Empathy for everyone: how to survive if you are an empath

Empathy for everyone: how to survive if you are an empath

The distant, rude word “empath” has a completely sweet and kind meaning: this is the name of a person who subtly feels other people’s experiences, is imbued with other people’s pain, easily reads the emotions of his interlocutor, knows how to sympathize, and is easily impressed. Empathy can manifest itself in different ways. When you shed a tear, upset together with a child who broke his knee, when you suffer because your friend is going through a difficult personal drama, when you physically feel the pain of a relative who is struggling with an illness - all this is empathy. The fact that you can’t pass by an old woman helplessly dragging a bag of groceries, you can’t help but feel sad when you see a homeless person, you can’t help but pet a stray cat or dog, and when you read the news, your heart breaks—all this is also empathy. . By the way, according to neuropsychologists, this quality is characteristic of 98% of the population - although not everyone uses it to the fullest.

The life of an empath is both simple and complex at the same time. Simple, because such people communicate easily, make friends without difficulty, and are always in good standing in the company. It’s difficult because experiencing not only your own, but also other people’s emotions requires enormous resources, which are not always available. How to survive if you are an empath?

Embrace your uniqueness

The ability to feel acutely is not a deviation or a disease: it is your way of perceiving the world. Therefore, you should not constantly apologize for your sensitivity, vulnerability, or touchiness. You need to accept these qualities and work with them. This will help you learn to control your mood and not make it dependent on external circumstances.

By the way, you can understand how much empathy you have “mathematically” - such a test was developed by neuropsychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. You will be offered 36 images of eyes and asked to characterize the emotional state of their “owner”. By the way, the majority rate is quite high: people correctly identify on average 26 pictures.

Define your boundaries

For an empath, having boundaries is vitally important, otherwise there is a risk of simply falling into the world of the person you empathize with - failing and never getting out. As a result, you will lose objectivity, spend all your mental strength and certainly will not be able to help. Psychotherapists who work with empaths argue that therapy should never be built on the principle of “saving the client,” otherwise both the doctor and his client will end up on a train “to nowhere.” That's why it's so important to know where your boundaries are.

Those who did not build boundaries in advance fell into the inexorable statistics: people in empathetic professions (psychologists, doctors, social workers, nurses) who do not “protect” themselves live on average 10 years less. There is nothing surprising here: they suffer from “empathic fatigue” (a term coined by rehabilitation specialist Mark Stebnitsky), that is, they experience a feeling of emptiness, exhaustion, and have lost interest in life.

Conclusion - look at yourself not as a wizard, but as a guide, an assistant.

Understand that there are different people around you: not all of them see the world the way you do

Some people are rude (sometimes even just because they are in a bad mood). Some people are impolite. It will still not be possible to help everyone. You will have to “get used to” these simple truths and stop expecting that everyone around you is the same kind, sweet, sentimental person. And if you are “lucky” to become an eyewitness or even a participant in such an unpleasant situation, then do everything to abstract yourself from other people’s negativity.

Avoid Toxic People

For empaths, resources are almost always running low, and toxic people strive to “eat up” what their circumstances didn’t give them. Therefore, you will have to “filter” the environment. So, we send to the “communication link” those who constantly complain, whine, who spread rumors, weave intrigues, and are always negative.

At work, the hardest thing is not to communicate with someone at all. If you are not on the same page as a colleague from another office, then you can try to minimize contacts. But with the boss, such a “feint” will not work. If you feel that you are having a hard time, learn techniques that help reflect negativity. A lot of them. And I remember one - I read it as a teenager in one of the magazines from my mother’s library: if someone suppresses you with negativity, respond to him with positivity - imagine, for example, that this person is standing in front of you not in a suit, but in... a tutu. And many psychologists recommend mentally creating a barrier between yourself and the interlocutor - for example, imagining that you are separated by a waterfall or a wide river.

