even to my childhood, I am an emotional sponge. And. And to me, that means that, you know, if you take a sponge and you drop it into a puddle, I don't just absorb the water. I'm absorbing the grit and the dirt and whatever the hell else is in there. I'm like, you know, I'm taking it all in. And. And I'm just kind of wired that way. And. And so kind of Ricky. And then recognizing this neurobiological piece that, you know, from an evolutionary standpoint, were kind of built that way to have this, you know, pretty immediate sense of feeling other people's feelings before our language centers even recognize what's going on. And. And I thought that was really interesting because now when I'm looking at being in the pandemic with this saturation of client distress and I'm an emotional sponge, well, I need to do something about my sponginess. You know, I need to do something about my level of absorption here because I can't rely, incidentally, on some people having a good day for me to feel okay. And, you know, I need. And because of my own distress, I realized I needed some. The strategies that I had were good, but they weren't holding me. So looking at the other. The. The other components of empathy, so we've got the feeling, empathy, and then moving to cognitive empathy. So, you know, kind of the. The perspective taking, the. The understanding. And I have a motivational interviewing background, as you know, Stan. So for me, that was kind of really where. Thinking about the use of complex reflections to help me kind of shift modes, and then compassion, you know, this idea that. And. And in reading the research and appreciating the research that when we have empathic understanding and empathic thinking combined with action, with. With concern for another, you know, to trying to leave another person suffering and pain, that. That actually buffers us. And I was fascinated by the. The conversation you had with Stephen Tresniak about when he was talking about the mri, you know, the. The neuroscience behind, you know, when I. When I'm in experience sharing and I feel your pain, the. The part of the brain that lights up as the pain center. And when I'm taking compassionate action, the part of the brain that lights up is the reward center. And I thought, oh, I've got to get more onto that. I've got to. If that can buffer me, if that can assist me, then that would be really helpful. And so I guess then I had some other thoughts that I wanted to share that just kind of blew my mind, Stan, about realizing that a lot of this is also about your job function. So a lot of the work that I do these days I work in clinical mental health education and I work with the Beyond Blue support service. So that's one of our national mental health support services in Australia. And people call us up when they're not on their best day, they call us up on their, on their hard days. And it's via web chat or phone. And so that's a job where the saturation of kind of distress is really high again. And then I've done some work with people in kind of non clinical roles, people who are in kind of legal.
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A
Or.
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B
Financial jobs where they have to sit with people who have experienced kind of trauma, they're reading coroner's reports or sensitive material and they're having this experience sharing, happening. And I started thinking, oh, hang on a minute. Depending on your job task as to what level of exposure you're going to have to other people's distress and some jobs naturally have a higher level of exposure to people's distress than others. And so I'm going to talk you through it. If we look at this ecosystem, if we think of empathy as an internal ecosystem of, you know, the empathic feeling experience, sharing cognitive empathy and compassion, right? And tell me if I'm losing you.
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A
I'm with you. I'm with you.
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B
So I started thinking with the overlay of my life. So I'm going to give you three kind of different tasks with this overlay of the. So we can look at how the ecosystem might vary. And so I'm going to tell you a story about when I was young. So back in the day I used to compete in karate. And so the, the whole idea of these competitions is that, you know, it's a sparring match and I've got to land as many kind of punches or kicks on my opponent with skill and control and unencumbered and I get a point and the first person to six points wins or the, or the person with the highest level of points and the times up wins. And I wasn't naturally a fighter. I was quite shy kid and so, but what I was really good at was feeling people's feelings. So I would be in a sparring match and I could almost feel your intention. So just as you're about to hit me, I would, I was also quite fast and I've got long arms and legs and so as you're thinking about hitting me, I would beat you to the punch, essentially. And so in. In the karate world, this is known. This kind of fighter is known as an anticipator. I could. I was really good at anticipating people's movements. And then I did. As a kid, I didn't really have the words for understanding why I could do what I could do. I just knew that I'd get this kind of feeling in my body. I didn't even have language for it. And I would just go. So in a good day where I could trust myself, I could just go. And I seemed to just kind of beat people to the punch. And they'd get frustrated. They'd be like, how did you do that? I'm like, I don't know. And so this particular day, I was fighting. I was fighting a girl in a local championship, and I was cleaning the floor with her. It was 4 0. And here's where my empathy ecosystem got out of balance for this task. So you might imagine. So I've already kind of described that as a. As a fighter, it was actually in my favor to feel the intentions to an extent. Yeah. I don't need to feel the nervousness maybe of my opponent, but if I could feel kind of where you were intending to go, that served me. And cognitively, you know, I could perspective take like, you want to beat me? You want to land the punch or the kick? Right. And so I've got that. But the compassion piece, I probably don't want that so much. Right. Here's what went wrong. I was winning 4 0, and just for a split second in my body, I felt compassion for this girl because she was so frustrated. I started to feel her frustration. I think I felt something, or maybe I felt her. Her. Her, you know, her distress or I don't know what it was that I felt something and I just dropped my hands and. And she hit me in the face so hard that she broke my nose. And I remember thinking, this didn't work out.
