The Art of Empathy by Karla McLaren Read Free Book Online

ability to accurately identify and understand emotional states, thoughts, and intentions in yourself and others.
    3.  Emotion Regulation: To be an effective empath, you have to develop the ability to understand, regulate, and work with your own emotions; you have to be self-aware. When you can clearly identify and regulate your own emotions, you’ll tend to be able to function skillfully in the presence of strong emotions (your own and others’), rather than being overtaken or knocked out of commission by them.
    4.  Perspective Taking: This skill helps you imaginatively put yourself in the place of others, see situations through their eyes, and accurately sense what they might be feeling and thinking so that you can understand what they might want or need.
    5.  Concern for Others: Empathy helps you connect with others, but the quality of your response depends on your ability to care about others as well. When you feel emotions with others, accurately identify those emotions, regulate them in yourself, and take the perspective of others, your sensitive concern will help you engage with them in a way that displays your care and compassion.
    6.  Perceptive Engagement: This skill allows you to make perceptive decisions based on your empathy and to respond—or act (if necessary)—in a way that works for others. Perceptive Engagement can be considered the pinnacle of empathic skill, because it combines your capacity to sense and accurately identify the emotions, thoughts, and intentions of others; to regulate your own emotions; to take the perspective of others; to focus on them with care and concern; and then to do something skillful based on your perceptions. Notably, in Perceptive Engagement, you’ll often do something for another that would not work for you at all and that might not even be in your best interests. Perceptive Engagement is about meeting the needs of the other.
    These six aspects of empathy build upon one another. Although Emotion Contagion tends to occur instinctively, the rest are more intentional. However, all of these aspects can be developed (or calmed down in the case of hyperempathy) with the empathic skills you’ll learn in this book.
    Let’s look at each aspect in a bit more depth.
    EMOTION CONTAGION
    Emotion Contagion is central to an understanding of empathy, which always includes some form of transmission of emotion from one to another. There is currently a great deal of debate about how this transmission occurs. Is emotion transmitted primarily through the face? Is it moderated through a few specific visual structures in the brain? Is emotion copied in a more intentionally cognitive manner, such that I can only feel an emotion from you if I can understand it in myself? Or is there more to the story?
    As I write this book in 2013, a great deal of our capacity to empathize is being attributed to a group of structures in the brain called mirror neurons. These structures are thought to activate movement-related areas in your brain when you view movement in someone else (for instance, if you see someone moving his or her arm, your brain will fire the same neurons you use when you move your own arm). The mirror-neuron hypothesis puts forth the idea that these structures do the same kind of thing in response to emotions—that is, when you see someone feeling happy or sad, for instance, your brain might fire the same neurons that you use when you feel happy or sad.
    The hypothesis behind mirror neurons is that they help you empathize because you can actually feel the movement or the emotion of another in your own body—the idea is that you can empathize because you can actually feel like the other person. However, I don’t find this to be a full enough explanation for empathy. Because this hypothesis focuses so much attention on visual cues, I’m concerned that it leaves out a great deal.
    Emotion Contagion is so much more than simply mirroring emotion.