Empathy
Empathy, Understanding and Compassion
Empathy and the Process of Socialization
Article on Cultivating Empathy in Children & Youth, by Dr. Arundhati Ray
To show empathy is to
identify with another's feelings. It is to emotionally put
yourself in the place of another. The ability to empathize is
directly dependent on your ability to feel your own feelings and
identify them.
If you have never felt a certain feeling, it will be hard for you
to understand how another person is feeling. This holds equally
true for pleasure and pain. If, for example, you have never put
your hand in a flame, you will not know the pain of fire. If you
have not experienced sexual passion, you will not understand its
power. Similarly, if you have never felt rebellious or defiant,
you will not understand those feelings. Reading about a feeling
and intellectually knowing about it is very different than
actually experiencing it for yourself. This is one concern I have
with many of those who write about emotions and emotional
intelligence from an academic or corporate viewpoint. And it is
one reason why I want to keep my writing more personal than most
writing on the subject.
Among those of equal level of innate emotional intelligence, I expect that the person who has actually experienced the widest range and variety of feelings -- the great depths of depression and the heights of fulfillment, for example, -- is the one who is most able to empathize with the greatest number of people from all walks of life. On the other hand, when we say that someone "can't relate" to other people, it is likely because they haven't experienced, acknowledged or accepted many feelings of their own.
Once you have felt discriminated against, for example, it is much easier to relate with someone else who has been discriminated against. Our innate emotional intelligence gives us the ability to quickly recall those instances and form associations when we encounter discrimination again. We then can use the "reliving" of those emotions to guide our thinking and actions. I believe this is one of the ways nature slowly evolves towards a higher level of survival. In other words, over time, awareness of our own feelings may lead us to treat others in a more pro-survival way.
For this process to work, the first step is that we must be able to experience our own emotions. This means we must be open to them and not distract ourselves from them or try to numb ourselves from our feelings through drugs, alcohol, etc.
Next, we need to become aware of what we are actually feeling -- to acknowledge, identify, and accept our feelings. Only then can we empathize with others. That is one reason I believe it is so important to work on your own emotional awareness and sensitivity-- in other words, to be "in touch with" your feelings. -- and to help children stay in touch with their feelings.
Empathy begins with awareness of another person's feelings. It would be easier to be aware of other people's emotions if they would simply tell us how they felt. But since most people do not, we must resort to asking questions, reading between the lines, guessing, and trying to interpret non-verbal cues. Emotionally expressive people are easiest to read because their eyes and faces are constantly letting us know how they are feeling.
Once we have figured out how another person feels, we show empathy by acknowledging the emotion. We may say, for example,
- I can see you are really uncomfortable about this.
- I can understand why you would be upset.We can also show empathy through a simple sign of affection such as hug or a tender touch. Though empathy is usually used in reference to sensing someone else's painful feelings, it can also apply to someone's positive feelings of success, accomplishment, pride, achievement etc. In this case a "high five" would also be a sign of empathy.
In one of the Mayer et al studies, many variables were measured. Of these many variables, sensitivity was found to have the highest correlation to emotional intelligence. (Selecting a Measure of Emotional Intelligence) It can be assumed that empathy and sensitivity are also significantly correlated. By definition sensitive people are more likely to notice someone else's feelings and to feel something themselves. But even those who are not naturally sensitive, or do not have a high natural level EI, can take steps to show more sensitivity to the feelings of others.
A basic guideline for showing sensitivity to someone is to not invalidate their feelings by belittling, diminishing, rejecting, judging, or ignoring them. Even just a simple acknowledgment without any real empathy is much better than totally ignoring someone's feeling. (See section on invalidation)
Sensitivity also means being receptive to others' cues, particularly the non-verbal ones such as facial expressions. This is similar to a highly sensitive radio antenna which can pick up faint signals. The more information you are able to receive, the more you can help them and yourself. By the way, I don't believe someone can ever be "too sensitive" any more than someone can be too intelligent. I simply believe it is a question of how they use the information their extra sensitivity is giving them.
Empathy, Understanding and Compassion
Empathy is closely related to compassion. It seems to both precede compassion and be a prerequisite for it. When we feel empathy for someone we are getting emotional information about them and their situation. By collecting information about other people's feelings, you get to know them better. As you get to know others on an emotional level, you are likely to see similarities between your feelings and theirs, and between your basic emotional needs and theirs. When you realize that someone else's basic emotional needs are similar to yours, you are more able to identify with them, relate to them and empathize with them.
My view is that all humans have similar emotional needs. (See human emotional needs) The wide variety among our needs is mostly a difference in degree, rather than in type. For example, we all need to feel some degree of freedom, but I may need more than you.
