After a stroke, a 49-year-old man from Brazil has changed a lot. He became kind and generous - even too generous. Having met homeless children on the street, he gave them all his money. He left his office job and opened a company selling homemade fries. The business failed: the man gave away most of the food for free. It was only thanks to the close attention of his wife that the family did not plunge into debt.
It turned out that after a stroke the man had damage to the part of his brain that is responsible for controlling emotions and making decisions. He felt a desire to help - and immediately got down to business, without taking into account other factors.
It is no coincidence that the ability to empathize is considered a virtue. Without empathy, we would not be able to go beyond our own self, understand other people's emotions, or create trusting and close relationships.
Empathy also exhausts, misleads and pushes to unfair actions. Guided by the most noble feelings, we often cause harm not only to ourselves, but also to other people.
They prioritize relationships, not results.
It is very difficult for empaths to give negative feedback to subordinates and express (even justified) complaints about work, their dissatisfaction with the result. In addition, because of their sensitivity to other people, they often take into account the “specifics” of a particular situation for a particular person and make many exceptions to the rules. And this may be perceived by the team as inconsistency or injustice.
What to do: you can use the “volume adjustment” technique: imagine your ability to empathize as a device that allows you to feel other people’s emotions, visualize it as a mechanism. There is low volume, there is high volume. Answer yourself with whom you are ready to turn this handle to the maximum - family, spouse, children, friends. Where is the average volume enough, where is the minimum? In what situations at work are you ready to use your empathy at its maximum volume, and in what situations at its minimum?
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Types of empathy
There are three types of empathy, which differ in the degree of penetration into other people's feelings.
- Level 1 – simple . A person sees emotions, notices facial expressions and compares this with what he saw before. Mirror neurons play the main role here.
- Level 2 – intermediate . In order to fully understand a person’s well-being and try on his life situation, the empath begins to ask questions. He finds out from the suffering person the causes of the problem, asks if this has happened before, in general, he tries to get as much information as possible regarding the traumatic event. Thanks to this, the empath is able to put himself in the place of his interlocutor.
- Level 3 – highest . There are very few empaths of this level, since this presupposes the possession of certain knowledge. A top-level empath knows a person completely, understands what goals drive him, knows everything about his values and life priorities. For this reason, it is very easy for an empath to imagine himself in another person's shoes.
Accepted and not burdensome
As a rule, hyper-empathetic people are reliable helpers and mentors; subordinates and colleagues come to them with problems and difficulties. But they themselves very rarely burden others with their experiences. It turns out to be a vicious circle: the empath accepts the negativity of others, helps and empathizes, but he himself cannot ask for help or support. This imbalance leads to emotional burnout.
And the inability to defend oneself causes less conscientious colleagues to want to take advantage of the empath’s generosity and kindness. For him, this turns into the fact that those around him begin to use his time and energy: both his boss and his colleagues. He is being used, and as an intelligent person, an empath cannot help but understand this, but it is difficult for him to “get out” of these situations.
What to do: internally acknowledge your vulnerability and vulnerability. Understand that strength is not limitless and it is important to take care of yourself. As they say, put the mask on yourself first, and then on your child, colleague, or subordinate. It will help you not to come into direct contact with other people’s emotions, but to experience them “from the outside.”
An empath must always remember
- You can't fix everything for everyone.
- Some people don't want you to solve their problems.
- It is not your job to solve other people's problems.
- You don't want others to solve your problems.
- You must control the quantity and quality of the processes in which you intervene and oversee.
It sounds very rude to say “it’s not my problem.” But for a true empath, they are sometimes the only salvation from immersion in the world of other people’s lives and emotions. You can't make other people happy. They have to do it themselves.
Delving into themselves
The subconscious habit of blaming oneself for the difficulties and problems of others leads to unproductive self-examination and biased self-accusation. Self-esteem and self-confidence suffer. There are also more serious consequences to excessive self-criticism. For example, leadership specialist and professor at INSEAD international business school Herminia Ibarra argues that an excessive tendency to self-examination and self-criticism keeps a person in the past, preventing him from moving forward.