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A
Damn that compassion.
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B
Damn that compassion. And it's so interesting, right, because when I look back as an adult knowing this stuff now, it was a revelation, you know, like 30 years, 40 years later. Not 40 years. No, it could be. No, not 40 years later, you know, but like 20 something years later. And I've gone, oh, my gosh. I've just worked out why I got my. Why I had that accident is because I was feeling compassion in the middle of a fight.
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A
Yes.
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B
That. That balance of my empathy ecosystem didn't suit the task. Right.
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A
Gotcha. Yes.
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B
Right. And so then let's move that overlay to a helping profession. Let's say I'm an ed nurse or a surgeon or a doctor. Now, it's probably again a situation where it's a slightly different makeup, right. Like I, I definitely want to have cognitive empathy. I want to understand the nature of your illness or injury. I want to understand kind of, you know, what's happening for you in that so that I can help treat you. And there's my compassion. I have the intention to relieve your pain and suffering, to heal you, if possible, to put you at ease, to offer you comfort. And I'm going to take action to do that. And they're our action heroes, right? They're very action oriented jobs. They're very tangibly oriented, right. So there's your cognitive empathy and your compassionate play. But you definitely don't want a neurosurgeon feeling too much empathic feeling for the person they're working on. Because if I start to worry about your family or start to feel sad for your predicament, that's going to pull me away from all of my good executive functioning, thinking resources as I'm holding a scalpel to save your life. Right. So again, it's a different empathy to have harmony in that job. I need to be able to navigate the ecosystem, my internal ecosystem, according to the job task. And then we'll take one more version which is maybe more in the realm that you and I live in, which is for the helpers that do kind of use talking as their offering of healing and compassion. And we probably need a bit more of a flexible balance of all three.
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A
Right.
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B
And so thinking about the work of Babette Rothschild where she talks about the empathy dial and being able to turn, you know, kind of empathy, your empathic resonance. So I'm talking about that experience sharing capacity up or down, depending on your current experience of, you know, and capacity for connection. So, you know, I think it was Terry Moyers in it in, in my motivational interviewing TNT who was talking about empathy as a stretchy rubber band. You know, and we've all got this genetic set points. You've, you know, some of us have got a smaller rubber band and some of us have got a big stretchy rubber band. I was like, I'm definitely on the stretchier side. And you know, with empathy training we can increase those skills and you know, and, and, but sometimes life experience will reduce down that, that kind of tendency. And, and so I started thinking of this overlay Stan, about okay, so now there's this extra component of my personal Tendencies and my job task. Because if I'm low on, if I'm naturally kind of low on empathy, I might need more turning up of my empathic resonance to feel a bit more to help my understanding, to take compassionate action. If you're like me and you don't need any help in the feeling compartment, if anything I run the risk of feeling too much and then getting dysregulated, then I need to learn how to turn the dial down to maintain some resonance, but at a level that I can tolerate so that I can make the best of my cognitive empathy and my compassion. And so that's kind of where I got to, with there's a lot in there. I guess that's where I started to get to this breakdown of. Hang on, there's way more to it than just kind of these three modes. It's also, how do I. What's my natural tendency towards those modes and what's the function of the task that I'm doing?
