I Feel You: The surprising power of extreme empathy

by Cris Beam

A rigorously researched and intensely moving examination of empathy: how it works, how it transforms us, and how our society misunderstands it.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Self Help, Science, Emotion

272 pages, Hardcover

Published March 20, 2018

About the author

Cris Beam is a journalist who has written for several national magazines as well as for public radio. She has an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University and teaches creative writing at Columbia and the New School. She lives in New York.

Reviews

[Kit · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I'm being completely honest, if I picked up and read this book under a different title, I'd have rated it much higher. I spent a huge portion of the book looking between the page and the cover, feeling exasperated. That seems unfair; after all, this book has some incredibly important and nuanced things to say about empathy. The author dives into detailed exploration of reconciliation programs and empathy-centered programs, showing their strengths and -- perhaps even more -- their limitations.

Much of what I deeply want to believe about the power of empathy and compassion was undermined by what I read in this book. I left it feeling depressed and even hopeless about humanity and the world. Maybe it was a great reality check on my idealism, but the promise of the title was definitely not kept. This book did NOT show me the "surprising power of extreme empathy" but rather the complicated, messy, and often discouraging truth of it.

[Porter Sprigg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beam is good at connecting dots between how various communities think about empathy. We see psychological, neurological, and sociological explorations of empathy. There are a lot of helpful anecdotes mixed in with the occasional unhelpful anecdote. It's a helpful introduction to empathy. Religion wasn't touched on at all which I didn't love, and I feel like there could have been more of an exploration of how American society could develop empathy across political, racial, and class lines. Good but not great.

[Christie Bane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this whole book, and I'm still not sure just what I read. Empathy is an interesting subject. The ability to see things from other people's perspective allows you to see them as the complex human beings that they are, and helps make it easier to work together. This really should have been an interesting book, but instead it was the kind that I had to force myself to keep plowing through, kind of like workouts. ("If I do my leg strength routine/read a chapter in the empathy book, then I will allow myself a half hour of judgment-free Internet browsing.") There are a couple chapters on the science of empathy and mirror neurons, which washed right over me because science is boring. Then there were chapters on empathy being taught in schools, people without empathy, empathy as performance art, and empathy in rebuilding a damaged national history. Sprinkled throughout the book are tedious and repetitive mentions of the author's experiences as a sexual minority and of her involvement with the trans community.

In my opinion, the best place to learn empathy is from reading great novels. Novels taught me more about human nature and putting myself in the place of others than books like this ever could have.

[Jess Macallan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an interesting read for anyone who wants to understand different viewpoints of empathy, the latest research and current projects exploring empathy in a variety of settings. The concepts presented encouraged me to take a step back and consider the different roles empathy can and should play, and how it can also be so easily misunderstood. Although the book is about empathy, it made me think harder about the roles of connection and compassion and how challenging it can sometimes be to look at someone and truly see them while honoring their story, their choices, and their identity without judgment. I was heartened to read about the various projects that promote empathy and necessary community resources, and I appreciated the author's premise that empathy is a moral art, rather than a skill we cultivate through practice.

I received an e-copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Roozbeh Daneshvar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cris Beam writes beautifully, with a narration that easily takes the reader with the book. I needed this book myself: empathy proves to be a potential gateway to make peace.

The book had many detours, sometimes to the point of being too much and many of the times at the service of the greater picture.

Below I am bringing some segments from this book with lines from myself.

One definition of empathy, something that is related to social media:

"What’s incontestable is this: we’re spending more of our daylight hours linking up with more people than ever before, and more people are interested in watching us do it. Experientially, this might feel like empathy. Empathy, by some definitions, is being seen."

One viewpoint about empathy:

"Lopes likens empathy to a skill, and the breadth of one’s empathic skill will be limited by the emotions one has experienced oneself. For instance, if you’ve never experienced shattering loneliness, murderous rage, or even ecstatic delight, you won’t be able to empathize with these states in another."

Whom do we have more empathy for?

"RESEARCH SHOWS THAT we do, generally, have more empathy for people who we believe share similar values or come from similar backgrounds than we do for people who are unfamiliar."

Three groups of empathy:

"Higher-level empathy is, at root, taking on a new perspective. Modern accounts of perspective-taking put it into three camps: A. Self-focused (how would this feel for me to experience your situation?) B. Other-focused (how would this feel for you to experience your situation?) C. A combination of A and B, either sequentially or simultaneously"

Can psychopaths empathize?

"It’s not that psychopaths can’t empathize; it’s that they don’t."

A line about fear and empathy:

"Fear is what forms a root of recognizing the other as human, a building block of empathy, and it’s what psychopaths don’t feel. Yet fear also forecloses the possibility of understanding and building a kind of moral imagination about the other; it’s our hope and hindrance at once."

