Terry Martin has been delving into the quality of Empathy for another of his occasional essays: *
Empathy is generally described as the ability to take on an other’s perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience.1 Rogers and Stevens (1967) define empathy as:
To sense the client's inner world of private meanings as if it were your own, but without ever losing the ‘as if’ quality. 2
Empathy would seem to be a ‘good thing’, but more recently the notion of toxic empathy has gained currency. Alison Stuckey writes:
Toxic empathy is when a person over-identifies with someone emotions, feelings and takes them on as their own. 3
Megha Pushkarna elaborates further:
Toxic empathy is when you do not just replicate and reflect another person’s emotions or feelings, you also experience and consume them. Consuming someone else’s problems can cause you to become equally overwhelmed or even more so. When you replicate another person’s emotions as your own, you make them your emotions too, even though you are only empathizing or putting yourself in that person’s shoes.
People who are overly-empathetic or hyper-empathetic may gradually lose their own wants, needs, as the feeling when overshadowed by another person’s emotions. These people experience others’ emotions to an extent where they lose themselves and feel the pain or negativity and in some cases positivity of another person. This diverts them from their own path and their life and onto someone else’s. 4
Kalisch, writing from an empirical perspective, and her own experience of teaching empathy to nursing students, says:
Data obtained from the investigation... indicated that empathy training involving the integration of didactive training, role-playing, some experiential training, and a role model of empathy was most successful in increasing interactive empathy, thus lending support to previous findings that empathy is teachable.5
Empathy, kindness, love and compassion can easily be conflated and confused. Empathy is just an emotion and morally neutral. As St Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:13, 'And now abideth faith, hope, charity (love), these three; but the greatest of these is charity.' King James Version.
References
2. Rogers, Carl & Stevens, Barry (1967) Person to Person: the Problem of Being Human A New Trend in Psychology Real People Press
3. Stuckey, Alison (2024) Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion Sentinel
4. Pushkarna, Megha What is Toxic Empathy and How to Emotionally Protect Yourself? - The IILM Blog
5. Kalisch, Beatrice J (1971) An experiment in the development of empathy in nursing students. Nurs Res. May-Jun; 20(3):202-11
*Terry Martin is a trustee of the Southampton-based charity Caraway which has a team of Anna Chaplains working in and around the city.
Comentários