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A
Yeah, no, those are really great examples and there is a lot of food for thought that one could unpack in amongst all of that. But these, these three modes, I guess that the experience, experience sharing and sort of affective empathy piece, the, the perspective taking or the cognitive empathy piece and the compassion, which you're sort of conceptualizing as kind of action or you know, taking helpful action and sort of a motivation, I suppose, in, in that kind of direction. And the, the karate example is really an interesting one because I often, I often think about how empathy in and of itself isn't necessarily about trying to do good for others. We might bring our empathy to a competitive motivation like that where we're using it to anticipate or to sort of, in that case win or whatever. And so that's really interesting. It can be brought to a compassionate motivation, I suppose, or a competitive motivation or even a, a revenge motivation maybe or something darker, you know, like. So it's. So that's kind of interesting. But even there you had to kind of juggle what your experience sharing kind of feeling empathy was targeting. Because if it was targeting the, the anticipation of what the person might do next, that's great. But if it kind of hones in on, on the frustration or distress that that person's feeling, losing four nil, then that's not so good. So even within each mode is kind of potentially different targets. The surgeon really needs to have the cognitive empathy going, but not too much of the affective feeling stuff because they really need to focus on actually probably the action piece of It. And do that very, very well. And then for sort of therapists or others along those lines, it's. Yeah, it's sort of a little bit about all three. But there are individual differences. I mean, what you mentioned, the highly sensitive person type framework and you mentioned there as well, this notion that different people might have these different kind of rubber bands of empathy and maybe certain experiences are a part of that or cultural things or. Or other aspects of the person and individual differences. So what have you thought there in terms of. Yes, the sort of. The pre existing personal conditions and how that influences all of this?
- [29:05]
B
Yeah, well, you know, as you can see, that's been on my mind a lot when I had this revelation about this, you know, this kind of one instance in karate where my natural tendencies for compassion took the driver's seat in a place that was unhelpful.
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A
Ultimately, you're a lover, not a fighter, clearly.
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B
Right. So my T shirt. And it's those. It's a really interesting place to. To. To be that I became a, you know, a. A karate competitor.
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A
Yes.
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B
With a natural tendency that wasn't really to fight. And now as a psychologist and being in a helping profession, also with this question of how do I look after my heart so that I can be connected. And I guess it also. The other thing, slight segue, but I promise I'll come back is that I noticed during the pandemic was this, that we were starting to suffer from what people have termed the dehumanizing defense. You know, that we were starting to become empathically strained because of our collective experience, sharing that with the. Just with the saturation of distress. And, and now I'm not even just talking about my clients. I'm talking about the news. I'm talking about my neighbors, I'm talking about my friends and family, my partner worrying about am I, you know, if I get Covid, am I going to make it? And so it's what happens when in our empathic ecosystem, if we're not, you know, if our, if our spirit, if.
- [30:51]
A
Our.
- [30:53]
B
You know, if our nervous system is not actually supported with any kind of safety to tolerate this kind of crisis. And people were switching off. And one of the things that happened during the pandemic was that I was fast tracking frontline workers to the top of my book so you could jump my wait list. And in fact, that's when I started to burn out because I was squeezing more clients in because I was trying to be helpful. And so I was seeing paramedics and nurses and school teachers and medical doctors who were really sharing quite graphic accounts of trauma, of their own trauma of witnessing people dying. And, and I was again feeling, feeling that. And, and they were starting to switch off for survival. And so then they were starting to get this really kind of blunt or brash kind of way of just talking about it as if it was a movie they were watching, not something they were in. And that kind of dark humor that sometimes you do see, particularly in the, in, in some of the frontline medical professions. But I noticed it in me too. So I was starting to kind of get blunt. And it was interesting at that time, Stan I remember doing a webinar with the Australian Psychological Society on self care and they had some preliminary data that was coming out that was indicating that I don't know what percentage, but there was a whole bunch of psychologists that had forgotten how to engage because we pivoted to telehealth and we just suddenly become very businesslike. And there was a part of me that just really wondered if we was missing the engagement pace partly because the cadence of our day