Categorii: Tot - empathy - pain - concepts - compassion

realizată de Matthias Behrends 4 ani în urmă

290

Empathy

Empathy is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon often described as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. It exists on a continuum, with complete emotional numbness on one end and profound emotional sensitivity on the other.

Empathy

Empathy

On "Learning" Empathy

The Myth: Empathy is a skill. So by definition, you can learn Empathy like any other skill ...
This is only possible under certain conditions

person is not a sociopath (or has an otherwise altered brain structure / psychiatric condition)

person has not been numbed yet

I.e, by ...

... repetition

... practicing it

Debunking Myths

Empathy and Self-Worth

The relationship between someone's Empathy and Self-Worth
A higher self-worth is always connected with being able to reduce empathy for self-protection, when needed. The "ability" to empathize does not mean one "has" to empathize.

This is something that so many of the "helping professions" have to learn. When you have this skill, then being highly empathetic AND being able to distance yourself form the suffering of others is possible.

Core Concepts

The "one-way mirror" metaphor
see CIT
Sympathy can become empathy
"Empathy is similar to sympathy, but empathy usually suggests stronger, more instinctive feeling. So a person who feels sympathy, or pity, for victims of a war in Asia may feel empathy for a close friend going through the much smaller disaster of a divorce."
Spectrum
continuous spectrum

0-10

useful and sufficient

Empathy has segmental properties
and sometimes not

“There is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”―[https://www.mindomo.com/mindmap/6fa3fb506dde394abf471145e0c8ad39 Alan Watts]

(Emotional) Pain

Empathy and (Emotional) Numbness
... are inversely related.
... describe opposite directions of the same phenomenon.
Numbness

Definition

Mirriam-Webster's Definition:
"the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner"
A property of Human Nature.
not a skill!
The ability to experience emotions on the basis of information that mainly affects another individual or entity.
Comments:

"individual or entity"

"entity" here can include many things: groups, abstract concepts like nature or even the whole Universe, etc.

"... affects the another ..."

"ability"