The impact of literary fiction (something that I always try to somehow put into words and cannot):

"One of the literary empathy studies was designed by social psychologists at the New School in New York, and it showed that after reading literary fiction for three to five minutes (as opposed to popular fiction or science writing), subjects were more likely to immediately decipher the emotions in photographs of eyes or full faces."

and also:

"EMPATHY is so inherent to reading, the studies also made me laugh a little. It was as though scientists proved that trees gave shade. Books are one way we imagine other lives; we can inhabit, for a moment, the mind of a psychopath or an adulterer or a nun, when we might never be those things ourselves."

and even more about literary fiction:

"ToM is a base note for empathy; you have to know that someone’s beliefs, knowledge, or feelings are separate from yours in order to empathize with them. It’s also critical for understanding stories. In the New School study, participants who read literary fiction scored higher on ToM tests than those who read popular fiction because, the authors posit, popular fiction “tends to portray the world and characters as internally consistent and predictable.” Readers don’t need to emotionally stretch to understand a character’s motivations. Literary fiction, by contrast, “uniquely engages the psychological processes needed to gain access to characters’ subjective experiences.” We build fully fleshed-out people from the thin stuff of words; we imagine them before and after the curtain falls on their scenes; we ascribe motivation to gestures and glances."

One line about art:

"Hyper-goal-oriented art isn’t art; it’s propaganda."

and about making art:

"The impulse to create art is often the impulse to understand something, to get inside an idea or a character or a hidden part of oneself and make meaning from that understanding. It’s an empathic impulse."

and about writing, which I believe is important for enjoy reading:

"In writing, I’ve found, it’s nearly impossible to fully hate the characters you create—even when their behaviors are loathsome on the page. The very act of writing them necessitates a kind of curiosity, which in itself becomes a kind of love, and the more fully fleshed the characters grow, the less capable they are of unidimensional motive."

One side about empathy for the oppressed groups:

"The question becomes this: can empathy for an oppressed group actually turn on its head and become another kind of oppression?"

About empathic approach:

"Morton also argues that the most empathic approach is to ask “how” rather than “why” someone’s come to do the things she’s done, especially when situations are morally charged."

When is empathy impossible?

"Empathy, I learned, is impossible when the life you know is threatened."

The impact of when the perpetrators show signs of remorse:

"In victim-perpetrator encounters, if the perpetrator feels remorse, this caring-for attitude can begin to kick in inside the victim, which in turn opens her to forgiveness."

A bit about nostalgia:

"Gobodo-Madikizela comes from a staunchly psychoanalytic stance, and she says the problem with nostalgia is that it short-circuits mourning—for what you did, for how others suffered—and if you cannot mourn, you cannot feel the edges of things, cannot hope for any meaningful, empathic reconciliation dialogue."

About releasing de Kock (from South Africa's apartheid era):

"When the minister of justice released de Kock, he said it was “in the interests of nation building.” Behind bars, he’s a criminal. Outside, he’s one of us."

and about dealing with trauma, one of my favorite subjects:

"if you don’t reconcile the trauma through some form of transformation, Gobodo-Madikizela says, the trauma is bound to repeat itself."

How is it possible that we might want a human face for our enemy?

"Sometimes, when meeting with an enemy—say, someone who killed a family member—you end up wanting your enemy to reclaim his humanity, because then your loved one didn’t die in vain. “It’s that caring dimension of empathy that’s very important and often missed,” she said. “It goes beyond stepping into the other person’s pain; it’s also caring for them.”"

And lastly, about empathy, power and love:

"After all of this research, two of my favorite definitions are these: empathy is an interruption of power, and empathy is mutual vulnerability. Both definitions call upon an aspect of loving, and so I’m not sure which came first, the empathy or the love. I suspect they’re braided together, are mutually reinforced."

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a high school teacher in a school with a strong SEL (social-emotional learning) focus, I appreciated the explanation of the process of the Narrative 4 program and I'm thinking about bringing it to my school. I also had never heard of Playback Theatre and now would love to see a production.

You should read this book because of the interesting anecdotes and research Beam shares. She mentions a non-violent communication course in which participants basically just want someone to repeat back what they've just said - which then makes the speaker feel 'heard' (Can I can try this with my next difficult interaction? Just kidding. Kind of). She also mentions that Japanese parents want their preschoolers to understand and empathize with their peers, while American parents are more focused on the development of self-confidence of their children (thus putting us behind the empathy eight ball early on). And Beam mentions the the RealDoll/Doll Husbands/DolLApalooza culture which makes me think I've led a sheltered life and that I can't wait to bring this up new knowledge at my next party ("Did you know there are doll brothels?")

Aside from the intended content, I gained empathy for the author because her (now former) partner was undergoing surgery/hormones for a gender reassignment. I probably wouldn't have read a book on that topic per se, but hearing about it in a peripheral story line helped me to see the emotional realities more closely than I have before.

Overall, I feel the same as several other reviewers. I felt that Beam needed data to back up her title. I didn't see many examples of the surprising power of extreme empathy. It seemed that Beam wishes for this result of her research.