had changed and we weren't moving. We were kind of sitting immobilized in front of a screen and we just kind of forgotten how to connect with each other. But this kind of switching off thing was, was on my mind and it was on my mind. I'll come back to the highly sensitive person because I read Elaine Aaron's research and I quite clearly identified it, you know, took the quiz and I was like, oh yes, off the charts and, and looking at the six domains of, of sensitivity. And it really helped me kind of, I guess get a clearer idea of maybe how I could support myself. So you know, she, her work talks about, you know, if you are a highly sensitive, then chances are that you are more prone to this kind of experience sharing and that I, that I could take agency to be more deliberate about how I might kind of protect that energy that the depth of processing. And that's probably fairly obvious in our conversation already. Like I get caught in the details and I'm so excited and curious about oh, let's dig deeper in there. And then suddenly I'm Alice in Wonderland down the rabbit hole. And but if you think about that, that could be a double edged sword in therapy where that can work very well for me in assisting people to kind of do the deeper dives. But again, if the saturation point is trauma and distress all the time and, and I've got this depth of processing where I'm really immersed in it, it's only going to make my experience sharing more vulnerable. So the, but the other part of, of being highly sensitive is also that interestingly enough the research says that we're equally, equally prone to taking in the good and that I can also be an emotional sponge. And I think this was really hopeful that, you know, and it made me think of course, of course, Tanya, that you know, do you think about our mirror neuron system? You know, when we smile at each other, you know, you smile at me, I smile at you when I won't yawn because you might start yawning that, that we have this, that I have a capacity for exponential joy. But I wasn't feeling much of it. So I think that piece of understanding, and I'm not saying that, you know, I think there's a, there's a sun and a shadow side to the three aspects. You know, you. So in Elaine's work you, I think it's 30 of the population, I think it's 30 are highly sensitive and then we've got moderately sensitive and lower on the sensitivity and, and all three of those realms, if you like have strengths and shadow sides. And so I think rev, you are on the spectrum of sensitivity is about understanding your natural tendencies towards empathy and then looking at the way that you might utilize the three modes of your empathy, your empathy ecosystem depending on your, your kind of task at hand or your job role in this instance. And so that really helped me put together a bit of a plan of deliberate action of how I was going to help sustain and nourish and support myself so that I could be of help during the pandemic.
- [36:23]
A
Yeah, that sort of real self awareness of where, of who, who we are and where we're coming from and what our particularities are in a sense and kind of understanding, you know, perhaps across those three things, the, the feeling empathy, the cognitive empathy and the compassionate piece and, and perhaps you know, the, the task at hand and who we're actually sort of working with and, and, and what's kind of required of us and, and trying to sort of, I don't know, find the balance. I mean it really does strike me that, you know, a little bit like you were talking about Terry Moyers, it's possible to develop skills and, and develop that cognitive empathy. Yeah, it, it might even be possible to develop the feeling empathy, you know, sort of in terms of. I was talking with Stephen Andrew recently on, on this channel and he sort of mentioned as the, you know, the information comes in from the other person and sometimes we go up 2 inches to our brains and we sort of think about it. But he was saying we want to drop 12 inches to the heart. Yeah, Feel it and feel it. And so, but, but it, you know, it really, it's a tricky one when we are kind of like overflowing with that affective empathy and we are highly sensitive and we feel things and we feel, you know, the tragedy and the joy. But when we're just surrounded by really tough stuff, how do we dial that back? I mean, when you found yourself in that kind of emotionally overloaded place, I mean, what helped you to manage that or recover there and return to a more balanced, compassionate stance? Really?
- [38:13]
B
Yeah, really good question. And to me, for me it was a real layering of stuff, right? Because it wasn't just going to be one thing that was going to cut it. Because I recognized then given my tendencies and given the environmental pressures that we were in this collective crisis, that it was going to be more than just one thing. I was going to have to really bolster it up. And so I recognized that, you know, that typical routines and self care practices like, you know, going for a walk and this and that they were going to be helpful. But I was going to need a very, a real regulation piece in real time, as you say. What helped you in those moments where you were starting to get flooded. And so there are a couple of things. So one is I was already, because of my martial arts background, I'm quite a big meditator. So I meditate most days. But it's funny when, when crisis happens, it was the first thing to go, but it was the very thing I needed to sustain me. So brought it back.
