The ability to feel someone else’s pain or joy as one’s own is considered a blessing and a necessary ability for many professions – a doctor, teacher, psychologist. But how not to cross the line beyond which empathy is harmful not only to the one who empathizes, but also to the object of our sympathy?
“Most people believe that empathy is the ability to put oneself in the place of another person, “to walk in his shoes,” comments Tatyana Efremova, a psychologist and Gestalt therapist. – Psychologists specify that this is empathy for the human condition, but without losing the sense of self. There are two types of empathy. Emotional – a reflection of one’s feelings of the feelings of another. And cognitive – the ability to understand how a person thinks.
Our vision of empathy as the basis of kindness and morality is very clear. But on closer examination, it is a poor moral guide, because it makes it impossible to help in the long run. It provokes false judgments, indifference and cruelty. Leads to irrational and unfair political decisions. I am against excessive empathy.
The expert gives an example to support his position.
Imagine: a 10-year-old girl is in the terminal stages of brain cancer and is in severe pain that conventional medicine can no longer cope with. Let’s say you work in a clinic and you can move her a little higher on the waiting list for surgery. What would you do? This question was asked to participants in a study conducted by social psychologist Daniel Batson of the University of Kansas.
Living someone else’s pain activates the same neural networks as when experiencing your own.
When the situation was described in detail to the respondents, they understood that there were children in the queue who needed more help. But when first asked to imagine the pain of that same 10-year-old girl, they offered to put her name in front of other children.
“Here, empathy outweighed justice and led to an immoral decision,” says Tatiana Efremova. “The response to the child’s suffering was triggered by empathy—the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes, which many consider a gift.”
Research in the field of neuropsychology and neurophysiology has confirmed that empathy affects the health of the one who experiences it. Living someone else’s pain activates the same neural networks as when experiencing your own.
“If this happens chronically, it can significantly affect the state of health, because a person receives a multiple increase in his own stress due to the pain of others,” explains the psychologist. In addition, empathy is a kind of searchlight. It highlights the people who find themselves in the field of our empathy. Empathy makes us care about the “chosen ones” but takes a backseat or completely obscures the long-term consequences of our actions. It “blinds” us, deprives us of empathy for the suffering of others in the present and future.
“This can be observed in African countries. Charitable aid destroys the economy, as goods and products from developed countries compete and ruin local farmers and manufacturers. Helping one, we harm many,” Tatiana Efremova is convinced.
An overly empathic psychologist is at risk. May lose the ability to help or even harm. He runs the risk of “drowning” in emotions after the client, losing his vision of the situation as a whole.
The ability to be a good parent can also suffer from excessive empathy. “Too imbued with the suffering of another, afraid to cause short-term pain now, you will not be able to help him in the long run,” comments the psychologist. For example, you need to prick your finger today to take a blood test. It hurts, but it will help to recognize the disease in time and save the child tomorrow.
Parents often have to force their children to do things that they don’t want to do at the moment but that will benefit them in the future – do homework, eat vegetables, wash their hands, go to bed on time, visit the dentist. If especially sensitive mothers and fathers do not insist on an unpleasant action now, feeling sorry for the baby, they thereby deprive him of experience and prevent him from adapting in adult life.
You need to train to analyze the facts, look at things consciously, not succumb to the first emotional impulse
Empathy is shortsighted. It motivates us to do things that may seem right now, but lead to tragic consequences in the future.
“Imagine that an eight-year-old girl became seriously ill due to a poor-quality vaccine. You are the leader of a vaccine project, you are a sensitive person, you see her suffering, you talk to her and her family. You want this to never happen again. But if you stop the vaccination program out of emotion, ten more children will die. You won’t see their eyes, you won’t hear their crying parents. They are just soulless statistics. This decision is emotionally farther from you than the desire to help one girl who is nearby.
You can learn not to cross the line beyond which empathy becomes dangerous. It is necessary to train to analyze the facts, to look at things consciously, not to succumb to the first emotional impulse. And to know that every phenomenon and concept always has at least two sides.
About expert
Tatyana Efremova – psychologist, psychotherapist, leader of groups, master classes and trainings. Works in approaches: gestalt therapy, transactional analysis, coaching, cognitive behavioral therapy. Advises and leads groups in Russian and English. Member of the Professional Guild of Psychologists and the European Association for Transactional Analysis. Her .