Read Online The Art of Empathy by Karla McLaren - Free Book Online

Taking—a feeling into, an aesthetic, literary capacity to embody characters and imbue them with life, hopes, dreams, wishes, and attitudes. When you skillfully take the perspective of others, you bring all parts of yourself to the process of trying tounderstand how they might feel and respond. Skilled Perspective Taking helps you see things clearly from another’s standpoint.
    CONCERN FOR OTHERS
    Concern for Others is an empathic aspect that is both crucial and tricky. If you have too much concern, you may expend all of your time and energy on the needs of others, while essentially ignoring your own. On the other hand, if you have too little concern, your relationships may suffer, because others won’t feel your interest, and they’ll assume that you don’t care about them. Interestingly, I find that some people who feel a great deal of concern shut down their empathy pretty early in life because they simply don’t know how to meet all the needs they perceive. These people can appear to be deceptively low in empathy when, in truth, they may simply be low in empathic self-care skills.
    For an empath, the other tends to be an endless source of fascination, frustration, confusion, joy, struggle, delight, exasperation, comfort, and discomfort (remember that the other also includes art, ideas, music, movement, literature, animals, etc.). In service to this empathic need for engagement, some of us focus all of our attention on the other and totally ignore our own needs until we burn out. I address empathic burnout throughout this book so that you can learn to balance your Concern for Others with healthy concern for yourself. The world needs empaths, but your health and well-being are equally important. If you burn out, not only is it very painful for you, but it’s also a loss in the larger sense. If you burn out, there will be one less healthy empath in the world. Self-care and Concern for Others should and must coexist.
    On the other side of this equation is a lack of concern for or a lack of interest in others. I’ve put forth the proposal that unconcerned behavior may actually be masking or obscuring hyperconcern or hyperempathy (or empathy that has not been supported). When I see obviously empathic people who exhibit very little Concern for Others, my suspicion is that they have burnt out already; I don’t immediately think that they’re incapable of empathy. If you scratch underneath the surface just a little, you’ll find that some of the angriest, most anxious, most arrogant, and most antisocial people harbor a profound well of concern that they’re either unable to manage or unwilling to acknowledge—or both.
    It’s very easy for a highly empathic person to burn out and retreat inward. I’d even go so far as calling that process an empathic tendency. In a world inwhich emotional awareness is often low to nonexistent, such that Empathic Accuracy is continually impeded and skilled Emotion Regulation is rare, being highly empathic can be a pretty grueling situation of uncontrolled Emotion Contagion. We’ll tackle this situation head-on in this book, but just be aware: people (and animals) you might think of as uncaring and unempathic might actually be hyperempathic and burnt out. And the way you approach them can make it better or worse.
    Most of us are gruff, cold, or angry toward those we’ve identified as uncaring, but I’ll tell you, empath to empath, that a complete and constitutional lack of empathy is rare. It is hundreds of times more likely that seemingly uncaring others are burnt out or impaired in their emotional regulation skills than that they are pathologically unempathic. Therefore, approaching them somewhat neutrally is a more truly empathic thing to do. Too much coldness will only cement them in their isolation (and confirm their belief that others aren’t worth their time), whereas too much warmth might feel threatening. When a