- [39:16]
A
Good.
- [39:17]
B
And, and I was, and I realized also that I was at a place where I just needed someone to tell me what to do because I was feeling lost. So I was, I was going for guided practices and I was looking for very particular, a very particular balm. You know, it wasn't just any meditation practice that was going to do it for me. It was going to be a self compassion practice, right. Because I was in pain and I was with other people who were in pain. And so I needed to kind of move through this awareness and the, you know, the self kindness and the connecting to humanity was actually was a huge piece for me in the isolation of the lockdown to keep connecting to humanity. So I revisited Kristen Neff's work and I was doing a lot of. So I would start my day before I even got up out of bed with a self compassion practice and some coherent breathing to support my regular, my nervous system. So actually my scaffolding was. Because my nervous system was so rattly coherent breathing practice to help my nervous system even calm because I was waking up with dread. And so there's research shows that coherent breathing practice can, can assist with kind of moving that sensation of dread and mobilizing. And so I'd start with that for stability and that was my warmup for my self compassion practice. Even if that was a five or a ten minute. And then I'd. And then I would get up and I'd kind of stretch and move and, and then in the moment in my sessions, I started thinking about what are some of the natural gestures, you know, when we think about compassion? You know, we work in a world where, you know, it's, we don't have the opportunity like a nurse or a doctor to actually fix the wound, you know, in the, in the kind of truest sense, because what we do is in relationship. And so it's a, it's a healing ground. And people, yes, they do have the, the capacity and the opportunity to heal, but we don't install it. And so here's this idea of me finding even the smaller gestures of compassion to be with somebody. And you know, it's interesting. I, I had a little surgery recently and it wasn't, it wasn't a big thing, but I was nervous and as the anesthetist I really trusted my treatment team, but I was nervous and as the anesthetist was starting to put the anesthetic in, I noticed a hand holding my hand. And I looked up and it was my surgeon. And she, she was holding my hand and she just looked at me and she smiled and she said, I got you. And I, and I said, can you just keep like holding on to me till I fall asleep? And she said, yeah, it's okay. And then it was funny because I remember saying to the anesthetist, I don't think this is. And then this is working. And then I was gone.
- [42:21]
A
It's a spine tingling example. Yeah, right.
- [42:23]
B
And she didn't have to do that. Like she's probably got how many surgeries that day and mine wasn't a big deal. And if she had have just thought, oh well, this isn't such a routine surgery, like whatever, and got on with it. But for me that was incredibly healing to have this moment of. And it was a microsecond. She looked me in the eye and she smiled and she squeezed my hand. She said, I got you. And I went, oh, thank you, so thank you so much. So, Dr. Tran, if you're listening, thank you. And it makes me think, like, what are the gestures? And I've done it already for Those watching on YouTube, I, I instinctively put my hand over my heart, and I never realized that I do this, you know, instinctively. And so here's an extra layer of when I'm in the moment now that I have the deliberate awareness and also the science. I love the science. Stan, how cool is it that putting your hand on your chest releases oxytocin, right? Because if I'm in a pandemic and I'm isolated and I'm alone and I'm scared and I'm doing telehealth, but I'm holding my hand on my heart and I'm gesturing to you that I care. So right now I'm layering up because not only do I have a heartfelt, genuine expression towards you to say, you've moved me and, and I can hold it, and I am with you in this moment, but I'm also regulating and holding on to me as well. I'm holding on to you and me right now. Right. And, and a really interesting thing during the pandemic, even on telehealth, is that I noticed my clients mimicking me. And they would hold onto their heart. And so sometimes they do it. There's that mirror neuron response, right, of experience sharing as co regulating. Where my clients would start to. I'd put my hand there and I'd say something, you know, try and aim for some accurate empathy. Like, you know, you're going through a lot right now, and you know, this is really hard, and you're still showing up for yourself. Like, you're, you're determined, you're. You're trying to put your best foot forward and, and suddenly in reciprocation, they put their hand on their heart and they'd be like, yeah, I am actually. And I had forgotten. And these are all the ways that I'm doing it. And then after a while, I started notice clients putting their hand on their heart without me even having to kind of elicit that. And so now I'm starting to feel like we're holding each other. So I had a couple more things I'd like to share before we close up, but just of things that help me regulate in the moment. But I guess I'll pause for a second.