[Carol Boyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book to be very worthwhile and struck me at once as just what the world needs more of today. Empathy for me is when I can go beyond myself without judgement as I try to see a person from their own perspective. It is active listening to another's thoughts, understanding their viewpoints. It is compassion for another, and a compelling challenge at times. The author has done extensive research and her approach defines many meanings, many theories. One striking deficit of empathy is how it has been weaponized following the last election. We have seen hate crimes rise. Her basic definition is that empathy is not a skill but a moral art, which can be refined and improved. There is so much to this book, to be absorbed. I appreciated the personal elements that the author has included about her own life. I enjoyed reading this book.

[Carolyn Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought I knew what empathy is but this book made me realize that my definition was somewhat glib and made me think deeper.
Cris Beam examines different understandings of what it means to be "empathic" (is it a skill, something to be coveted and calculated, or an ethic practiced out of instinct and for some moral good?) in the three sections of the book. Part 1, "Understanding", breaks down the ways we understand empathy as a concept and use it to understand each other. Part 2, "Justice", examines the getting along/good citizen aspect. Part 3, "Forgiveness", was for me the most interesting and probably the hardest to understand on a practical level, covering as it did the recent parole in South Africa of a man who had originally been sentenced to 2 life sentences plus 212 years for crimes against humanity.

[Jade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting, especially for those of us that have a rather overdeveloped sense of empathy. This book is written in such an interesting way--both technical and anecdotal and reader friendly. It's nice to know that there is scientific work being done on empathy--so often people are dismissive and in this horrible time in the world, I feel like empathy might be our only chance to save humanity. With the messages of division and bigotry and "otherness" that are being hyped every single day, it is comforting to know that I am not the only one that gets that if we continue to live in a me, me, me society, we are going to blow up sooner, rather than later. Highly recommend.

[Meghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone needs a self-help book once in a great while and I received this book as an advanced readers copy for our New Year New YOU display we are creating. This book colorfully describes the power of empathy and its effects on not only other people's lives but our own. Everyone deserves to be happy and to live the best life possible but sometimes true happiness comes when you go out and help others and this book clearly clarifies what it means to be empathetic to help other people and more importantly feel great about yourself! A wonderful read that deserves 5 stars!

[Ryan Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I nearly put down this book midway through. It did not match what I expected: a typical self-help volume about how to develop empathy and how that development will help the world. Instead, Cris Beam has created an open, raw exploration of both the scientific and the personal ramifications of developing empathy. Read to the end. Prepare to be pushed, for that is how we develop the capacity for empathy—by truly listening to the experiences of others who are different than us.

[Simón · Rating 3 out of 5]

The content of the book appealed to me more than the journalistic structure. The parts I enjoyed the most were the memoir-ish ones where the author turned the camera on herself and wondered whether she should be empathetic to an abusive partner. It showed the dangers or limits of empathy in a direct way. I empathized with her.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I checked it out from the library but had to return it before I was done. When I went back it was checked out.
It was pretty interesting but it was an extremely one sided argument. Still good to have that side in a very long elaboration.
I will check it out and attempt to finish it if I can.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Look who I know!" fractured at times by unreferenced facts that sound nice enough.

[Myrrah Grey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely loved it and charmed.

[Stacia · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting read overall. Not what I expected. ...and still not what I expected after reading it, as related to the title. I wish there had been more about what empathy IS, defined.

[Laura Greenfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, unexpected, learned a lot, complicated my thinking, inspired by the author's blending of genres (personal storytelling and academic research)

[NoRa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this made me sleepy.

[Robyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting parts, notably the chapters relating to apartheid and empathy in the justice system.

[Scribe Publications]

[Beam’s] exceptional intelligence, equally evident in her thinking and her writing, shines light on empathy from extraordinary angles.
Booklist (Starred Review)

A thoughtful exploration of empathy in all its forms.
The New York Times

Her exceptional intelligence, equally evident in her thinking and her writing, shines light on empathy from extraordinary angles … Her clear goal is to empower readers with the knowledge to enact the complicated and varied forms of empathy necessary to navigate modern times.
Booklist Online

Beam offers an intelligent three-part exploration of empathy’s cultural impact … A fascinating and well-rounded view of how empathy functions in society and why some cultivate it as a skill while others consider it a good moral value.
Kirkus Reviews

I Feel You is not a book about being or striving to be perfect. If anything it is a reminder of our and others’ imperfections and an examination of our willingness to understand them.
Melanie Cheng, Spectrum, The Saturday Age

She discusses empathetic experiments in the arts, educational facilities and the justice system in this comprehensive reference book, which will be a useful addition to the literature for people working in these fields … Beam’s book provides thought-provoking discussions.
Weekend Australian

[Maureen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an excellent study on empathy. I found it best to read as a school textbook, taking notes as I went along. Chris Beam, the author, delves into the origin, definition and practice of empathy in the past and the present. She does an excellent job of showing the wonderful results of empathy, whether practiced one on one, or in public scenarios such as courts of law. When hearts and minds are engaged empathy has a surprising power.

[Ann T · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC.
I enjoyed this thought provoking book on empathy amd it’s many ways of being displayed.