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HOW CARING TOO MUCH CAN HURT
INSTEAD OF HELP
In a riveting interview, Dr. Barbara Oakley discusses how caring too much can hurt not only you, but also the very people you mean to help.
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Dr. Barbara
Oakley |
Do you sometimes feel drawn into other people's problems-so much so that their pain becomes yours? Do you, or does someone you know, sometimes feel overwhelmed with the burdens of others? In Cold-Blooded Kindness: Neuroquirks of a Codependent Killer, or Just Give Me a Shot at Loving You, Dear, and Other Reflections on Helping That Hurts, Dr. Barbara Oakley tells a magnificent true story that shows how empathy-one of mankind's deepest, most valuable emotions-can be a double-edged sword. |
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| | Amy Alkon |
In this Promethean exclusive Q&A, we've invited Amy Alkon, author of I See Rude People and advice columnist in nearly 100 newspapers nationwide, to ask Dr. Oakley about how caring too much can hurt instead of help. |
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Amy Alkon: How is it possible to be too nice?
Dr. Barbara Oakley: One of my students demonstrated that in a course I was teaching about problems that can grow from misplaced kindness. From day one, this student-let's call her Jennifer-had a sour attitude, as if she could hardly wait for each class to end. One day I received a note-Jennifer wrote to say she was missing class because her brother was in the hospital. He'd just tried to commit suicide.
I learned that Jennifer had been giving everything she had to try to help her brother in his depression. But instead of lifting him out, her empathy had instead dragged her down. She was becoming depressed and withdrawn-she had finally decided to drop out of school to "help" her brother. Indeed, she'd lost all interest in school.
I pointed out to her that maybe she could apply some of the ideas in the course-that she could feel compassion for her brother, but it might be a good idea to draw back from empathizing with him. Sometimes, what we think is helping someone else really isn't as helpful as we might want. Ultimately, she needed to remember that her brother was the final decision maker in his life-she wasn't responsible for her brother's life or choices.
I can tell you, I was more than a little nervous about giving the advice-was I being too cold, butting into a fraught situation that I knew little about?
Alkon: It's always a risk, giving unsolicited advice, but I really admire you for the way you went about this-so compassionately and so concretely helpful. Too often, "ivory tower" research just stays in the ivory tower, gathering dust.
Oakley: Amy, it was remarkable! Within a few days she was back in class looking like a completely different person. She told me later that once she realized the ideas in the class applied directly to her own situation, it changed her life. She learned that stepping back and setting emotional limits can sometimes be the best thing you can do to stay healthy. |
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Alkon: Let's step back for a minute. Altruism usually means caring for someone else at cost to oneself. Do you think all altruism is somehow harmful?
Oakley: Not at all. Altruism is part of the foundation of society-empathetic caring for others can be vital. It's just that in our culture-especially for women-we've made a secular cult out of the idea of altruism-caring for others. It's seen as this unmitigated good. But here-let me show you a picture of what can grow from empathy. You can have good things come from it-positive feelings and good health. Or you can react in a negative way, becoming too intertwined with the negative feelings being experienced by another. Cold-Blooded Kindness is about a very unusual crime, but it is also about some of the latest research in how to help ourselves choose a healthy path for helping others. If you truly want to help others, you need to also understand that sometimes, an action that seems obviously altruistic is in truth deeply harmful, not only for others, but also for yourself. It has the opposite of the intended effect!
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Alkon: Why did you choose to write about Carole Alden and the strange-sometimes bizarre-story of how she came to kill her husband?
Oakley: I began working on Cold-Blooded Kindness truly believing that Carole Alden was what she portrayed herself to be-a loving mother of five who snapped and killed her sadistic husband because of all the horrific things he'd done to her. But virtually every day that I worked on the book there was a new, shocking revelation that contradicted yet another of her claims. In the end, the only conclusion the evidence would allow is that Carole Alden is a deeply vindictive, pathologically dishonest killer who makes her way through life as a professional victim. She's not the one who's too nice. We are. We allow ourselves to get our heartstrings tugged by someone who is an expert at tugging, and as a result, we assist people like Carole in doing terrible things, and in turn, help create whole new sets of victims. Incidentally, as the book reveals, there were other mysterious deaths around Carole Alden. What's truly shocking is the number of supporters Carole has-people who simply believe what Carole has told them, no matter how far-fetched her story is, and how much it contradicts the physical facts. These are people so wrapped in the cult of nice that it's as if they poke their fingers in their ears while saying lalala to avoid hearing anything that doesn't fit with what they are determined to believe. |
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Carole Alden with attorney James Slavens
Courtesy of Chris Detrick, Salt Lake Tribune |
Alkon: Give us a few examples of Carole Alden's claims that weren't supported by the evidence.
