“I took a day or two
To exile from the light,
To unfold that prisoner
They call a mind.”
– From “It’s Happening Again” by Agnes Obel
Talking with Agnes Obel is more relaxing than talking with 99 percent of my therapist friends who aspire to help people cope with anxiety.
This calming effect comes perhaps from years of developing a creative process designed to help Obel explore her own experiences and feelings in a safe, nonjudgmental place.
Fiercely protective of her creative space, Obel finds that she is only effective at making music when she is alone. And when she is ready to share her music, she invites people into her safe space, where they can explore Obel’s experience, and allow her music to help them explore their own thoughts and feelings.
In doing so, with her music, Obel has created an “empathy technology” — a term Obel uses to describe any method by which people can better understand their own experiences and the experiences of others.
And critics are noticing this seemingly therapeutic effect in describing her new album, “Citizen of Glass.” Rolling Stone describes her music as “glistening … like ice crystals at attic windows,” leading to an “enveloping steambath destination.” And The Quietus wrote, “Through Obel’s breathtaking vocals and ethereal piano and cello compositions, ‘Citizen of Glass’ succeeds in creating a welcome musical space to escape the observations of ourselves and others.”
One of the themes of “Citizen of Glass” is a caution that true empathy is not about the full transparency of social media by which every aspect of our lives is shared with the world. Rather, it is about allowing ourselves to have our own private space to understand and explore our feelings, helping others do the same, and then sharing our feelings with each other when we are ready.
Empathy can be defined as the ability to perceive and understand the feelings of others. Empathy is considered a critical aspect of interpersonal relationships, including doctor-patient and couples relationships, because understanding the feelings of another can help us engage in compassionate, pro-social behavior that is helpful to another person.
For example, one study of cognitive-behavioral therapy of 185 depressed patients found that perceived empathy of the therapist was associated with significant reduction in depressed symptoms by the end of treatment.
Art and creativity may be an effective way of improving empathy. For example, studies have demonstrated that reading literary fiction may improve the empathic ability to identify emotions in others. Similarly, one study of 52 school-aged children, in which the children were assigned to either musical group interactions or a control group for nine months, found that the children in the musical group interactions had significantly improved empathy.
Obel explained why art can be an effective form of empathy technology. “We are using art as empathy technology to understand other human beings,” she explained. “You can step into the mind of somebody else when you read a book or you listen to a song or when you see a painting.”
Obel recalled how various forms of literature allowed her to experience the emotions of others. “You realize something inside of yourself. Or something is woken because of a piece of music or this book. For example, Dickens’ books, they opened up the minds of people in England about poor people who were suffering,” she explained. “And that was a classic example of empathy technology. You could read this book and see how it is to be a child who doesn’t have any parents and to grow up in an orphanage. I’ve never been to Kansas. But I feel like I have because I read ‘In Cold Blood.’
“I have an idea of tumbleweeds even though I’ve never seen tumbleweeds.”
Obel thinks that music can be a potent form of empathy technology by providing a uniquely holistic experience that transcends specific language or sensory input. In effect, as emotions are experienced and communicated on many levels, music can help provide outlets of communication through words, sounds and in the case of live performances, visual presentation.
“There is limitation to conversation. There are limits to words. There are all these biases we have. I speak with an accent. I’m a woman, whatever. This room smells of different stuff. I get affected by all these different things,” she said. “And I think with music we can communicate beyond that. I hope so,” she explained. “At the moment, I’m listening to a lot of Greek folk music. And I hear a lot of pain and personal stories in those songs. And I have no idea what the lyrics are about.”
One of the reasons why Obel feels music can be so important is not only that it allows us to understand the feelings of the musician, but also that art allows us to connect with and understand our own experience. “There’s another level that’s opening something up in you. There can be a longing for it. Something we’re not aware of, but it’s there,” she explained.
Eventually, Obel was not satisfied with simply listening to music, and she decided to create her own music. And for Obel, the creative process starts with allowing herself to have a safe space from the outside world so that she can immerse herself in her own experience.
“I’m lucky because I work alone. I played in bands before and worked in groups around music. And it was not good, so I never made anything in these group projects that I liked,” she explained. “And then I discovered that when I worked alone, I could work very intuitively and freely. And I could sing in a different way. And also the songwriting I do—I never write when [there are] people around me. I really need the feeling of being left alone. I’m left in my own bubble, on my own island. And then I can work. And then I can create music. I use my own imagination. And it’s this world I tune into.
“In these situations, you have to grab onto something and protect it.”
What Obel finds is that being alone and protecting her creative space allows her to be free from her own expectations and the expectations of others. “I just know that I’m not good at working where there’s a utilitarian point or function where it has to be like that or that or that,” she said. “And that also means that I can’t write with the expectation of doing something specific. In my experience, as soon as I feel that, I stop doing anything.”