As I see it, compassion can be defined as a combination of empathy and understanding. Greater empathy gives you greater information, and the more information you have on something, the more likely you are to understand it. Higher emotional intelligence makes possible a greater capacity for such understanding. Thus, the logical sequence is as follows: Higher emotional sensitivity and awareness leads to higher levels of empathy. This leads to higher levels of understanding which then leads to higher levels of compassion.
Haim Ginott wrote that "It takes time
and wisdom to realize that the personal parallels the universal
and what pains one man pains mankind." Now we might add that
it also takes highly developed emotional intelligence.
Those who are not in touch with their own feelings are not likely to have a sense of conscience. They may feel no remorse, no guilt for causing harm to others. As could be expected, studies show that such people are unlikely to respond to rehabilitation.
One thing which could easily cause a person to lose touch with his own feelings and to lose his sense natural sense of conscience is an extremely painful childhood and adolescence. Such people have experienced so much pain that they shut themselves from it. This pain may have come from physical, sexual or emotional abuse. The end result though is similar. They do not experience their own pain, so they have no compassion for the pain of another. Nor do they have any empathy.
They are also likely to be extremely needy. In other words they have many, and deep, unmet emotional needs (UEN's). As adults, they will have developed elaborate defense mechanisms in an attempt to block the pain coming from both their UEN's and from the guilt they would feel if they allowed themselves to feel.
As Freud helped us see, attempts to defend our brains from psychological pain usually involve the cognitive parts of the brain. For example, common defenses are rationalization, justification, denial, intellectualization, moralizing, preaching, proselytizing, self-righteousness, projection, suppression, etc.
In the absence of a conscience, behavior must be controlled by fear, threats and punishment, or by separation from society. This comes at tremendous social cost, and evidently is ineffective, given the overcrowded prisons and rising fines -- the United States being the best example of this.
It seems that laws are really only needed when conscience has failed. The more laws a society needs, the less emotionally intelligent.
Empathy and the Process of Socialization
I suspect that the correlation between EI and empathy decreases with age. In other words I suspect that a) children are by nature relatively empathetic and they slowly lose their feelings of empathy, and b) empathy is a relatively larger component of EI in children. Research on adolescents and adults seems to support this hypothesis. (See Emotional intelligence meets traditional standards for an intelligence.)
Here is what I think is probably happening. First there is the socialization process which may lead to a drop in empathy. This could be happening for several reasons. For instance, I have noticed that I cannot feel empathy for someone if I am feeling defensive or if I am preoccupied with my own needs. It makes sense, then, that if children are consistently put on the defensive, or if they grow up with many unmet emotional needs, these children will slowly become more concerned with self-defense and with their own interests in general, and less able to empathize with the troubles of someone else. From my observations, this is in fact what is happening to the majority of children in many of the countries I have lived in and visited. Besides the more obvious forms of physical and sexual abuse, I see children regularly criticized, over-controlled, disapproved of, underestimated, judged, ignored, threatened, punished, verbally attacked, humiliated, mocked, etc.
Another factor that could be contributing to a drop in empathy is the general low value which society places on feelings and emotions. Until very recently few people seem to have appreciated or even ever thought of the evolutionary value of our feelings and emotions. I can certainly say that this concept certainly was never introduced to me in my formal education.
Speaking of education, the higher one goes in the formal education system the more emphasis is placed on the intellectual, cognitive brain. Generally, this seems to be at the expense of the development of the emotional brain. University students then might be expected to score higher on the more cognitive parts of the MEIS and MSCEIT tests and lower on the empathy scales. This would result in a lower correlation between EI and empathy.
Finally, beginning when we are children we are instructed to control our feelings and the expression of emotion. We are told that this is part of what it means to be "mature." We are led to believe that emotions are irrational, signs of weakness, femininity, etc. All of this would tend to lower our empathy and increase our score on the regulation of emotion part of the EI tests, which would be another reason the correlation between empathy and EI scores (as EI is currently being measured) might drop with age.
In one of their 1990 publications Salovey and Mayer hypothesized that there was a positive relationship between empathy and emotional intelligence. Since then their studies have indeed shown this to be the case, (using their test which tries to measure IE). (See Emotional intelligence meets traditional standards for an intelligence.) Still, their definition of EI and their detailed chart of its many aspects does not mention empathy -- something I was at first puzzled with. Recently I realized though, that it is possible to feel too much empathy, to the point where you let someone else's moods affect you in an unhealthy way. (For example, in a codependent relationship.) Therefore, it now seems to make sense that while our innate emotional sensitivity gives us the ability to feel empathy, our emotional intelligence helps us decide what to do when we feel empathy and what to do when someone else's moods are affecting us too much.
Even though I believe it is possible to sometimes feel too much empathy, I generally believe it is something we could use more of in society. I suspect that our ability to empathize is one of the main ways our emotions contribute to the survival of the species.