himpathy
“Should we do a Tarot reading first?” my friend asked.
“Sure, I just brought them out,” I said.
She craned her neck. I moved the paper towel roll so she could see the pocket-sized Tarot box already sitting on the dining table between us. I watched her eyes settle on it.
“You brought out the Tarot deck before I asked?” she said, examining the deck suspiciously. “That’s a bit creepy.”
“Um,” I said, “it really isn’t. Today felt very quiet and heavy. Besides, it’s the full moon.” I pulled the box toward me and started shuffling the little deck of cards.
A few nights earlier, we’d argued. Everything was fine afterward, but my friend was still worried. She stopped on the walkway and turned and stared at me. “Are we enmeshed?” she asked me.
“No,” I said. “It’s called attunement. It’s part of coregulation. Not the same as codependence at all.”
But coregulation is no easy task here in the real world: people get too stressed out and dysregulated to do it right. They get too unfocused, or tired. Maybe only one person is attuned to the other, which is unequal and destructive. Sometimes it happens that people want two vastly different things. You’d think compromise would be more common—neither person gets the exact thing they want, which sounds terrific honestly—but for some reason it always turns into King Solomon holding a meat cleaver to an infant, and then you’re like, god, just take the whole baby please.
“Mind that big heart of yours,” Sherlock Holmes was telling a blonde lady onscreen. The lady’s brunette twin sister had been planning to kill her for inheritance money. The blonde lady was unlikely to realize this, until Sherlock Holmes had astutely pointed it out to her.
“There it is again!” I exclaimed. “The lesson I keep hearing everywhere! Stop empathizing with everyone!” Mind that big heart of yours.
The medical drama The Pitt had become too stressful to watch; I’d recommended watching Elementary instead. My friend recognized Jonny Lee Miller from Mansfield Park, which is not the first role I would think of for him.
The first episode of the first season had opened with a grisly murder. My friend gasped. “This is supposed to be cozy?” she asked me.
“Oh,” I said, “you always have to start with a shocking scene of violence so you can have the coziness afterward.” And investigators can’t work for the police, because they have to break all the rules all the time. They have to have a wealthy, detached or deceased parent, explaining how they’re able to blow off work and joyride around town solving mysteries all day. They have a doctor or mortician as a best friend, getting them the inside scoop on victims’ bodies. Most important, they themselves cannot be from any discernible social class, because they are liminal figures who have to cross socioeconomic thresholds in order to solve mysteries. “Every crime procedural is a social commentary on class,” I concluded.
The next night my friend hosted a dinner party. Someone was talking about a guy from class who consistently sucked all the air out of the room.
During a pause, I said that I was working on my... oh, I couldn't remember the term now. Him-passion? Everyone laughed. But, and I apologized for saying it, it seemed like the young man in question was performing for the validation and approval of the women in the class. “Which isn't your responsibility at all,” I rushed to add. “He's on... his own... journey.”
Later I was carrying in some plates or something. “HIMPATHY!” I shouted. The term was ‘himpathy’.
“When you were talking about that guy,” another young woman said, turning toward me, “I really thought ‘aww’! I saw him as just a little boy.”
“Oh, please don't,” I said, laughing. “Personally I’m working on... not doing that as often.”
At the start of this year, I’d felt bad for a neighbor who’d lived in a little apartment across from mine. I’d given him encouragement, attention, time, energy. He ended up feeling entitled to everything I had. I had no time for friends and neighbors who actually needed me—or for myself. When I’d tried to pull back or set clear boundaries, he became obsessive. Eventually he was evicted for his erratic and destructive behavior. To this day I still feel bad for him. I think about him all the time.
As I reshuffled the cards, I mentioned himpathy again: this instinct to extend compassion and goodwill to whichever party is the cultural Default, who is often white, cisgender, and/or male. At first we give it freely, “because we absolutely cannot imagine other people having bad intentions,” I explained. “We think, oh, malice is rare, it's unlikely.” Maybe so, maybe not!
I was explaining why some of us repeatedly extend the ‘benefit of the doubt’ to people who don’t intend to ever grow, or problem-solve, they just want our support in feeling like they’re right. They end up hoarding our energy, sucking it all up. “Compassion is a beautiful thing!” I exclaimed. “What it probably comes down to is, save all that valuable compassion for people who actually need it.”
Also, I had grown up being friends with all boys: “They were exactly as emotionally immature as I was,” I mused. “And that’s how I grew up to become a man-whisperer.”
My friend asked how she could hold more compassion for people.
“Oh, just ask yourself what I'd say about them,” I said, “and then remember that I'm probably wrong. And I'll start asking my Inner You what you would say. The reality is somewhere in the middle.”
I put the cards away, and we moved to the couch to watch another episode of Elementary. My phone rumbled in my bag.
I looked at my phone, skimmed over some messages.
“AHA!” I said to my friend on the couch. “This is what I was trying to describe before: this thing I have been calling energetic laundering. It's, like, a type of enablement.”
The person who was texting me was in an on-again relationship; however, his partner was planning to reconcile with an abusive ex. She expected him to support her plans—potentially prolonging everyone’s misery and dysfunction—and he was at a loss as to how to proceed.
I started typing a reply on my phone, reading my response out loud to my friend as I tapped: “I... call... this... energetic...”
I call this "energetic laundering"—when someone expects your uncritical support and energy, which then gets poured into the black hole of a toxic dynamic or structure
enabling the toxic structure by proxy, basically—making the structure feel more 'comfortable' for them when, no, it SHOULD feel uncomfortable, because it's a bad situation
I don't want my energy going into anything destructive!!
I'm sorry
Woof