- [45:00]
A
Well, it's interesting because even the surgeon isn't a zero on the feeling empathy. You know, the, the, the, the, the sort of the, the real Skill there is to be able to engage with that affective empathy in that moment when you're still awake and then shift, I guess. So it's. It's a very fluid kind of balancing of the three modes really. And the other thing that I sense there from you too is, is that each of the three that the. The feeling empathy, the cognitive empathy, the compassion are for self and other in a way. And that ability for you as. As a highly sensitive person of. Of others to also really cultivate a sensitivity towards the self and to be able to notice. And then you use the cognitive empathy to put some of those feelings that we're experiencing into words for ourselves and then to think about the steps we can take to express that self compassion, even just in the moment. And the little experience, little gestures, hand on the heart and slowing the breath and managing the nervous system. So it's sort of. It's very multifaceted, the whole thing.
- [46:11]
B
Right. And that's what made me think, Stan, that actually this is an ecosystem. Because when you think about what's the function of an ecosystem is that everything is interrelated. And what you're aiming for is a sense of harmony that's kind of good enough for you to do the things that you're trying to do. And so for me, it was really helpful to start to think of this not as kind of conceptual ideas, but as a way of being in my work that I'm actually in this. I'm in this too. I'm not just an instrument, like I'm feeling and thinking, and I have a spirit and that I needed to kind of tend to that. Not in a. In an individualistic way, in a way of interrelatedness. And that really helped me. And so I guess the last thing I wanted to kind of share is that, you know, so there was this kind of regulation piece, you know, and as you've really beautifully put it, actually about that, that kind of dance of, you know, I'm trying to be in a breathing body, in a body that can move and a body that can, you know, with a spirit that can feel and that I can be more skillful in how I express and what I choose to express in this session that might offer somebody a sense of support or holding so that they can talk about the things they want to talk about and process the things that they want or need to process. And. And I realized that I also needed to be a bit more of a moving person because I was just sitting in my chair for hours at a time. I could Sit here and see four clients in a row and not get up out of this chair. And so I started being more deliberate about taking breaks. And because we were in a 5k lockdown, that wasn't going far. But what was interesting in my community was. And so here's another version of layering is so go for these walks. And in my local community of the suburb of Melbourne, where I live, people would leave each other messages in their front window. And so I'm moving my body. And sometimes I'd put on a guided meditation about walking and breathing and noticing. And then I started thinking about Rick Hansen's framework for taking in the good. Because I was like, oh, it's one thing just to buffer myself from the distress, but I've also got to take in the good, right? And I'm a bit impoverished right now because I don't have the. The range of experiences that I usually have where I can just go and make something kind of nice happen or go out. So I have to be more deliberate in how I try and create the good right now. And so what I did was I used Rick's framework, the heal framework. So it's have a positive experience. So I had to generate one. So I went for a walk. And then it's about absorbing, absorbing the positivity. So I'm seeing these beautiful messages. And in my little local suburb, we had a teddy bear hunt. And so people, families and kids were putting their teddy bear in the front window. And the idea was, which teddies could you see? And we're putting it up on social media, taking a photo so people who couldn't leave the house could see, here's a teddy on such and such street and a beautiful message. And the messages from kids written in crayons or adults even to say, I care about you. These beautiful messages with rainbows and unicorns. And you've got this. Keep going. We're in it together. And I care about you. Now, half these people in my 5k radius, I don't know, but when I look into their window and I see this little teddy, or I see a message of hope or connection or collective care, instead of letting it go through to the goalkeeper as just a cognitive thought, you know, when you notice something, you go, yeah, that's nice. And you keep going. I was like, no, no, no, I've got to take this in. This is the heal. I've got to heal myself, right? And so I would notice it and I would pause and I'd take a photo so that I could share the love later. And I would do like a mini compassion meditation, you know, a bit like a loving kindness. And I take it in for me. And I'd say thank you to that family or that house or that kid or that adult. Thank you for caring about me in this moment. I'm holding my hand on my chest. I've got another hand in my diaphragm. I can feel myself breathe. So I'm enriching