The Light and Darkness of Empathy
Empathy is a key that unlocks the door of compassion, so you may enter into the space of forgiveness. Empathy begins a process of spiritual growth, expansion and healing by giving you access to the thoughts, feelings and experiences of others. As defined by Merriam-Webster dictionary online empathy is: The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.
Psychological research suggests there are two types of empathy affective (e.g. feeling) and cognitive (e.g. perspective taking) which contribute to strengthening prosocial behavior and forming healthy relationships. This article published in the Greater Good Magazine: Science Based Insights for a Meaningful Life helps to lay the foundation of empathy, the benefits of empathy and how to cultivate more of it.
Empathy is a key, which unlocks the door of compassion, so you may enter into the space of forgiveness.
While empathy is an important and essential part of strengthening our humanity, our human connection with each other and with all sentient beings and life on this planet, when we have too much empathy it can become toxic. As with many things in life, having too much or too little of something is often associated with maladaptive behaviors and compromised health - health and wellness often thrive somewhere in the middle - a balance.
How can too much empathy become toxic?
Empathy is intended as a tool to help us sense, feel, know and even understand more fully the experience of others, which facilitates building stronger connections, relationships, understanding, togetherness, cohesion and community. Empathy can bring people together in service and support of each other - a catalyst for connection and action. Empathy is a beautiful feeling and experience that strengthens loving and caring relationships.
While empathy creates the opportunity for these beautiful experiences in life, there is a dark side to empathy.
When we have too much empathy, empathy can leave us feeling exhausted, irritable, stressed, overwhelmed and even angry. We may feel burdened by the stresses of others because we feel responsible or obligated to help others in need at cost to our own health and well-being. We may find it difficult to set limits with others regarding how much we help or even if we can help or not. Avoiding feeling bad or guilty for not helping or limiting how much we can reasonably help is often experienced when we have too much empathy.
Especially for high empaths, those who are highly attuned to energy and emotions of others, it is even more challenging to create healthy energetic and emotional space. Spirit shares that these highly attuned individuals are often the healers of the world and were born with the gift to sense, feel and sometimes see the unseen world of energy and spirit.
This gift to connect with the energy, feelings and emotions of others and the environment can become a burden because a highly attuned person will often automatically absorb these energies from others into their own body - absorbing physical and emotional pain and turmoil, sickness and ailments. Oftentimes, highly attuned individuals are unaware of this absorption and begin to believe that everything they think, feel and experience is their own experience rather than of others. This can be particularly stressful for highly attuned children because they will often experience this high sensitivity in distressing ways, such as: Frequent sickness or colds, skin rashes, ailments, anxiety and swings in their emotions.
What can we do to mitigate or lessen these negative effects of empathy?
Shift from empathy into compassion, which is a practice of feeling loving kindness and warmth in response to the stresses of others and even within ourselves. When we are driven to help from a place of empathy, we are often motivated into action because of our own discomfort, dis-ease, guilt, obligation and/or pain in response to the pain of others. Therefore, while we may respond with actions of kindness and support, if the internal feeling is stress, distress, anxiety and worry for them, we are also brining our pain to meet their pain.
In contrast, if we acknowledge that empathy gives us access to the awareness and insight into the pain and experience of others, we can make a conscious decision to meet their pain with loving kindness and warmth; compassion. Compassion is an act of loving kindness in response to pain experienced by others and even within ourselves. Compassion is rooted in an understanding that humanity is bound together by a shared experience of pain and suffering - all of us experience pain and are doing our best to navigate the pains of our past, present and future. Therefore, in response to the pain of others, we choose to bring kindness, warmth, safety and light rather than our fear, pain, and anxiety for them and their situation.
Is your energy and emotional state adding to their low vibration and stresses or are you helping to raise their vibration by sharing your light?
Neuroscientific research also indicates that a practice of compassion is more sustainable and supports greater overall health and well-being than empathy: When Empathy Hurts, Compassion Can Heal.
Spirit also reminds us that when pain enters into a person’s life, that pain or lesson is for them. It is not happening to them to punish them, this experience is happening for them to help them to learn, heal, grow and thrive in ways they may have been blind to, resistant to, or ignoring.
The universe conspires to support you, it is not here to work against you.
Embedded within pain is the opportunity and potential for immense growth, healing, learning, awareness and awakening. Sometimes that lesson is about learning how to ask for help rather than expecting help or pushing help away. When others experience pain, it is also an opportunity for us to learn how to offer loving kindness and support of others, while not taking their lessons away from them. How to join others on their journey rather than taking charge of their journey.
Spirit also reminds us that each person’s current experience in life is a culmination of a lifetime of choices and opportunities made, taken or avoided often in response or reaction to the actions of others. Thus, this moment in time is not for you to fix. This moment in time is an opportunity to recognize your shared humanity of the pain and struggle to navigate these experiences in life. It is also an opportunity to bring warmth and kindness to their pain, so they are not alone and an important reminder we are all on this journey together.
We are all human.
As we deepen our practice of compassion for others and especially for ourselves, we will find that a practice of forgiveness becomes more accessible. Forgiveness has the power to heal and facilitate true transformation, rebirth, renewal and ignite new light within.