Tenderness

#037 Comfort blowing in on the Christmas breeze

I’ve been a subscriber of

Donna Lancaster

for a while, and I enjoy her sensitive, and honest writing style- It’s like I’m reading the words that would come out of her mouth, not a highly edited picture perfect persona. Maybe what helps form this impression is that she swears in her writing! I trust people who show their passion with sensitive, heartfelt, soulful writing and a few well placed f**ks!

Why?

It’s hard to say, but there’s certainly a difference between swearing at, and swearing about. One is typically aggressive, and the other can be expressive. There is something about the tone of Donna’s swearing that conveys safety and authenticity. This is probably an obvious thing to write, but worth the reminder, that when I read it is like I am silently reading to myself, as I’m creating the sounds in my head. Even without being spoken out loud, the hard sounds of swear words are somehow satisfying to me, like the drum beat consonance of a poem. An OT friend and colleague once told me that the frickative sounds typical of swear words have a strong and often satisfying sensory quality. We swear when something is emotionally charged. Perhaps in the act of swearing we are unknowingly supporting our emotional regulation, exactly as we need it. Even the word frickative is satisfying to say!

I’m distracting myself. Back to Donna’s note, which reflected on her experiences as a sensitive child, feeling all the feels, and how over time, life pains caused her to close up to protect herself.

When I was young I was all heart. I would cry at seeing a butterfly, give my favourite sweets to the new kid at school and tell people I loved them and their shoes.Then I got hurt. Many times. And fear arrived. So I started to close down pockets of my heart to survive….and it worked. Clever girl.

…

And now my focus is on staying tender, open hearted, curious and kind. I tried that hard Warrior woman persona and she’s not for me. I want to cry at the beauty of a butterfly. I want to offer sweets to a stranger. I want to Love with my whole heart. And yes sometimes that means I get hurt. But that’s ok. It’s worth the risk.

Because I choose tender. How about you?

#wordsbydonnalancaster #choosetender

I recognised this in myself, and it prompted me to reflect on Tenderness. I repeated it, as if allowing the word to form and settle on my hand like a butterfly.

Seeds of Tenderness

Do we sprinkle life with tenderness, like pepper and salt that we add to improve the day to day flavour, or do we want tenderness to be the roots from which our lives grow? It might take time to cultivate the latter, but that’s the one I’m going for.

It’s been helpful to hold onto the word and repeat it almost like a daily mantra. Where can tenderness grow today?

My week started with my second choir practice with the National Choir, preparing for a remembrance event run by the palliative care charity Jasmine. Our choir leader encouraged more softness (insert correct musical term here!). This was not a Christmas performance to belt out. We were definitively not the main event- the people and the stars being placed on the Christmas trees in memory of lost loves were. The choir were there to provide music that could hold the emotion, as if offering our arms of sound into which people could drop, feeling safe and supported to express their grief, opening up their hearts to tenderness.

We needed to sing with similar tenderness.

I noticed that it was hard for the choir to maintain- the conductor smiled and nodded in encouragement but I could feel a pull towards a faster, louder, and perhaps emotionally safer pace and place.

How comfortable are we being in a place of tenderness with ourselves and each other, I wonder?

Everything seems to speed up in autumn towards Christmas. Tenderness requires us to do the opposite, seemingly impossible thing, to slow down and be in relationship with each other and ourselves. This can be challenging.

Meeting myself in a place of tenderness on a windy week night- The Christmas Breeze.

Reading Donna’s post reminded me of the first time I consciously heard, or thought about this word. I think it was in a workshop with

Kerri ní Dochartaigh

. I don’t have the notes to remind me of the details, but I was shocked to realise I had no felt sense of what it meant. It wasn’t a word that I had heard spoken much before, and it felt both distant, whilst also being a word that called to me, like Mary Oliver’s wild geese. Harsh and exciting? A siren call?

It was a seed that was planted then, whenever that was with Kerri, probably at the start of spring. Donna’s words came at the end of autumn, bringing tenderness to the front of my mind, a time of harvest.

As I said earlier, I recognised myself in Donna’s words. I was also a child who felt things strongly. I remember my mum driving us one morning, possibly on our way to school. Out of the window I saw an elderly man walking along the pavement, slightly stooped and slowed. I felt a huge wave of emotion that my young mind was unable to label. Witnessing his frailty I wanted to cry, as if I were sad, but I also felt deep love for the man.

I didn’t tell anyone- it was too confusing and somehow embarrassing.

I understand it now as the seed of tenderness. I wonder how we come to forget it.

Hardened hearts?

Have all of our hearts closed up and grown harder over the years? Is this part of what we unwittingly celebrate as resilience? Do some of our protections learned to withstand a harsh world make it harder for us to show and celebrate our tenderness?!

I do not recall the word tender or tenderness being used in any of my clinical psychology training. Paul Gilbert brought compassion into the training and therapy space, and Dan Hughes and Kim Golding expanded my knowledge and use of these terms in relationship with clients, but tenderness, is not a word I remember hearing once. Isn’t that strange?! (of course maybe I simply didn’t hear it before!)

Why is tenderness a word that writers are using, and not psychologists? Do we not want the people caring for us in our darkest moments to know tenderness too?