it, right? I'm absorbing it. I'm really trying to feel it. I'm not just thinking it, really trying to feel it in my bones. I'm really trying to take it into myself like a plant takes in sunshine, right? You know, I'm, I'm so. I'm. I'm having a positive experience. I'm. I'm enriching, I'm absorbing, you know, and then I'm linking it. And I very much needed. You don't have to do the linking step, but I needed it because the linking step is when you're experiencing negative material and you want to link the positive so that it kind of neuro tags in your, in your mind, in your memory and in your body to kind of counter that negativity bias. To go, no, it's okay. You've got positive stuff. You can. Because later on when I'm in session, I want to come back to that sunshine. I want to come back to that collective care and I want to feel it in my bones and I've got more chance of eliciting that as a resource state to kind of feel it in my body as a, as a fuel, if you like, for the rest of my sessions during the day, based off the fact that I didn't just go for a walk and I didn't have to see people because I couldn't, but I connected with love. And now I can use it later because I deliberately took it into my being in a way that I can kind of elicit and bring forth in a really felt sense. So that was one of the big ones for me, Stan, that really helped me stay in the work. And it helps me to this day to kind of come back to this idea that. So to kind of bring it home is such a humbling place to be, Stan, to realize that, okay, if that day at school happened, back in my psychology training where people worked out how to make friends with their natural tendency and understand the frameworks of how to be a helper, I still wish I had have had that day. But I think it's taken 25 years. It's taken 25 years and some deep dives and thinking back to some really interesting life experiences to put it together that I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm okay. I can actually be of help to the world with this big sensitivity of mine. I do have an ethical and a. And a moral obligation and a desire to rein it in so that I. So that it's not going kind of rogue. But a radical act of compassion is to actually take these deliberate steps to honor my tendencies and to try and really kind of map out and, and in a really respectful way. If I can understand my internal empathy ecosystem and depending on the job that I've got at the time, then I can be kind of, you know, the most. The most connected kind of best version of myself and respectfully also look after myself. So that's kind of where I got to.
- [53:32]
A
Incredible. Incredible. I really thank you for, for sharing the. That. That kind of really personal journey, sort of back to yourself in a way, you know, that you want to be. And you are someone who can sort of be deeply connected and empathizing with others and helpful in that way. But we need to manage that. We need to kind of have that. That sort of three. Three things that were occurring to me in that last section, you know, sort of in intent. Intention, attention and taking it in, you know, being able to. I love that idea of being like a plant and taking in the sunshine in a sense, you know, and, and the, you know, being able to have that intention to take certain actions yourself, that, that then opens you up to the. The positives or if that's a bit of a simply simple word there. But you know, really being able to. To sort of set that intention. Notice them. Notice the teddy bears in the window and kind of take that in and the tagging it too, to the, to the, to the other stuff.
- [54:40]
B
Yeah, it's like, you know, gone are the days. I think we would go, oh yeah, don't forget about self care. And I never really understood that as a concept. Like I, I was like, okay, self care, like take bubble bars and go for walks. Like what is. And now I understand more intimately that, you know, self care is. Is. Is an intimate understanding of and an appreciation of your tendencies, but also within, you know, your ecosystem and, and your job and, and the idea. It was hopeful for me, Stan, you know, at a time where we were running out of hope that I could nourish myself to keeping of service because there were days there where I was feeling as helpless and hopeless as my clients. And I just wasn't sure what else I had to bring. I didn't know what else I could offer and so this idea of being really deliberate, it's not just this kind of oh don't forget to sleep and eat and it's like we're far more complex creatures than that and it's not just about kind of being good at a therapeutic modality it's kind of also this intimate self knowing to understand how can you. How can you really look after and nourish and resource yourself in in the realm of wanting to be a helper.
- [56:00]
A
And funnily enough it sort of came back a little bit to self to sorry social connection too in a sense the teddy bears and the notes in the windows. Well yeah thank you again for sharing all of that. I think there's some absolute gems that are woven through there and a lot to kind of ponder and reflect on. So yeah. Tanya Cooper, thank you very much for speaking with me on compassion in a T shirt.
- [56:27]
B
Thank you for having me, Stan.