Empathy and Feeling Too Much

in #psychology6 years ago

Being able to take someone's perspective and share in feeling their emotions is a useful tool. We can understand others better as a result. But feeling their pain can sting like a scorpions tail. Catching the pain of others can become easy and common for some. It can come naturally and may also be a part of one's daily work environment, such as being a care giving careers, like a nurse, teacher, psychotherapist, etc. For others, they are still interacting with people and will experience varying emotions in our exchanges: anger, unhappiness, anxiety and possibly even sickness from that stress.


Source

Empathy is required to effectively bond with others by sharing our vulnerabilities and strengths. Other mammals at the very least share this commonality, from dolphins to rats. In order for consciousness beings to better organize and cooperate, such as many mammals and other animals do, a degree of empathic communication is certainly most helpful.


Contagious

Empathy can be infectious and spread in an area, for both positive and negative emotions. It's an emotional contagion that can follow many forms of communication, from verbal talking, to text chats with others, even fictional books and media have us empathize with them.

in our modern age of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, may of us are quick to show our emotional sides publicly for the world to see. The influences of others in our world, even if they are only an electronic representation in a virtual internet, affect us greatly. There are many heated debates, annoying trolls, and even harassment online. The amount of information we intake that we judge as positive or negative, will affect our mood. Local or remote, we can empathize anywhere and fall prey to the contagion of stress.


Stress

Physical pain, the associated psychological emotional pain and suffering are different. If we were to be electrically shocked, areas of our brain for physical and emotional pain would be electrically active. But, if someone you cared for was shocked, you would not have any activity in the physical response areas of the brain, but your emotional areas would light up.

In this latter case of emotional pain, the brain doesn't show any differentiation to recognize pain we experience from the pain others experience. This is because the emotional pain can be induced psychologically through non-physical input, such as visual or auditory, like seeing someone hurt.

Stress is a psychological pain, not a physical pain. There is something called secondary traumatic stress, or compassion fatigue, that is similar to PTSD. It's a lessening of compassion and empathy over time. This is due to an overload of feeling from empathizing with others. Those most susceptible work with trauma victims, but it applies to anyone who helps others, especially those who have an illness. This can lead to hopelessness, being cynical, incompetency, and self-doubt.


Overload

You can catch stress any time you understand and share someone else's pain. The degree of identification, attachment and interaction we have with others can affect the degree of empathy we have for others. But for some people, they can be triggered into deep empathic responses from seeing others in distress.

Taking on empathic distress can overload. Sometimes, people will lash out and be more aggressive to others, even someone innocent. That's not to say there aren't other reasons. We can be aggressive when someone we value is being mistreated by another as well. When we identify more with another, we take what happens to them as it happening to us.

When someone is seen as being attacked, we leap to their defense because we identify and value them in our lives and want to protect them. This can even be when the person being defended is right or wrong. Identification and attachment is powerful and can blind us to the reality of a situation. Many parents blindly defend their children who have done something wrong.


Adaptation

The positives and negatives of empathy are amplified in the modern world, as mentioned with all the interactions like Facebook, etc. Despite this, we are not helpless to our environment. Psychopaths, as we conventionally understand the term, seem to have a lack of empathy as well. Images of suffering affect some people less, and is indicated by less activity in areas of the brain associated with sensations for empathy. But if someone psychopathic primes their minds, by asking them to actively empathize with the suffering of another, then the brain actually engages in that electrically as regular people do. This priming can also affect normally functioning brains. All of the influences in our environment prime us to some degree, even if not explicitly from someone's voice suggesting us to accept something.

Much like priming the consciousness of another can be done, be can also prime our own consciousness. This can be done in many ways, concentration, contemplation, mindfulness, meditation, etc. Inducing emotional state with the power of the mind/consciousness. We can induce positive focused emotions to override negative ones.

This can also be done with empathy. Rather than empathize with the suffering of others and feel their pain, we can induce activity in the brain for love and compassion, and suppress areas for empathy of the negative emotions someone is going through. This can be demonstrated with fMRI imaging of meditation while hearing a screaming woman in pain.


Emotional Craze

Avoiding empathy burnout can save us trouble in the future. Empathy is a good tool, but not to be used all the time, nor amped up. Empathy is feeling for, and with, the other that is identified with, while compassion is only feeling for, and not with, the other. Feel for their pain, but don't feel the pain as if you were in their position.

For some jobs, being too empathic undermines the ability to perform. Surgeons surely don't want to empathize too much and let their emotions cloud the job they have to do. Competitive endeavors would also be affected by too much empathy. When we feel too much for the people around us, especially in our careers, it can drive us crazy, bonkers, coo-coo, or "psycho". The overload can lead us to give up our careers, all because we feel too much and too strongly for the other, as if they were ourselves.

