amberrr-onlymee

[lichtbrenger]

charlie and empathy

I’ve seen some thoughts about Charlie floating around (always love to read them, everyone has unique thoughts, namaste 🙏) and there seems to be a lot of discussion about Charlie having little actual empathy for the people around her and I don’t know if that is a fair assessment based on what we’ve been shown so far.

Long one so I’m putting it in the read more <3

The idea that Charlie has strong feelings of sympathy without feeling empathy kind of befuddles me, because the jury's still out on what sympathy actually is when compared to empathy. The most intuitive answer would be to separate them by saying sympathy is feeling for someone and empathy is feeling with someone. I wrote out a whole thing about this (that empathy does not directly motivate helping behavior like sympathy does and that empathy can lead to personal distress (a self-oriented reaction of distress to another’s suffering)) BUT I don’t think that’s the point I want to make here 😸 hihi. So I’m solely going to focus on the thought that Charlie has low empathy.

If we look at Charlie and the way she expresses empathy (which, if psychometrically sound is seen as multifaceted in nature; usually cognitive, affective and somatic (sliding scales referred to as CASES)) the only thing she seems to be lacking is cognitive empathy.

Cognitive empathy allows us to understand and interpret emotions more analytically. This is sometimes also called empathic accuracy.

Cognitive empathy is more like a skill, a skill Charlie never got to work on. Charlie has lived her whole life in uhm, hell, where people don’t respond well to genuine feelings of empathy/sympathy from others. Charlie has tried and failed again and again in reaching out to people, and these experiences haven’t provided her with a reason why. A lot of people point to the Angel Dust Situation as a moment where Charlie shows that she’s not empathetic, but I don’t actually think that’s what’s going on there. Charlie seems to have a lot of empathy for Angel is this episode, she is however completely unequipped. Everything takes her by surprise, her emotions are intense and she doesn’t understand the stakes of Angel’s situation when she first tries to help. This doesn’t means she’s unempathetic, this means she’s in over her head. She doesn’t have a lot of experience with people actually wanting/ needing her help and she hasn’t had any experience in Angel’s scene. She fumbles, but a lack of empathy isn’t the issue. Her feelings aren’t wrong in these very complicated moments.  

I’ve also seen people discuss Charlie's relationship with Vaggie and with that I feel like people forget that Charlie knew nothing about Vaggie’s life before her until the meeting in heaven. We don’t know what Vaggie told her, but I doubt she told Charlie about her trauma or hangups surrounding coming down every year to slaughter her people. Charlie has no real reason to think Vaggie isn’t her equal, her partner, capable of handling the same things she does especially since that’s probably exactly what Vaggie wants her to think. Charlie trusts her and doesn’t have a reason to think she’s not being forthcoming. Again, naivete, maybe; a lack of empathy, I don’t think so. I also think that, while we as the viewer may recover quite quickly from the shock of Vaggie being an ex-exorcist, Charlie is allowed to give it a little more time. She’s been lied to (in quite a big way) by the one person who has stood by her and she trusted unconditionally. She’s known her for years (I assume) and there are certain patterns of thought and behavior that just wear into a relationship, and you can’t expect someone to snap out of that all of the sudden. Charlie realizing Vaggie has her own specific demons and what that entails for their relationship is going to take time, I think it would take time for anyone.

Tldr; I don’t think Charlie suffers from a lack of empathy, she suffers from a lack of practice and positive experiences, mostly. She’s ill equipped in some instances, and purposefully left in the dark in others.