Leslie Jamison explores the complexity behind human empathy in the first chapter of her new novel “The Empathy Exams”, of what it means to be empathetic and how we portray our empathy onto others. Among figuring out why empathy is so essential to our human experience, she reveals the fear in accepting empathy and what it means to allow our souls to feel the walls of another. Do we want to share our pain in hopes of relieving it or will this act of disclosure result in a violation of self?

After taking on her new role as pretend patient for training medical students, she must vibrate within someone else’s troubles. She embodies a woman named Stephanie Phillips, someone who refuses eye contact and can’t fully experience herself thus forcing a clinician to “excavate her sadness.” Jamison presents us with a new insight on accepting empathy in which she suggests, sometimes we have to dig up the pain to even see it at all. Sometimes we may have distanced ourselves so far from our trauma that it requires an intentional effort to bring it to consciousness. This, however, poses a threat to our happiness. We internalize our sadness to a degree that it evolves running beneath the surface, pulsing. This pain never ceases to ache and flows throughout our veins. We carry this pain until it becomes accumulated sediment, only eroding when a new pressure is introduced. We keep it guarded, shying away from the empathy of others.

Jamison explains that we get attached to this pain as it normalizes in the system. After arguing with her boyfriend about getting an abortion she expresses that living with the choice was a different reality than what his was going to be:  “I wanted someone else to feel it with me, and also I wanted it entirely to myself.” The author experiences conflicted feelings that she says always surface when she feels anything that hurts.

The truth is that pain is a human reaction as the result of something hurtful that leaves us feeling lonely. To aleve the pain would require an expression to reach outside of ourselves, to receive the empathy of others. However, we become aware rather quickly the barrier between human bodies in which one cannot access the other to the extent of which we may want. In knowing the limits of the human experience thus delivers us from ignorance and back to our pain, the pain of being perpetually misunderstood.

Yet, Jamison offers us an alternative option that can bring us comfort. After reading the section of her script, labeled: ENCOUNTER DYNAMICS, Stephanie Phillips is a person who is incapable of understanding the psychophysiological reactions to her trauma. A provoking line of thought: “Sometimes I can’t stand how much of you I don’t know.” Leslie’s character is grappling with her own limits of fully knowing herself. We are a mystery to ourselves, capable of wanting opposing goals, and this requires work to figure out. We struggle to understand, but this is where our solace abides. Leslie proposes that we work “to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all,” recognizing the complexity of the human mind and experience. Often we try to simplify our pain so that it may be more plausible, to bring us a sense of comfort. However, when we do this we keep trauma in the dark, normalized. We must welcome the sadness with questions—knowing ignorance instead of ignorantly knowing. Perhaps assuming that ‘healing’ is the “hypothetical horizon we never reach,” subverts our definition of what it means to heal. What if healing was not meant to be a darkened bruise who lays its evidence of our flaws and swiftly resides leaving no trace of its existence. But instead, maybe healing is fully knowing our errors and allowing them to live on in their own time, accepting that there is a future with its ghost. The pain can encompass a space that is to each their own, but can be penetrated by others. When we accept this duality we learn how to survive the ‘double blade.’

Leslie Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams” can be found in her book or online here