After a very quick search (sorry Substackers, it’s Saturday and I want to go out, not write a PhD!) I found an article distinguishing between tenderness and sympathy, by Niezink et al (2012).

The authors cite other research that makes some interesting distinctions that like me, you may not have considered before.

• Lishner et al. report that sympathy and tenderness are evoked by different needs. Sympathy occurs when a human or animal is hurt or suffering- there is a current need.

• Tenderness occurs when a human or animal is perceived to be vulnerable, even when it had no current needs. They give the example of looking into a puppy’s eyes (see also Kalawski 2010).

Niezink et al conclude that these are ‘different components of empathic concern’.

This makes so much sense to me. It was the perceived vulnerability of the elderly man, not that he was obviously suffering. Yet how do I not know these distinctions already? My inner critic is having a field day!

My wise mind intervenes. How much education do any of us get on discriminating the subtle differences in our emotional lives? So much of our knowledge about the inner worlds of ourselves and others is based on our personal experiences. What we learn tends to be in relationship, not books, and dependent on how much we talk about these things together.

Empathy

We all probably think we know what we are talking about when we use the word empathy, and assume we have the same understanding. A few years ago I had a lightbulb moment of there being two very different definitions and experiences of empathy. My felt experience was only part of the picture. This transformed my personal and professional experience and I share this here in case it provides similar clarity to others!

Empathy is a term introduced by Titchener (1909), as an awareness in imagination of the emotions of another person as well as a kind of social-cognitive bonding.

It can be a cognitive process where an individual can ‘accurately and dispassionately understanding the client’s point of view concerning his or her situation (Dymond 1949)’

or

it can be a ‘vicarious emotion.. feeling either the same emotion as the other person, or an emotion congruent with (but not necessarily identical to) the emotion of the other person (Batson and Coke 1981; Eisenberg and Strayer 1987; Stotland 1969) (See Niezink et al (2012).

The distinction is that one form focusses on the cognitive understanding of someone else’s experience, and the other on the emotional congruence between people, feeling with.

Which of these forms of empathy do you most recognise in yourself?

Which do you most value and appreciate in others?

The lightbulb moment for me came when I realised what I understood to be empathy, was not what someone else understood it to be.

I empathise, he said.

And yet I couldn’t feel it. He could look and understand it like a scientist, but he would not come near and touch it, or me, in my pain. I realised in that moment that much as I valued cognitive empathy, I also desperately needed the other. I needed to be held, to have a felt sense that someone could feel my pain, or at the very least wanted to reach out to the parts of me that felt it. Understanding it was not enough.

It was a painful realisation at the time, but there is clearly great value in both forms of empathy. One lends itself better to having a cool and rational understanding of what someone is experiencing, and the other can aid deeper emotional connection. Each may be helpful in different contexts but we need both to respond with a wise mind rather than just logic or emotion. As anyone who identifies as an empath or highly sensitive person will know, there is a risk of overwhelm if empathy is not rooted in boundaries and self-care.

What more might we now learn from the distinctions made by researchers about tenderness?

Tenderness and sympathy

Apparently we lay people tend to categorize tenderness and sympathy differently. Sympathy is placed in the ‘sadness’ category, and tenderness is in the a ‘love’ category (Shaver et al., 1987).

It was love and sadness that I felt towards the elderly man walking along the street when I was a child. I didn’t speak about it because I didn’t understand it. I was embarrassed to feel such a swirled up mess of what was probably sadness and love for a stranger. How beautiful it seems to me now. Metta in action.

But just as Donna describes, slowly, slowly, slowly many of us develop a protective shell around our tender hearts, not even realising we are doing it. Instead, our MO might be to fight. Fighting the system, fighting the aggressor. There is always another battle of injustice that we could fight.

But that tender compassion is not gone, we just need to find a different way of acting on our empathy.

It is easier to wear slippers than it is to carpet the whole of the earth

Old saying

We can stitch our slippers together with tenderness.

Whilst I was writing this piece, Otis Reading and Try A Little Tenderness popped up in my mind. I hummed the bits I could recall and looked up the words. The song is about a girl wanting and waiting for things she does not yet possess. The response is that in the waiting, to try tenderness

But while she's there waiting, without them
Try a little tenderness
That's all you gotta do

Sounds simple! But how do you find tenderness in yourself and in a world that makes us weary with a fire of wanting for more, stoked the Black Friday Sales all around us?

Today’s word in

Beth Kempton

final #tinyautumnpoem prompts gives a helpful hint.

Plenty

I came to the Cayman Islands with just three suitcases, and although there are so many things that I think I need, or want, I can say that I have plenty of what I really need for a happy and healthy life.

The huge dump in the centre of the island is a reminder of the impact of our consumerism. Some days it smells particularly bad. It is not going anywhere, and grows every day like a cancer on the soil, right next to the new hospital and fancy school. Each time the Artful Dodger convinces me to go up for more, I’m going to try and remember it, and the alternatives.

Try a little tenderness. That's all you gotta do

What are you going to do to help the seeds of tenderness come into bloom?

References:

Niezink, L.W., Siero, F.W., Dijkstra, P. et al. Empathic concern: Distinguishing between tenderness and sympathy. Motiv Emot 36, 544–549 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-011-9276-z

Titchener, E. (1909). Elementary psychology of the thought processes. New York: Macmillan.