EMPATHY:
What Is It & How Does it Work?
So many people have such strange ideas about what empathy is. The best way to define it is to say that it is our ability to feel what another person is feeling. This is not to be confused with sympathy which is thinking about what another person is feeling. When someone says they can sympathize with what you’re feeling, it actually means that they can comprehend your situation. This is a mental function not a feeling function. They may also say that they feel for you. But this is an internally generated feeling that another person conjures within themselves in assuming what they would expect to feel in your situation based on their own past experience. When someone says I have empathy for you (provided they truly understand what empathy is), it means that they are actually feeling what you are.
Now that we know the technical difference between empathy and sympathy, let’s take a look at some examples showing us how we can know what empathy is and how it works.
Imagine, if you will, that you are standing in a pool with the water up to your chest. If you don’t move, the most you might feel might be the temperature of the water or perhaps a slight weightlessness in your body. Now you begin to move a bit. First, you feel the resistance of the water. If you move vigorously, you may feel the water push back at you a bit as you change direction. At this point, you probably know that it is your movement that is causing the water’s movement and push back. Unbeknownst to you, another person enters the water behind you. They begin to move also, slowly at first but becoming more vigorous. As that person moves, you begin to feel the pushback from the water that they are moving. It might feel a little different from what you’re doing but you would most likely just chalk it up to being a result of your own movement. If you were to totally still your own movement and then still perceive the pushback, it’s likely that you would then look around to see who else might be in the pool making the water move and recognizing that the movement of the water you felt was not of your own making.
So now, if we look at the water as being our feelings and we look at our ability to feel them as our empathy, we have a close analogy as to how empathy works. One more step to comprehend is that our feelings are generated by our solar plexus and our ability to feel them is through the heart. In different scenarios, instinct works through the root and sacral centers and intuition works through the throat and third eye centers. These I will describe in more detail in another place.
I’ve also been careful not to confuse feelings with emotions. Emotions are different in that they are feelings but with an attached mental judgment and memory resulting in perceptual triggers. Their difference I will explain later. As a side note, what’s also important to understand now is that instinct, feelings and intuition are capacities that we are born with. That is, we come into life with them open and working. All else is learned as we integrate our awareness into the physical world. Emotions, instinct and intuition will all be explained in a different place. For now, let’s just look at empathy, feelings and the dynamics behind their perception and movement.
When we enter the pool and begin to move, the water’s movement is akin to our feelings. We generate the movements, they come back to us and, hopefully, we recognize them as being a result of our own movement through our empathy. Empathy is, essentially, the radar that we use to perceive feelings the same way that bats or whales perceive the returning signals that they have sent out into the air or water through their movement or “vocalizations.” They send signals out and the signal bounces off the external environment and they are able to distinguish distance and the presence of who or what is in their, environment. We have this radar too. But for most people, this radar is sent and felt but not recognized for what it is because we have been so completely immersed and trained into only trusting the “reality” of the external tangible world. Our upbringing has trained us out of recognizing empathy and intuition in favor of only physical and tangible vibrations. And if we are perceptive enough, most of would simply assume that whatever comes back to us is simply a returning signal of our own making instead of coming from someone else.
So, to recap, when someone else enters the water, moves vigorously, and sends us a wave, we assume it as being of our own making. The only way for us to learn to recognize the vibrations of others is to still our own movement (feelings) so we can feel those of others. The key to learning to feel this is stilling our own movement (feelings) in the water (environment) allowing ourselves to feel the movement (feelings) of others as they enter and move in the pool water (the environment).
Only a few of us come into life knowing how to do this, let alone, understanding what empathy truly is. It is an innate gift that everyone has. But the majority of us must struggle to free ourselves from only trusting the “reality” of the physical world that we have been so strongly indoctrinated to solely respond to.