Empathy 

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. It involves putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and experiencing their emotions, thoughts, and perspectives. Empathy can be broken down into three main types:

1. Cognitive Empathy: This is the ability to understand another person’s perspective or mental state. It’s about knowing what someone else is feeling or thinking.
2. Emotional Empathy: This involves physically feeling what another person is experiencing. For example, if someone is sad, you might feel sadness as well.
3. Compassionate Empathy: This goes beyond understanding and feeling; it involves taking action to help someone in distress.

 

Empathy is crucial for building strong relationships, fostering communication, and creating a sense of connection and understanding between people. It plays a vital role in social interactions and can lead to more compassionate and supportive communities. Often the term can be used loosely in therapeutic teaching, where the individual just has to understand it but not actually do it. This is where most therapists fail. They say I can understand how you feel but clearly, they cannot understand at all. They would be better off saying I cant imagine how that makes you feel as that would be honest and not betray the other person trust which is crucial in any therapeutic setting.

The empathetic person or empath

Not to be confused with “emphatic”! This term is used to describe something expressed or done with emphasis. When someone is emphatic, they are showing or giving emphasis; they are forceful and definite in their expression or action. For example, if someone makes an emphatic statement, they are making it in a very clear and strong way to ensure their point is understood.

But the empathetic person is a person who is highly attuned to the energies and emotions of those around them may be considered an empath. Empaths are said to feel what others are feeling so deeply that they “absorb” or “take on” the emotions themselves, often at the expense of their own emotional well-being. But if working as a therapist this can be very help and insightful. It does not mean they can read your mind but they feel your mind via emotions.

Empaths are “highly intuitive and emotionally intelligent,” so they can read the room, pick up on other people’s energy, and be very aware of their own emotions, too. The catch? Taking on everyone’s feelings can be a lot.

There are Dark empaths and these are described as people who use their empathy (i.e., the ability to detect and understand others’ feelings and emotions) not to help others but instead to manipulate others for person in other words a narcissist.

While empathy is generally considered a positive trait, being overly empathetic can lead to negative effects like emotional exhaustion, feeling overwhelmed by others’ emotions, difficulty setting boundaries, increased anxiety, depression, and even apathy if not managed properly, essentially “taking on” the negative feelings of those around you to the detriment of your own well-being.

Empathy is a gift in many ways, but too much of it can create suffering. Empaths might experience burnout or emotional exhaustion; they can also be hurt through the actions of others with less empathy. Learning to say no, setting healthy boundaries, and practicing self-care can help empaths recover.

Empathetic distress is the strong aversive and self-oriented response to the suffering of others, accompanied by the desire to withdraw from a situation in order to protect oneself from excessive negative feelings.

For example, an empath can be misdiagnosed or seen as having social anxiety which is really not the case. They may go out to busy places such as shopping centres or Supermarkets which are full of people who really do not want to be there. These people feel stress and anxiety even anger and the empath will pick up on these emotions and feel them emotionally themselves. For this reason, they prefer not to go to busy places which tend to harbour such emotions. Instead, they prefer quieter places with a calmer atmosphere, such as nature walks or a walk on the beach where typically other people will only go because they want to and feel happy being there. They also in a lot of cases prefer the company of animals which live in the moment and tend not to complain so much. Animals such as Dogs are also very empathetic.

Due to modern day life many have lost the ability to show empathy in any deep and meaning full way. Empathy can be seen associated closely alongside instinct. But again due to modern day life, education, conformity, social settings we have placed ourselves in a character of what we wish to be like, an actor, rock star or celebrity among many other things and this false character takes over, and emotions and other states of mind take a back seat.