What is empathy

Many people have heard about empathy, but few people imagine what empathy really is. This term appeared among psychologists at the beginning of the last century, and later penetrated into fiction and esoteric literature. This led to the profanation of the originally scientific concept. The word began to be perceived simply as the ability to sympathize with another person or be considered one of the psychic "skills".

This has its own rationale: the ability to empathy is most pronounced in those people who are able to subtly feel the mood or state of another and have a tendency to empathy and sympathy. This quality must necessarily be possessed by psychologists and psychotherapists, teachers and personnel managers. Empathy also helps those who are engaged in the sale of services and goods.

So what is empathy?

If you do not go into scientific explanations, then empathy is usually called the ability to penetrate into the inner world of another person, even if he is unfamiliar. This leads to the other side of empathy: to be able to feel the situation on oneself as the interlocutor perceives it. With well-developed abilities for empathy, people can even control the mood and feelings of another person, if necessary to achieve a goal.

However, a person with the ability to empathize never fully identifies with an outsider. A good specialist skillfully sorts out the strings of the soul of a patient or pupil, practically putting himself in his place and starting from what he himself thought, felt or would do in this situation. But at the same time, the empath always remains by himself, without being distracted from the feeling of being a separate person, and at the end of contact with the interlocutor, he gets rid of his emotions.

If necessary, the empath can fully identify with the interlocutor. This technique is called identification. It helps to understand the other person on a deeper level. But with such an identification, it is possible to suffer from the feelings in which the empathic person gets accustomed, and to make the other's problems our own.

The average, "normal" person very often, experiencing some kind of feeling, is not able to define it and distinguish one from the other. A specialist with well-developed empathy can understand exactly what a person is feeling and feeling, even without realizing it. Thanks to this knowledge, empaths are considered to have some kind of psychic skills. But there is nothing "magic" in this, it is only the result of an in-depth study of their own emotions and feelings caused by relationships between individuals and manifested in some situations. The most complete definition of empathy in psychology was made by Z. Freud: "We take into account the mental state of the patient, put ourselves in this state and try to understand it by comparing it with our own."

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Empathy development

When comparing the average person and a specialist in psychology or pedagogy, there is a feeling of different levels of communication. This is true, because everyone is born with the ability to feel and sympathize, that is, to experience their own emotions and try on others. But as they grow older, a person tends to lose the ability to sympathy and empathy.

Those who are inclined to deal with other people's problems (doctors, teachers, psychotherapists, etc.), specially develop the ability to get used to someone else's inner world. This makes it easier to pursue whatever activity they have chosen in life.

It is no secret that empathic abilities help both sellers and fortune-tellers, traditional healers and even organizers of sects.

It is customary to distinguish 4 levels of empathy development:

Lack of empathy are unable to recognize emotional information in any form. They are insensitive to the manifestations of feelings of other people, even if they are directly let know about their experiences.

Usually such people are called callous or insensitive, soulless people. Examples of such behavior are probably known to everyone: this is following only your own interests with selfish natures. Usually such people are unable to provide even the slightest help to another.

With a weak degree of development of empathy, a person is often inclined to perceive other people's emotions too strongly. This is explained by the inability to control the degree of getting used to others. Weak empaths most often identify with the interlocutor or acquaintance, taking over their feelings and allowing them to absorb themselves. Very often they are very worried about events that are not personally related to them, quite acutely. Because of this, most of the inhabitants of large cities are in a stressful state, caused by the abundance of heterogeneous emotions of other people. In an effort to get rid of stress, people turn to various practices and techniques aimed at reducing emotionality. Together with it, they inevitably reduce their abilities for empathy.

Functional empaths control their emotions without suppressing them; they can easily “read” the emotions of other people without identifying with them. These are most often just those who, by the nature of their activities, communicate with a large number of people whom they must manage or supervise. In addition to all the specialties that have already been mentioned above, functional empaths often manifest themselves as ordinary, but very empathetic and responsive people, even if they do not work as psychologists or teachers.

High levels of empathy are very rare. Among the examples from life, one can mention strong psychotherapists, famous psychologists or educators, who at all times have created new methods of teaching and treatment, guided by the ability to manage the emotions of another.

Most often, the systems developed by them, even for their students, work in a limited and mechanical way, like a system of techniques. It is possible to study and apply the methods of A. Makarenko and M. Montessori, for example, but never reach the level of understanding of the wards as they do.

It is believed that mastering or learning empathy is almost impossible. It arises on the basis of one's own experienced feelings or problems. Only a person who himself has gone through grief, pain, disappointment can put himself in the place of the one who feels bad now next to him. Or, one who remembers well his joy or embarrassment, fear or anger in a certain situation is able to understand the feelings of another in a similar case.