The Art of Empathy by Karla McLaren Read Free Book Online Page A

To accurately pick up on the emotion of another, you also have to understand social contexts and the specific display rules 16 of your community. (Each family, community, and culture has a different set of rules about how emotions are displayed, which emotions are accepted, which emotions are denied, and how intensely group members can feel and display some or all emotions.) You also have to be able to identify moods and multiple gradations of emotion, hear vocal tone changes, watch for subtle body-language cues, understand social relationships, and read nuances, undercurrents, and gestural language—you even have to rely upon your sense of smell in many cases (most of us are not consciously aware of the many decisions we make based on our very sensitive noses). There’s a great deal more to this contagion process than mirroring others 17 —you really have to understand the full context in which the emotion occurs in order to sense which emotion it is. Although this contextualsensitivity is a part of the second aspect of empathy—Empathic Accuracy—it’s important to mention it here. Emotion Contagion can feel completely autonomic, as if it somehow happens to you without your involvement; but it is also something you learn how to do as a social being. 18
    In the academic realm, there’s a great deal of debate about Emotion Contagion and its relationship to empathy. Some researchers argue that contagion, in and of itself, is not empathic—and, in fact, may be counterempathic. This idea was very surprising to me, because for many years, my definition of an empath was someone who felt the emotions of others strongly in his or her own body. And yet, I have to agree with this new approach. Let’s look at the distinction.
    In research performed by German psychologist Doris Bischof-Köhler, 19 infants and toddlers were presented with situations in which both the experimenter and the infant played with either teddy bears or spoons. In this study, the experimenter’s teddy or spoon was rigged to break, thus causing the experimenter to act distressed and to cry. Bischof-Köhler carefully watched what happened next. If the child noticed the distress and cried alongside the distressed experimenter, Bischof-Köhler did not consider that response to be empathic. Rather, she called this example of contagion self-centered, because the child merely became wrapped up in his or her own distress. Only when the child offered some form of consolation (patting the experimenter, trying to fix the teddy or the spoon, or offering his or her own teddy or spoon to the distressed experimenter) did Bischof-Köhler consider the child to have developed true empathy.
    This action-based definition of empathy is currently contested in empathy research, and some researchers want to roll back the definition to include only Emotion Contagion (in everyday English, the consoling actions that Bischof-Köhler wanted to see in her young subjects would be called compassion rather than empathy). I understand these reservations, because it’s very helpful to make clear separations between the different aspects of empathy. However, for our uses as working empaths, I find this action component of empathy to be extremely important, and it’s something we’ll focus on throughout the rest of this book.
    Here’s why: If your experience of empathy is primarily contagion, such that you act as an emotional sponge and become overwhelmed by the emotions of others, you’ll probably be unable to provide much support to them. You’ll be like the children in the experiment who dissolved into the emotion of theexperimenter and who could neither soothe themselves nor offer any support. In other words, you’ll shut down. It may also be difficult for you to take the perspective of others if they are a continual source of emotional discomfort for you, and your ability to engage perceptively may therefore be