Contents
The difference between being empathetic and feeling empathy
Psychology
The entrepreneur and nutritional coach Meritxell Garcia Roig creates a guide on “The art of empathy” for all those people who can feel the emotions of others
Today you woke up happy, you feel good. Then you get to work and something gets inside you, a sadness that you can’t explain. Your day starts to go wrong and you don’t understand why. It is, when your partner tells you something deeply sad, and you see that he feels that way, when you understand the reason for your regret. Has that ever happened to you? If so, it is because you are one empathic person, or rather, you can feel the empathy inside.
This is what Meritxell Garcia Roig, author of “The Art of Empathy,” calls “the power of sensitivity,” something that empathic and highly sensitive people carry. “We all have mirror neurons, which help us to empathize with others. People who are highly sensitive, have these mirror neurons much more developed, so they live empathy not only from a conceptual point of view, but also from a physical point of view in which they are able to live what another feels person », explains Garcia Roig.
«It is not just talking to someone, knowing their situation and empathizing with it. It is to feel it in your own body, to be in the situation that that person is living, at the level of physical sensations, of emotions, “he continues.
The author highlights the positive side of being such an empathic person: «Connecting with others at this deep level is beautiful, in the end it fills you, you feel closer to other people, you are able to put yourself in their situation ».
However, Meritxell Garcia also talks about the difficulties of having this “quality”, because if someone is having a bad time, and “it takes it to the extreme, it can cause problems”, although he explains that “the book tries to turn it around to this, ahelp to use this skill».
“It is like any personality characteristic, taken to the limit, it can be very good or it can be very bad”, says the author and continues: “Empathic people have a skin, so to speak, very porous. Everything what is around us pierces usIt goes deep inside and it is difficult for us to distinguish between our own emotions and those of others, because we live it as if it were our own and it can seem like an emotional imbalance ».
It is because of this peculiar situation that the author describes that highlights the importance of self-knowledge for empathic people, with the aim of «recognize what happens to us and the reason why it happens to us ”, knowing how to differentiate whether an emotion“ is ours or someone else’s ”and, once recognized, learning to“ manage it in a calm and relaxed way ”.
The entrepreneur confirms the importance of this, speaking of the danger of the need to please that these empathic people have. «You can please the needs of others, but there are times that at that moment you forget what you needBecause you are trying to make someone else feel good, and maybe you do it at the cost of feeling bad, “he says.
Avoid “emotional vampires”
It highlights the importance of recognizing what is going well for us and what is not, in all areas of our life: what we eat, how we dress and what relationships we have. It emphasizes relationships, an essential plane in our life and affects the rest of the vital sphere: «When a relationship does not go well, when you evolve, or that person, and you only hurt each other, and that does not mean that it does not you appreciate the person, but maybe you need another relationship and this must be able to speak naturally »
She then speaks of what she calls “emotional vampires” and “narcissists”, “personalities who seek the attention of other people, because they have lack of self-knowledgeThey don’t know how to give themselves the support they need. To avoid the harm that these types of people can do to “empaths,” Meritxell recommends first identifying these people in our lives. “Because we see a person every day, it does not mean that we have to have a deep relationship,” he says. He adds that if we find ourselves surrounded by people like this, various techniques can be used, such as “answering with monosyllables and interacting as little as possible so as not to get tired” or “interacting with that person with others around them, thus spreading the emotional load.”
The author ends by talking about how the empathy is something that we are taught to have towards others, but not towards ourselves. “Being so connected with the outside you need to do an exercise with yourself to understand what you really need”, he says and concludes: “You are the best friend in the world and the worst enemy for yourself.”