Alkon Interviews Oakley: When Helping Hurts
Caring too much can actually hurt instead of helping. For Prometheus Books, I interview my friend, engineering professor and author Dr. Barbara Oakley about the contents of her terrific, just-published book, "Cold-Blooded Kindness." A bit from the preamble to my interview with her:

Do you sometimes feel drawn into other people's problems-so much so that their pain becomes yours? Do you, or does someone you know, sometimes feel overwhelmed with the burdens of others? In Cold-Blooded Kindness: Neuroquirks of a Codependent Killer, or Just Give Me a Shot at Loving You, Dear, and Other Reflections on Helping That Hurts, Dr. Barbara Oakley tells a magnificent true story that shows how empathy-one of mankind's deepest, most valuable emotions-can be a double-edged sword.

An excerpt from our interview:

Alkon: What can we learn from stories like this?

Oakley: We can learn that setting emotional limits is okay-in fact, it's healthy. Right now society has this sense-again, especially for women-that there can never be enough empathy or altruism. That altruism is the answer to everything. But it's not. Altruism isn't this shining orb that brightens everything it touches. It is a double-edged sword. There are always tradeoffs. Carole Alden was a champion of soliciting the empathy of others. She often used her children as her shield-for example, she once managed to finagle some very expensive emu chicks she coveted by telling reporters that her daughter was dying of terminal breast cancer, and the chicks were her daughter's dying wish. Of course, her daughter didn't have terminal breast cancer, but Carole got those chicks.

That's a seemingly innocuous example-except to the breeder who donated the very expensive chick, the airlines who donated frequent-flier miles that should have gone to a more worthy recipient, and arguably the many newspaper readers who were cheated of an honest story. But we can all be tricked into making sacrifices that should never be made.

Ultimately, Cold-Blooded Kindness is a book meant to convey the best of what we know about the limits of our emotions. It does this using a compelling real-life story that shows how people can avoid being manipulated through their best trait: their compassion.