Person A is born with dysregulated dopamine; person B is not. Person A has a chisel; person B has a planer. As a child they are taught ‘this is morality’. Person A carves it deep; person B is more relaxed.
They go to school and see that not everyone behaves according to morality. Person A comes into conflict, more grooves carved, while person B sees the nuance and keeps their opinions to themselves.
A’s friends must meet a high standard as must their own impression of themself. B is more able to dance with people from all walks and forgive their own shortcomings.
They both go down a dark alleyway and get mugged. This is trauma. This carves an impression deep and both of them become unable to empathise with people who are unafraid of dark alleys.
But what is trauma? It’s the deep encoding of something, often because of threat.
And what if your brain has been deep-encoding everything since the day you were born? Is that not trauma too, on a neuronal level?
How about war? They go to war and only one of them develops ptsd. Why is that?
Are the people who are born dysregulated not more sensitive, more scarred, more needing of support, yet also more unable to accept it when it does come their way?
What is the purpose of empathy? Is empathy not there to help ease the suffering of others?
For someone who has a nice, smooth carving it might just be a case of letting it go. ‘Don’t worry about it’ they say. ‘Oh that must have been hard; it’s good that it’s over now’. But the scarred mind cannot move this way. The water does not flow like that.
The scarred mind cannot imagine how you could possibly be alright with leaving things unfinished, unknown, without resolution.
Which is more valid? The 10 who can naturally let things go or the 1 who can’t?
Over my life I have found myself feeling very hurt when I was called unempathetic. I feel other people's pain exquisitely, but I have learned ways of dealing with pain that are different; more urgent. Fix the problem first, and only then think about emotions. Or maybe don’t, because that makes it worse. Maybe just go for a bike ride instead.
Maybe that’s what we need. A bike ride. Or a walk. Or to jiggle our legs. Maybe that’s the solution. Repetitive actions to regulate dopamine so we can sharpen our planer and lessen the grooves, let the trauma spool out without words. Maybe this is kamma that ends kamma?
If a child is highly sensitive and cries at the small things, is it not because they feel more pain than the child who does not? And are they not shouted down to grow up and stop being a nuisance for others? Stop moving. Stop regulating. Get out the chisel.
More often than not, the people who are born with a brain which causes them pain wind up being ostracised and branded unempathetic precisely because of the pain they are in.
So I will go on regulating and I will excuse myself for a walk or a ride and I will listen to rhythmic music and meditate and write because that’s just how my brain deals with these things.
To make it technical, I will go on up-regulating my D2 dopamine receptors and enhancing tonic dopamine because these are the ‘unlearning’ side, the planer, while I will be careful about timing and intensity of phasic-spiking activities that sharpen the D1 chisel.
The people with nice smooth surfaces deserve empathy, of course; the easy kind of empathy I see and cannot partake in. How I wish that worked for me. But the reality is that it doesn’t, and it often makes things worse. The water goes into those grooves and cuts them deeper.
So I’ll carry on sharpening this planer and trying to hone my ability to un-learn and un-condition from the lessons of life.
But please stop saying we lack empathy just because our brains are more inclined toward trauma than yours.
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