As a whole, empathy is not usually fully understood, and maybe we will never fully understand the role of empathy in bringing about positive change.
To feel another person’s private world as if it were your own, without losing yourself as I did — that’s empathy, and it’s crucial for all human interactions and for avoiding being burned out.
Feeling someone else’s anger, fear, or confusion as if it were your own, but without your anger, fear, or confusion keeping you hostage, is precisely what the word Empathy is trying to describe.
Why learn about Empathy?
The short answer is; Because empathy can be too much to handle in our stressful day-to-day lives, and it will kill your spirit.
You are likely to be drawn in too quickly and too deeply to become drained or feel numb.
Without knowledge about Empathy, the chances are that you can lose your self-esteem and find yourself in emotionally and sometimes physically unsafe situations.
In this blog post, I will walk you through the different layers of Empathy and how they have helped me in my life.
What is empathy?
As a whole, empathy is the awareness of other feelings and thoughts based on the perceived emotional communication, which occurs in body language and facial expressions — including both voluntary and involuntary expressions, also known as micro-expressions.People frequently mention two types of Empathy that are often seen in some ways as opposites, when in fact, they complement each other.
These two forms of Empathy include:
1. Cognitive Empathy
– Knowledge of how the other person feels and may be thinking.
2. Emotional/affective Empathy
– When you physically relate to the other person, as if your emotions were contagious.
A psychopath has no emotional empathy but has a strong sense of cognitive Empathy — that is why he can manipulate you.
Persons with autism typically display the opposite, with high — though often selective — emotional Empathy and comparatively low cognitive Empathy (although intelligence and observation can compensate for some deficits).
Compassionate Empathy
In addition to cognitive and Affective Empathy, there is also a third type of Empathy, which is less known, called compassionate Empathy, or empathic care. It consists of empathizing with a person’s distress (using cognitive and affective Empathy) and then spontaneously helping when needed[1].
Notice that the experience of emotional empathy alone does not demand acting on this experience.
On the flip side, compassionate empathy, although related to emotional Empathy, does not require the presence of emotional Empathy.
For instance, if you are a social worker in a hospital in a large city, you can not afford to be overburdened by emotional empathy and grieve with your clients.
On the contrary, you need to meet your client’s desire to be helped/counseled/guided to do a good job.
Empathy is like the ability to plug into a high-voltage power source, and compassion is like a switch, a control circuit, or a fuse that keeps you from being electrically shocked every time.
Nevertheless, it may very well be that emotional Empathy is the basis for compassionate Empathy.
Motor empathy
The fourth type of empathy is called motor empathy. Motor empathy is an automated empathic response in the form of an unconscious mirroring of another person’s facial expressions, mimicking body language or speech, or yawning.Motor empathy appears to be at the very least in part based on cognitive and Affective Empathy, as deficiencies in either would prevent you from subconsciously responding to something you understand (cognitively) or care about (affectively).
To show empathy in all its dimensions, you need to:
Understand the emotional state of the others (cognitively).
Sense what the other person is feeling (affective).
Be willing to help (compassionate).
And to unconsciously respond to all you understand and feel (motor).
Examples of Empathetic Responses:
— Acknowledge someone’s pain
— Admit and share how you feel
— Thank the other person for opening-up
—Tell them that you want to hear more
—Show encouragement
—Ask how you can help
Finally, there is no script for empathy.
In the real world outside this blog post, there is no script for empathy.
It’s not as much about what you say as it is about being there and listening well.
Practice every day and start small.
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References for this blogpost:
(1) Three kinds of Empathy: cognitive, emotional, and compassionate | Daniel Goleman
(2) A New Understanding of Compassionate Empathy | Psychology Today
(4) Putting the altruism back into altruism: the evolution of Empathy (de Waal, 2008)
(5) A perception-action model for Empathy
(6) Putting the altruism back into altruism: the evolution of Empathy
(7) Can You Have Too Much Empathy? | Psychology Today
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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Photo credit: Oziel Gómez från Pexels