She does not deny that self-analysis is needed in life. But it is harmful if it becomes a habit or when you try yourself in a new role, in a new field. People get hung up on their shortcomings, convince themselves that “this is not for me,” feel guilty about failures, and this prevents them from achieving success in any business, especially a new one. Professor Ibarra believes that this is a problem for 50% of managers.
What to do: try to be objective. If you are in doubt, try to distance yourself from your feelings and use logical thinking. Write down the situation on a piece of paper, give it a dry assessment: are you really to blame for your failure? Could you have done anything to prevent the unpleasant situation? Even if you understand that the blame for what happened really lies with you, take it calmly. Admit, “Yes, it was my mistake,” and focus on how to correct the consequences and prevent similar problems in the future. The ability to forgive oneself for mistakes is an important area of development for an empath.
Neglect themselves
An empath may spend too much time on others and forget about themselves. At home, he finds himself out of focus - he poorly understands his true desires in his career, the motives for making decisions, and emotions. As a result, it may lose its meaning, value, and self. Such a person may not even ask himself the question: why do I need this (for example, a new project, a challenge at work)? Or not knowing the answer to it.
What to do: train your “no” and arrange an information detox to listen to yourself. Start by identifying where at work you are sacrificing yourself against your will, and begin to restore boundaries. Be prepared for the fact that at first this will cause a lot of surprise and misunderstanding among colleagues. Be sincere but firm. They get used to it and adapt. At the same time, detox from the Internet, TV and other media, as well as from contacts with other people. Relax and calm down, listen to yourself.
Reduce your circle of close friends
The rhythms of modern life require you to be resourceful all the time. Throughout the day, we receive gigabytes of information that our brain processes and filters. The more empathic you are, the closer to your heart you perceive information from the outside.
The desire to console every person who has suffered even the slightest failure will take away not only your strength, but also your precious time. To avoid emotional disruption and information overload, psychologists recommend that empathic people reduce their social circle. By narrowing your circle of friends to the people who matter most, you can spend more time not only for them, but also for yourself.
Sensitive to context
Overly sympathetic people are very sensitive to context: a colleague looked at me the wrong way, a manager thought something wrong about me. Such information analysis can take a lot of time and effort. And if the team is toxic and the concentration of negative emotions is very high, you can lose the ability to objectively assess the situation, performance, and ultimately get the whole bunch of psychosomatic diseases: from poor sleep to overeating and high blood pressure.
What to do: recover. There is an important point in this advice: you need to find time not for your family, but for yourself. Do what restores you as much as possible: lie on the couch with a book, watch TV series, take a walk, go on a trip alone. Be alone as long as you need to. And until new strength appears to empathize and support others without sacrificing oneself and the result.
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In someone else's shoes: what is empathy and is it possible to be a good person without it?
Until recently, many popular science articles extolled mirror neurons: they were discovered in the early 1990s and are responsible for the ability to recognize other people's actions and sensations, imagining oneself in the place of others. Mirror neurons began to be credited with all sorts of virtues—it was argued that without them there would be no heroic self-sacrifice, no language, and perhaps no civilization. Taking a deeper dive into the topic, it turns out that everything is not so simple: so far it has only been convincingly proven that such neurons exist in macaques, but about humans, despite numerous indirect evidence, nothing is known for sure. Since scientific ethics prohibits inserting microelectrodes into the human brain purely for the sake of experiment, magnetic resonance imaging provides the most accurate data. Indeed, there are also areas in our brain that are equally activated when, for example, we dance ourselves (falling, eating, kissing - whatever), and when we watch someone else dance. It is logical to assume that it is they who make it possible to emotionally “get into the skin” of another person. But how close these mechanisms are to mirror neurons in macaques and to what extent they can extend to subtle sensations is still not very clear - there is still debate on this topic.
