ELEVEN: The Art of Empathy

“As the study’s longtime director George Vaillant put it, “Whereas a warm childhood, like a rich father, tends to inoculate a man against future pain, a bleak childhood is like poverty; it cannot cushion the difficulties of life. Yes, difficulties may sometimes lead to post- traumatic growth, and some men’s lives did improve over time. But there is always a high cost in pain and lost opportunities, and for many men with bleak childhoods the outlook remained bleak until they died, sometimes young and sometimes by their own hands.

The second was a group of 456 inner-city Boston boys like Henry Keane, selected for a different reason: they were children who grew up in some of Boston’s most troubled families and most disadvantaged neighborhoods, but who, at age 14, had mostly succeeded in avoiding the paths to juvenile delinquency that some of their peers were following. More than 60 percent of these adolescents had at least one parent who immigrated to the U.S., most from poor areas of Eastern and Western Europe and areas in or near the Middle East, such as Greater Syria and Turkey. Their modest roots and immigrant status made them doubly marginalized. Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, a lawyer and a social worker, respectively, initiated this study in an attempt to understand which life factors prevented delinquency, and these boys had succeeded on that front.

Here is where Emmy Werner’s research, our own Harvard Study research, and many other pieces of research from across cultures and populations converge to show that a critical link between childhood experience and positive adult social connections is our ability to process

emotions.

It is from our relationships as children—especially our relationships with our family—that we first learn what to expect from others. This is when we begin to develop the emotional habits, so to speak, that will be with us for the rest of our lives. These habits often define the way we connect to others and our ability to engage others in mutually supportive ways.

A crucial point here is that our ability to process emotions is malleable. In fact, managing emotions is one of the things we actually get better at as we grow old. And there is strong evidence that we don’t have to wait until late in our lives for this to happen. With the right guidance and some practice, we can learn to be better at managing our feelings at any age.

The complex emotional lattice of every family is unique in important ways, and our families affect us in ways that other relationships do not. Families share history, experience, and blood as no other relationships can. We can’t replace a person we’ve known for our entire lives. More importantly, we can’t replace a person who’s known us for our entire lives. Nurturing and enriching these relationships despite challenges, persevering, and appreciating the positive things we get from them is worth the trouble. Bob thinks of a moment when, as a young man, he was going through a time in which he was incredibly angry at his parents, and an uncle took him aside. I know you’re mad, his uncle said. But just remember: nobody is ever going to care about you this much ever again.

What role did friendships play amid these challenges? Do their experiences have any lessons for us?

They do. Using participants’ firsthand accounts of their combat experiences and their connections to fellow servicemen, we found that those men who had more positive friendships with their fellow servicemen, and who served in combat units that were more cohesive and connected, were less likely to experience symptoms of PTSD after the war. Their friendships, in other words, were like a kind of protective armor. Having good and trusted friends buffered these men during some of the most difficult events of their lives.