What Obel finds is that she is able to connect with her own personal experiences—both current and past. “I’ve always felt that I didn’t really know if I had a personality. But if I had one, it’s the sum of my experiences. I am the sum of my experiences. And everything I’m seeing is through this prism or through this framework of all these experiences I’ve had in my life. So in a way, the present is always seen through a prism of the past,” she said. “And it’s an illusion to think you can go neutral into anything. I feel like the past is alive in that sense. I use it in my work, and I feel it every day, how it’s still there.”
More, these experiences are not always understood in language. “Sometimes, when I play piano, I can reconnect to something in how I would express the experience of being a child—which I can’t really express in words,” she said.
Overall, this type of experience can be extremely beneficial. Obel is describing a creative experience that can be considered flow, a state of “effortless concentration,” a complete immersion in experience. During this state, people are perhaps more open to experience, including connecting with their own experiences and also less concerned about expectations of others.
The experience of flow has been linked not only to artistic creativity, but also positive psychological states. Research has found that mindfulness, a concept similar to flow, can be an effective treatment approach to managing issues such as anxiety and depression.
In addition to helping her be creative, Obel described how this flow state helps her emotionally by helping her appreciate every moment and feel connected to others.
“It makes the present so important. And it’s going to turn into an experience. It’s going to color everything afterwards. So you have to not just cherish a good moment for the sake of the moment, but also for the sake that it’s going to change you,” she explained. “I was also interested in the idea that I was a glass prism, or that we all were, and our paths were shining through us. I think we do it with our individual paths and our collective paths.”
But the ability to immerse oneself in our own experience can be dangerous and overwhelming. “When I was working with this ‘Citizen of Glass’ title, I was interested in transparency and fragility and a scary sense of openness when you reveal yourself,” she explained.
One of the reasons this immersion, or “bubble” as Obel calls it, can be so scary is that if we are not careful, we can get lost in negative experiences, emotions and thoughts, from which we cannot disconnect.
“I can totally see the bubble thing being bad and good. It’s like you’re living in your head,” she explained. “If you turn it into something good, you can create something that’s outside your head. And that’s a victory. Then there’s the bad thing—where you can’t.
“You’re just stuck there.”
Obel described this “stuck” feeling when sharing her now-deceased father’s struggle with depression. According to Obel, he would often engage in rumination—or a repetitive thinking about the same event. This rumination caused him to be in a state of self-focused attention, whereby he was stuck in his own world and had difficulty accepting outside feedback.
“When you lose that passion for stuff, the past can take over everything. I saw it with my dad. My dad was very depressed most of my life,” Obel explained. “And that was like the past had taken over his mind, and he was just going through things that had happened. He couldn’t get over the fact that he had gone bankrupt. He just couldn’t get over it.
“It was this mountain for him, this life he had before.”
Obel recognizes that she and her brother may be susceptible to similar cycles of rumination. “The weird thing is, he sort of passed it on to me and my brother. Because we had this whole life before he got depressed and sick that we longed for, when our parents were still together. There’s a lot of longing and nostalgia for a time when things were good, and he wasn’t sick. And I think both my brother and I can get caught up in that,” she said.
Ultimately, Obel is hopeful that she and others can use these ruminative cycles to inform creative endeavors. “I also feel like that’s the sort of thinking when I make music. So it’s a weakness, but it’s also a powerful tool, to use your past, the emotions you have there, and these memories that are so powerful—and then create something from it. And talk about it in a way that’s outside normal conversation—express it in a more profound way with music,” she said.
Accordingly, Obel used her experience with her father’s depression to inform some of her music. “The song, ‘It’s Happening Again,’ is my experience of it. I never suffered from depression like my dad, but I certainly know it a little bit,” she said. “And I wanted to write about it. ‘It’s Happening Again’ is the cyclical nature of this darkness that has entered your life.
“And you just know, ‘Oh, no. Now it’s coming.’”
And Obel encourages people to explore their feelings through artistic endeavors as a way of coping. In fact, evidence suggests that music is a form of behavioral medicine that can improve depression, anxiety and stress.
This can lead people to become more hopeful that experiences such as depression are not forever. “I think it’s power when you know it goes away again. And that’s what [my dad] never got … that it would go away again,” she said
And Obel encourages people to not feel obligated to give up the personal space they need to feel safe and creative, even in a world that is dominated by social media. That true “empathic technology” does not have to come from losing control of their privacy or invade the privacy of others to be empathic.
“I think today we have an ideal in our culture because of social media and these phones, where we can film and document everything immediately and show it to everybody. So everybody potentially has an audience,” Obel said. “Before, it was artists and famous people. And especially artists would turn their life into an artifact—remove it from yourself and see it from the outside and make it interesting. And tell a story about it that has an artistic element to it. Now everybody can do that. And that’s great.
“But I’m just wondering if it is also important to have mystery and stuff that you keep for yourself.”
Photo credit: Alex Bruel Flagstad
An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Psychology Today on January 6, 2017.