By the way, you can use empathy tactics when talking with a non-empath. Thus, psychologist Marshall Rosenberg proved that if an employee repeats what was just said by the boss, then conflicts are resolved twice as quickly.

Don't neglect loneliness

People with a high level of empathy love people very much, but sometimes it is unbearable for them to be in a crowd: they feel everyone’s mood, like an X-ray, and everyone’s emotions shine through. They need solitude to reboot. The best way to “reset” is to stay in nature, walks, workouts, swimming, and hobbies.

Remember that work is important, but not the only part of your life

We are most afraid of mistakes and missteps at work. Therefore, it doesn’t hurt to remind yourself more often that work is work, but there is also family, hobbies, friends, travel and many other pleasant things. A mistake or a conflict situation at work most likely will not put an end to your career, but it will definitely be able to teach you and “share” your experience. This will allow you to react to circumstances less harshly.

Try to adjust the world to suit you

Empaths adapt to the world so as not to offend, hurt, or make things worse. Therefore, sensitive people are often openly taken advantage of.

The solution is to practice saying “no” hard. I know it’s very difficult to refuse empaths. Therefore, in any situation, proceed from the following: first ask yourself what this gives you specifically, and then clarify what it gives to others. It’s not for nothing that on an airplane they ask you to put an oxygen mask on yourself first, and only then on someone else. If the situation not only gives you nothing, but also frankly harms you, feel free to say “no”. Be sincere, friendly, but persistent in your refusal.

Replenish your resource whenever possible

If you have not found effective schemes for resource restoration, then you can easily fall into a depressive mood and start eating stress. Therefore, you urgently need to choose what gives you strength - communication with a friend, breakfast in a cafe on Saturdays, travel, drawing, meditation, reading, training. The main thing is that it gives you an incentive to live. And it was fun, of course.

Results

What's the result? Empathy is an important human quality. It allows you to form deep, lasting personal relationships, promotes the development of communication skills, and psychologists even claim that it increases work productivity. Definitely, the ability to take the place of another, as Freud wrote about, to understand motives, to “read” a state makes us human, because robots are not capable of empathy. However, you need to carefully preserve the boundaries of your inner world so that a wonderful feeling does not turn into a bottomless well devouring your resource.

Interesting facts about empathy:

It can be learned. If you are among the 2% who do not know how to empathize, simple techniques will help you become more humane.

There is a Museum of Empathy and a digital Library of Empathy. Its founder was Roman Krznaric, a thinker, writer and philosopher from Britain, who devoted several of his books to this topic.

On the social networks VKontakte and Facebook, entire communities have been created dedicated to the life of empaths (VKontakte, by the way, such a community has a very cute name - Empath's House). Here people share their experiences, help each other solve complex life problems, and simply communicate with like-minded people.

When there is too much compassion

The ability to share other people's emotions can become an unbearable burden. Highly empathic people and specialists in helping professions - nurses, doctors and psychotherapists - are well aware of this.

A specialist in the field of rehabilitation programs, Mark Stebnicki, introduced the concept of “empathic fatigue.” Constantly dealing with the grief and loss of others, people experience burnout—feelings of emptiness, physical exhaustion, and loss of interest in life.

Studies of nurses have shown that “compassion fatigue” leads to absenteeism and frequent medication errors.

The hypothesis that empathy encourages altruism has been studied for many years by American sociologist Professor Daniel Batson. “Empathy helps break down the boundaries between one person and another, it opposes selfishness and indifference,” he argues. But the reserves of empathy are not limitless. Fortunately, you don't have to share their emotions to help another person. Much often, a more productive step is to curb your feelings and look at the situation from the outside.

When compassion goes too far, we stop thinking about other people - we are too concerned about our own suffering. For empathy to be useful, it must be contained and directed in the right direction.