In any case, mirroring emotions is not the only option for empathy, or even the most accurate. Of course, it helps to unmistakably understand the feelings of a person who has hit his finger with a hammer, but with mental pain, as well as with joy, there are nuances - it is not difficult in general to judge from the face, posture and gestures of a neighbor that he is feeling bad, but how It is known that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and for what reason a particular individual is suffering is not so easy to understand. To do this, the sufferer will have to question and complete the picture, modeling his own participation in the situation that upset him. And here, again, there is no guarantee that the model is correct - you, most likely, “tried on” the drama that happened to your psyche (unfortunately, many people consider this, in general, self-centered technique to be the truest empathy). Or a simplified idea of what is familiar, which is often based on stereotypes and prejudices.
The highest aerobatics of understanding is to collect in your head a mental “model” of another person, knowing his personality type and individual reactions, and then superimpose different situations on it. This gives a much more objective idea of someone else’s inner world, and helps writers create living characters “out of their heads” - it was precisely this skill that allowed Tolstoy to so convincingly describe the emotional unrest of 18-year-old girls. But this so-called “cognitive empathy” is a rational process, far from involuntary emotional empathy.
And yet, intuitively it seems that it is the ability to feel someone else’s pain that insures us from cruelty towards others - this should include the golden rule of ethics: do not do to others what you would not want to experience yourself. Unfortunately, practice shows that in reality the human psyche does not work this way: in addition to sensitive, good-natured people, high scores in emotional empathy are demonstrated by... sadistic maniacs. Despite the apparent paradox, this is quite logical - otherwise they simply would not be able to enjoy the suffering of their own victims.
Of course, it is alarming that narcissists and sociopaths, who cause a lot of inconvenience to others, are incapable of emotional empathy, but at the same time they are good at cognitive empathy, which allows them to skillfully manipulate people in their own interests, taking advantage of other people’s weaknesses. Here again the temptation arises to link insensitivity to maliciousness, but if we look at the full lists of symptoms of both disorders, we will see that low empathy appears in conjunction with other alarming traits: a sense of superiority over others in narcissists, aggression and contempt for social norms for sociopaths. In addition, both are generally incapable of experiencing deep emotions (for example, the feeling of love for another person as a unique entity, rather than a kind of property or reflection).
At the same time, scientific evidence shows that, in its pure form, a low capacity for empathy does not necessarily lead to irresponsible behavior: one of the main researchers of empathy, American psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen (by the way, cousin of comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen) drew attention to this that people with Asperger's syndrome and autism have low levels of both cognitive and emotional empathy. Despite this, they are not prone to cruelty, as a rule, demonstrate strong moral principles and more often become victims of violence than initiate it themselves.
And this is not to mention the fact that there is a fairly convincing theory according to which human ethics is based not on reverent sensations, but on completely pragmatic motives: for example, Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene” explains in detail why, from the point of view of game theory, you can simply It is advantageous by default to respect the interests of your neighbor, until he himself sets you up. Treating others humanely and acting in their best interests are useful social skills: in the long run, they increase your chances of well-being, although in a specific encounter with some unpleasant type, Christian charity may not be the most successful strategy. The tendency of individuals to obvious self-sacrifice can also be explained by pragmatics - at least from the point of view of the survival of humanity as a species.
Emotional empathy lags behind cognitive empathy in several other ways: first, it is biased. We are more inclined to sympathize with those who are similar to us, and those who seem nice to us (and the second is often associated with the first), we are sensitive to the tears of a child, but we are unlikely to be greatly moved by sad statistics (although, it would seem, ten thousand deaths are clearly worse than one). Secondly, emotional resonance does not always help to provide assistance more effectively: a person who is too sensitive can be so overwhelmed by other people’s experiences that he himself falls asleep for several hours (even to the point of physical weakness and other psychosomatic symptoms). In this regard, a cold-blooded cracker, who understands with his mind that it would be good to help his neighbor, can be much more useful in a critical situation. Therefore, for example, both surgeons and psychotherapists learn to abstract themselves from other people’s emotions - otherwise they simply would not be able to do their job efficiently.
This does not mean that emotional empathy is completely unnecessary: when we see our own experiences reflected in other people's eyes, we feel understood, and this helps us feel close to other people. You just shouldn’t expect that high empathy is guaranteed to make someone a good person, and you should stay away from anyone who lacks it: reason gives us no less opportunities to find a common language and do good.