Oakley: There are so many discrepancies in Carole's stories that you could fly a squadron of 747s through them with acreage to spare. Carole went to great lengths to hide the fact that she'd bought a gun the very day she shot her husband. Then she told investigators she had shot her husband because he was charging straight for her-but the autopsy showed that the bullet was in her husband's back. And she didn't just shoot him in the back-she also shot him point blank in the head once he was down and helpless. She proceeded methodically with this coup de grāce, putting a pillow to his head to avoid the splatter. Then she went and dug a hole under the koi pond in her backyard and dragged his body outside with her jeep, taking out a corner post of the porch with his flying body. As one of the prosecutors told me, you can't make this stuff up. Only when Carole called her boyfriend for help-and her boyfriend told her he was going to call the police-did she finally call the police herself. |
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Alkon: What can we learn from stories like this?
Oakley: We can learn that setting emotional limits is okay-in fact, it's healthy. Right now society has this sense-again, especially for women-that there can never be enough empathy or altruism. That altruism is the answer to everything. But it's not. Altruism isn't this shining orb that brightens everything it touches. It is a double-edged sword. There are always tradeoffs. Carole Alden was a champion of soliciting the empathy of others. She often used her children as her shield-for example, she once managed to finagle some very expensive emu chicks she coveted by telling reporters that her daughter was dying of terminal breast cancer, and the chicks were her daughter's dying wish. Of course, her daughter didn't have terminal breast cancer, but Carole got those chicks.
That's a seemingly innocuous example-except to the breeder who donated the very expensive chick, the airlines who donated frequent-flier miles that should have gone to a more worthy recipient, and arguably the many newspaper readers who were cheated of an honest story. But we can all be tricked into making sacrifices that should never be made.
Ultimately, Cold-Blooded Kindness is a book meant to convey the best of what we know about the limits of our emotions. It does this using a compelling real-life story that shows how people can avoid being manipulated through their best trait: their compassion. Cold-Blooded Kindness is, ultimately, a story with a triumphant ending, written to lay out ways we can become triumphant in our own lives.
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Barbara Oakley, PhD, PE, FAIMBE, is an associate professor of engineering at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Her work focuses on the complex relationship between neurocircuitry and social behavior. Among her varied experiences, she worked for several years as a Russian translator on Soviet trawlers in the Bering Sea during the height of the Cold War; she met her husband while working as a radio operator at the South Pole station in Antarctica; and she has gone from private to regular army captain in the US military. Oakley is a recent vice president of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, the world's largest bioengineering society, as well as a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering. She is the author and editor of many books, including Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend and the forthcoming Pathological Altruism (Oxford University Press, June 2011).
Amy Alkon is an award-winning nationally syndicated advice columnist in about 100 newspapers and the author of I See Rude People: One Woman's Battle to Beat Some Manners into Impolite Society (McGraw-Hill, 2010). Her column and her book are both bitingly funny but rooted in anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral economics. The late Albert Ellis, cofounder with Aaron Beck of cognitive behavioral therapy, was a fan of Alkon's advice column and deemed her "saner than most of the therapists I know." Alkon's work has been covered in publications including the New York Times, LA Times, Boston Globe, Toronto Sun, and Psychology Today, and she has appeared on national TV and radio shows in the US and Canada, including the Today show, Good Morning America, Nightline, Politically Incorrect, Dennis Miller, and on the news on CNN and MTV. Read Amy Alkon's daily blog at advicegoddess.com and follow @amyalkon on Twitter.
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Related books of interest
from our catalog include:
  
  
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We hope we've piqued your interest in this fascinating topic, and, if you truly care about helping other people, that you'll want to learn more about how to use empathy wisely.
Sincerely,
Jill Maxick
Prometheus Books
publicity@prometheusbooks.com
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