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

reduced. Too much empathy is just as much trouble as too little. In fact, many workers in healthcare, counseling, emergency response, and criminal justice have to learn to reduce their Emotion Contagion in order to do their work.
    If you experience strong contagion, hyperempathy, and emotional sponging that is very uncomfortable for you, you can learn to focus on increasing your ability to identify, understand, and work with your own emotional states and emotions in general (specifically, you can develop your skills in Empathic Accuracy and Emotion Regulation).
    Emotions are tools for empaths, and learning to understand them, welcome them, and work with them skillfully is a central empathic activity. However, this empathic understanding is continually impeded in our everyday emotional training, to the extent that many people are afraid of emotions and actually try to avoid them altogether. We’ll look very closely at why people are so afraid of emotions (or so dismissive toward them), because humankind’s nearly universal problems with emotions truly impede empathy. Most of us have been trained to view and approach emotions in a way that makes contagion problematic— not because emotions are problematic in and of themselves, but because our training is so backward and unhelpful. We are actually trained to be emotionally avoidant and therefore empathically unskilled; accordingly, if our Emotion Contagion skills are naturally strong, we may experience a great deal of discomfort simply because we have no idea how to work with the emotions we feel and perceive.
    If your current empathic condition is primarily one of uncomfortable contagion, I’ll help you learn to identify and work with emotions as tools so that you can become grounded in and comfortable with them and the other five aspects of empathy. With this empathic emotional grounding, you’ll be able to have a fuller and healthier experience of empathy, instead of being stuck in an uncomfortable and unworkable level of contagion. Conversely, if your current capacity for Emotion Contagion is very low, I’ll teach you a new way to approach emotions and to clearly identify them as reliable responses to very specific situations and stimuli.
    Why might your capacity for Emotion Contagion be low? There are many possible reasons, but the ones I’ve seen most often are (1) sensoryhyperawareness that is overwhelming and leads a person to turn inward and reduce his or her receptivity as a form of protection (this is true for many people on the autism spectrum); (2) early-childhood experiences with depressed and low-affect caretakers who didn’t give the child enough experience with a full range of emotions (we’ll talk more about this in Chapter 9 ); and (3) early childhood experiences of (or extended periods of contact with) emotionally explosive or abusive people, such that the person learns to turn away from (or distrust) emotions as a survival tactic.
    If you experienced any of these situations, this book will support you in retrieving and rebuilding your empathic capacities in a way that is understandable, accessible, and reliable for you. However, you may also benefit from the support of a trusted counselor or therapist. The capacity to experience the full range of emotions (inside yourself and with others) is your birthright, and you can do a great deal to retrieve this empathic capacity, no matter what kind of obstructions you experienced. And, of course, engaging with your artistic, literary, and philosophical Einfühlung capacities will help you explore emotional and empathic skills in intentional and self-expanding ways. We’ll explore more about the specific healing effects of artistic expression in Chapters 5 and 6 .
    EMPATHIC ACCURACY
    Empathic Accuracy is your empathic capacity to accurately identify emotions, thoughts, and intentions in yourself and others. This is an interior skill, an interactional skill, and an