Difficult work is often difficult precisely because it involves tolerating some emotional discomfort and doing the work anyway. If your emotional endurance is low, you won’t be able to follow-through on (or sometimes even start) much of the most important work of your life.
Let’s say someone has both a high-functioning theory of mind and an overflowing well of compassion. What then? Well, this is what Hoffman calls “empathic over-arousal.” A person will feel so worn down by the intensity of other people’s emotions that it wears them down — it turns their distress into my actual distress. This might not seem like a bad... See more