Appropriate empathy is required for certain situations. Wholesale application is not a wise measure to adopt. If all empathy means is experiencing other people's suffering as your own, we won't get too far except feel a lot of pain. Letting the pain immobilize us into learned helplessness does not help anyone. This would only double the amount of suffering being experienced in the world.

Subduing our inner little psycho can be done with priming conscious induction of emotional states. It's a mind-over-matter type of effort. Instead of getting an over-active empathic aspect in consciousness from environmental stimulus to induce emotional states within you, take control of how you feel, and induce your own emotional state. This is a way out of the internal turmoil within, while still engaging in the actions that you need to.


References:


Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.


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As far as I understand, I think empathy is a feeling which makes us a sensitive human being. A person who understands others' problem and feelings. He/she don't hurt others and take care that his/her action don't harm others.
But an emotional person in different from an empathetic person. He/she is impulsive. An emotional person thinks his/her feeling are the most important. He/she don't much care about others feeling.
However, we cannot clearly say who is empathetic and who is emotional because a person can react emotionally or rationally according to situation and time. After all we are not a simple creation of nature.

Empathy is paramount for us being where we are as a cooperative society and as individuals moving into the future. Emotions are problematic at times, but that's why we need to reason as well, not simply feel something ;)

Psychopaths, as we conventionally understand the term, seem to have a lack of empathy as well.

....but 'they' are so expert at understanding what empathy is, without feeling it, it is almost impossible to differentiate between real empathy and 'psychopath empathy'.
And this is a real problem, especially in today's social media world.

Empathy is a valuable emotion, but called upon too much and too often, (social media), it loses the inherent value it holds..

Excellent post, sir!

Thanks ;) Yes, those psychos can fake it a lot and make people believe they are caring for them :/ Then comes the manipulation...

It is a much bigger problem than society has acknowledged - or understood over the last 300 years (industrial revolution), in my opinion.

I isn't just the pure psychopath the manipulates feelings by understanding empathy, but not feeling it.
(i.e sociopaths and 'malignant narcissists')

We are talking just under 4% of the worlds population!

When communities were intimate, as in that everyone knew everyone, these pathological personality types were countered (and even nullified).

With larger societies - and anonymity, most importantly - it then became the '4%'s' playground....

It's something I have been looking at for a few years....and I still don't see a solution without psychological profiling of all people up until until adulthood - and a common database of the profiling for everyone to access...

....Of course, that runs 'just a a little bit' contrary to my libertarian principles, on every level....

Yes, when interaction and cooperation is so impersonal and disconnected it creates room for manipulative people to get by, hoping from one person to the next, one group to the next, and exploiting them.

As a bodywork therapist of 3 decades, I can attest to the physical aspect and truth of this phenomenon. One of the first lessons to be learned is to guard the natural empathetic tendency so their ailment does not jump ship to you! Great article @krnel

Yeah don't feel too much and get fatigued with or else it will jump ship as you say and then you stop feeling much at all anymore in order to adapt and cope with the stress of it all :/

Working in Human Resources makes it that Empathy is a skill needed but one that is controlled to not go overboard when handling sensitive cases like bullying and sexual harrassment.

One needs to keep a level head, objective and using labor law and company policy to objectively see the different points all the while still connecting and seeing the people as individuals and not just cases.

I remember one hearing I was handling that I wanted to start hitting the accused with a chair because of a sexual harrassment to an employee under his management.

It is human nature to identify and root for those people that we resonate or push our psychological and emotional triggers.

Empathy is a way for us to out ourselves in someone else's shoes and see things in their perspective. Yet we much be very careful not to be dragged into its undertow and drown in the emotions.

Balance is needed.

It's good to see ourselves in others. It makes us care about what happens to others. And yes, sometime people should be hit with chairs for their wrong doings :P

Great post and a very important perspective. Are you familiar with Paul Bloom's work? He wrote a book recently called "Against Empathy" and has some very interesting conversations with Sam Harris on his podcast on this topic.

No I have not. Thanks for the recommendation. Much in ourselves and in the world is dual. Empathy, compassion, love have dual aspects to them. Short titles like "Against X" make it seems like someone is completely against X, even if they aren't, hehe. I guess it's a marketing click bait choice to get people interested :P

Very informative and yes I agree with your opinion about empathya and emotion which is a tool to understand each other better.

everything is scary

Yes it is so useful tool to know the communicator's perspective and feelings toward you , even without saying so .

Very insightful, thanks for posting this @krnel

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