Most dangers in life come not from the obviously bad, evil, or toxic, but from what might best be described as “too much of a good thing.”

A few months ago, Hurricane Helene dumped an incredible amount of water on the mountain communities an hour west of where I live. Generally speaking, water is a good thing. The average human can go only a handful of days without water. But when 40 trillion gallons of water fall in less than a week, water goes from being necessary for survival to being a threat to survival. That’s enough water to fill Lake Tahoe, which makes mountain streams, creeks, and rivers flow way over their banks.

40 trillion gallons of water is definitely an example of “too much of a good thing.” A less obvious example is empathy when it spills over its natural boundaries.

What is “empathy”? First, it’s kind of a made-up word. I guess all words are made-up to some degree, but empathy was first coined just over a hundred years ago as a way to describe the ability to project one’s own imagined feelings into the world.

Empathy’s cousin sympathy comes from the much older word sympathizo (to suffer with). While sympathy has been around for a few millennia, empathy is a new kid on the block and its exact definition is tough to pin down. For the sake of this blog post, let’s define it as the feeling that you understand and share another person’s feelings and emotions. It involves relating vicariously to the pain of another, “as if one had experienced that pain themselves.”

Understanding and sharing another’s feelings and emotions seems like a pretty good thing. In fact, the same Google search that produced the above definition also highlighted the importance of empathy:

Empathy is a key ingredient of successful relationships and a building block of morality. It helps us understand the perspectives, needs, and intentions of others.

Golly, without empathy we will lack morality and struggle with relationships!

In the AMC adaptation of Hannibal, the titular villain has zero empathy, which is at least partially why he experiences no remorse (and quite a bit of pleasure) when killing and cannibalizing. On the other hand, the FBI profiler Will Graham, who is the protagonist to Hannibal Lecter’s antagonist, represents the other end of the empathy spectrum. His hyper-empathy allows him to assume the point of view of criminals and clearly understand their motives and actions. AMC wants viewers to understand that empathy is kind of like a superpower, although Graham does pay the price of nightmares and a mental breakdown.

Popular author and speaker Brené Brown agrees that empathy is awesome. In her book Atlas of the Heart, she says:

“Empathy, the most powerful tool of compassion, is an emotional skill set that allows us to understand what someone is experiencing and to reflect back that understanding.”

She declares empathy far superior to sympathy and describes sympathy as “the near enemy concept” of empathy.

What makes sympathy so bad? According to Brown, sympathy is not true connection, and it keeps us at a safe distance from the person experiencing the pain and suffering.

I have great admiration for Brené Brown, so pardon me while I disagree wholeheartedly with her.

Empathy is okay, but the condition of our world today makes empathy far less helpful than sympathy. In his book A Failure of Nerve, Edwin Friedman highlights that, in the modern context, empathy often becomes “a power tool in the hands of the sensitive.” Empathy is the virtue that opens the door to the vice of what Friedman calls “herding.”

Herding is what happens when an anxious group allows the least mature, most anxious, most reactive member of a community to demand that the rest of the group adapt to them and their sensitivities.

For example:

• A toddler throws a tantrum in the supermarket, and the parents try to meet the demands of the tyrannical tike.
• A severely under-performing employee wilts and weeps when given critical feedback by the manager, and his fellow employees try to soothe his suffering and resist the “mean old manager” who inflicted the pain.

In both examples, the empathy of the group is not virtuous—it is toxic.

For coaches, leaders, spouses, pastors, and friends, the “true connection” promised by empathy is exactly what makes it unhelpful and unhealthy. Truly connecting is a euphemism for joining in the feelings of the other person versus allowing others to feel what they feel, to own their own feelings, and to be differentiated from others.

The toddler in the supermarket feels something deeply, but the feelings flow from the narcissism characteristic of an immature person. Sympathy might stand at a distance and notice the feelings of the toddler without validating the feelings. It’s the parent’s job to guide the toddler into a state of maturity wherein the toddler is not consumed or controlled by feelings. In other words, the parent needs to lead, not follow.

The reprimanded employee’s feelings of hurt and offense are self-referential, which is normal but not helpful. It’s normal to use oneself as the reference point for determining what is true, but it’s a whole new level of anxiety that demands others use me and my feelings as the reference point of what is true in a given situation.

Empathy soothes, while sympathy holds open the door for change. Sympathy invites the employee and his peers to adapt to reality (performance) while recognizing the challenge of doing so.

As coaches, we should be on guard against over-doing empathy. Just because a client feels something does not make the feelings valid, helpful, or appropriate. The feelings might be all of those things, but they might also be signals of immaturity keeping the client stuck. Who’s to say? Not the client, nor the coach.

As the coach, we serve as another reference point (not “the” reference point) for the client in determining what is really going on. But if we give up our position as being someone other than the client and opt for “truly connecting” or “joining them in their suffering,” we abandon the client to a self-referential hell that positions the client as the center of the universe.

And that would be too much of a good thing.