In 1978, Kathy Kleiner was asleep in her bed at the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University when serial killer Ted Bundy entered through an unlocked door. After attacking two of her sorority sisters, Bundy found Kathy’s door also unlocked. Kathy survived the attack and is one of only a few Bundy survivors. When we began writing her memoir, A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy, she said she wanted to weave in as many stories about the other victims as possible. For about two years, I researched the more than 30 women and girls Bundy killed. By the time I started compiling their biographies for an appendix, I often felt stressed, saddened and a bit on edge. There were certain victims who I thought about daily. Later, I learned I had empathy overload, an experience that social scientists are finding can happen to people in both their professional and personal lives.
What is Empathy?
Empathy is typically considered how a person understands and relates to others. Some scientists have suggested empathy evolved as a neurobiological process so that a person would be compelled to create and keep social bonds. These social bonds would motivate the person to get along with other group members and strive for their children’s survival. A person can experience empathy overload, a type of compassion fatigue, which occurs when they are negatively impacted after providing emotional support to others. Compassion fatigue is a relatively new concept in trauma studies. In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers began to more widely recognize that trauma impacted both the mind and the body.