We could define empathy as the ability to put yourself in the place of others, to understand your vision of reality, your posture and your opinions without prejudice. Empathy can help not only others, but also ourselves.
Empathy is the ability to put yourself in each other’s place, to understand it, to try to understand what is going on in your mind, how and why it feels so, but not from our point of view, but by trying to think like it, with your beliefs and values.
- Empathy arises from acceptance.
- The understanding that a person’s feelings are possible in the situation in which he finds himself.
- Even if we were in the same situation.
- We had a different attitude.
In simpler terms and by way of example, it may not be very important for us that we do not have siblings, but for someone else it can be, in this situation the empathetic person would put aside his?Scale of importance?the suffering of the other from the?scale of importance?
There are people who have a natural facility to do what we said before, but there are others who can’t do it. Sometimes we confuse empathy with another concept that, although different, is a fundamental element in empathy, we are talking about recognition of emotions.
We are talking about recognizing sadness, joy, fear, anguish, there are people who are able to quickly identify the emotional state in which the other person is located and there are others who cannot do it, exaggerating a little, even if they write on the first line.
Logically, in this previous step there are many variables that influence the most cognitive part of empathy: the familiarity we have with the person who shows emotion, our degree of fatigue, his communicative predisposition, etc.
Empathy has many positive aspects: it facilitates communication, comfort, problem solving, etc. , but there is also another extreme: the negative.
Living permanently, putting on other people’s shoes? can make us create an emotional disconnect with ourselves, which can cost us dearly.
Therefore, it is very good to practice and train the mental action to put you in the place of the other, but without forgetting that the other person is in this situation, without falling into it permanently. The first to take care of ourselves is ourselves.
We can be very empathetic, but if we don’t show it and put it into practice it’s useless, that said, we’ll list some times when we can use empathy:
On the other hand, there may also be times and situations when we do not show empathy:
Empathy is a good skill to practice because it allows us to understand others, but it is also essential to be careful when over-practicing, so as not to disconnect from ourselves.