One day in Nepal, a young woman named Sita came to me for consultation. Her sister just committed suicide. She was haunted by guilt for not being able to prevent this. Unable to concentrate on anything, she cried for days on end, and when the tears stopped, she fell into a stupor.

During one of our sessions, she looked me straight in the eye and said, “Do you know what it’s like to lose a sister? I won't survive this. Since I was born, we lived in the same bedroom, we did everything together. I couldn't hold her."

Her suffering was so intense that it took me by surprise. I remembered the suicide of my sixteen-year-old cousin. I had to make a huge effort to pull myself together and not burst into tears. The depth of emotional resonance completely amazed me. But I knew that if I cried with Sita, I would not be able to help her.

I managed to calm down and stop thinking about my pounding heart, my eyes blurred with tears, and suppress the memory of my brother. Finally, when the intensity of emotions had subsided, I said to Sita: “I understand your grief. I really understand you. But you are not alone. I also lost a cousin at almost the same age as you. I know how hard it is. But I understood and accepted the fact that there was no way I could stop it. It is not my fault. This pain can be overcome.”

She suddenly raised her head and looked straight into my eyes to see if I was telling the truth. Much to my surprise, she stood up and hugged me, muttering, “I’ll try. Thank you".

From the book “Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World” by Mathieu Ricard

From empathy to rational compassion

Mathieu Ricard is called “the happiest man on earth.” A Buddhist monk and former doctor of molecular biology has become the subject of pioneering research into the effects of meditation on the brain.

In one experiment, he was asked to look at photographs and empathize with the suffering of the people who were depicted in them. “The empathic resonance very quickly became unbearable for me. I felt emotionally exhausted,” admitted Ricard. Then he came out of this state and focused on the feelings of love and care.

Instead of simply reflecting the other person's pain, love and compassion meditation activated completely different parts of the brain.

Researcher Tanya Singer from the Society. Max Planck repeated this study on 60 volunteers who were not monks. In the first group, participants developed a sense of empathy for others, and in the second, they practiced meditation on love and compassion.

Participants from the first group experienced more stress and negative emotions - the difference was noticeable after just eight hours of training. Compassion meditation quelled empathic stress and cultivated a sense of caring and willingness to help others.

True altruism has little to do with emotional empathy, many researchers believe.

Empathy quickly depletes, limits our circle of concern to one person and pushes us to ineffective decisions. Intense feelings are a poor guide when it comes to moral choices.

So, in a study by Daniel Batson, participants were told about a ten-year-old girl named Sheri Summers with a terminal illness - she was waiting in line for treatment that was supposed to reduce her pain. Participants were then asked to move the girl to the front of the line. When they were simply asked if it was worth doing, they refused - after all, there are other children who need help. But if participants were first asked to imagine how Sheri was feeling, they decided that she was the one worth helping. Compassion turned out to be stronger than justice.

“Sadness must be curbed by all means to make the world a better place,” writes Oxford philosopher and ethicist William MacAskill. Calculation, not empathy, is what is needed if we truly want to help others. It's easy to feel like a noble altruist. It is much more difficult to bring real benefits to people.

Emotions are a poor assistant in the fulfillment of altruistic impulses. Sometimes noble intentions cause great harm.

Donations to Africa support oppressive regimes. Overprotective parents raise neurotic children who are incapable of adulthood. Wars and conflicts are fueled by compassion for the victims.

Reckless empathy for a few can lead to disastrous consequences for all. But while empathy has its limits, it certainly shouldn't be abandoned entirely.

After traveling around the world on the Beagle, Charles Darwin became a staunch opponent of slavery. According to the modern theories of his time, whites and blacks had different origins: the blacks occupied an intermediate level between man and animal, and were treated accordingly.

Before the voyage, Darwin, like many Victorian gentlemen, thought this was quite fair. Only when he himself saw the suffering and humiliation of slaves did his opinion change - he began to consider slavery a disgusting and vile phenomenon. With the help of rationality he would hardly have been able to reach this conclusion.