Compassion, empathy, inclusion. How to take the place of another?

Each of us is, to one degree or another, prone to empathy towards others. It is not surprising that we seek to provide some relief to another person's pain if we see that he or she is truly suffering emotionally as a result of some devastating event. However, there is a significant difference between empathy for the problems of others and empathy for those problems. Empathizing, we understand a person’s problems, strive to help and try to do everything possible in our power. In addition, empathy presupposes the ability to feel the inner state of another person, figuratively speaking, to put oneself in his place and see the problem through his eyes. Therefore, in order to really help someone, sympathy alone is not enough, you also need to empathize with his problems with him. However, how to do it correctly? How to express your desire to help without hurting a person’s feelings? What exactly should we say? Should we just say “I'm so sorry…” or “I feel for you” and leave the person to their feelings, or should we do more? Sympathy and empathy are not synonymous, although people often use them interchangeably. When you empathize with someone, you feel what situation they are in. You understand this. This is a mental process that requires certain emotions. Not surprisingly, this is a skill that is not innate, but is acquired with age and maturity. And empathy does not require any knowledge or emotional sense of connection and largely depends on the brightness of mental perception. That's why even a dog or cat can sense when you're sad and try to cuddle you in every possible way to distract you from sad thoughts. Even animals are capable of empathy, but only humans can empathize. Even movie characters can evoke our sympathy. You may feel empathy for someone whose life experience is completely foreign to you. And you can only empathize with a person if in your life you have already encountered something similar to the situation because of which he suffers. American psychologist T. Singer argues that sympathy and empathy should be considered as separate processes, in particular because each of them depends on different neurons and separate parts of the brain. Expressions of empathy are common even in infants. Scientists have found that the “contagious” crying of newborn babies in maternity hospitals is explained by this emotion. When one baby cries from fear, hunger or pain, others begin to echo him. Young children, whose mental abilities have not yet fully developed, are already capable of showing empathy. Thus, it can be argued that the ability to feel empathy for others is inherent in our very nature. But the ability to empathize appears in a person after gaining life experience and various life situations. As one wonderful psychologist said, empathy is the ability to feel someone else’s pain. Therefore, develop these abilities in yourself, help others when they are going through difficult times, because this is the quality that makes us human.

In the modern world, few people think about what empathy is. The rhythm of life, stress, unstable economic situation and other troubles in life force a person to think about himself and his well-being. Such a situation can lead to the disintegration of society and the destruction of traditional foundations, so we must not forget about such human qualities.

Compassion - what is it?

Sympathy is one of the most important, expressing feelings about a situation or situation. Why is sympathy needed? It allows an individual to understand other people’s emotions and remain human. This condition can be based on the following principles:

• attachments;
• understanding;
• respect.

Often such emotions express empathy for another person. They can be expressed in different ways:

• necessary or gentle words;
• encouraging actions;
• physical or material assistance.

The ability to sympathize is good, it is important to do it on time and not to be intrusive, since sometimes heated situations arise in which this “gesture” will be unnecessary and there is a high probability that sympathy will cause psychological damage to the individual. Therefore, it is so important to express the emotional state in question sincerely and at the appropriate moment.

Character traits

Empathic abilities manifest themselves as sincere attention to another person. An empathetic person is interested in the emotional state, problems, and worries of the interlocutor.

• The ability to empathize depends largely on the character, level of intelligence and emotional energy of the individual.
• The person believes that she has this gift, but she thinks and perceives the world a little differently. If she pays attention only to herself, then there is no way to penetrate very deeply into the thoughts and feelings of other people.
• If the intellect is not sufficiently developed, then the individual will draw conclusions that are incorrectly formed and will not fully articulate them.
• Abilities can be poorly dissipated if an empathic person has emotional dryness.

It is worth noting that generally those who have a sense of empathy are considered people with a high level of spiritual and intellectual development.

The concept of empathy is manifested in the following states:

• understanding people’s feelings and states on an intuitive level;
• experiencing sensations similar to those felt by the interlocutor;
• the ability to put on the image of others;
• the skill of taking on an outside point of view without barriers;
• analysis of the situation from another individual.

In addition to the fact that empathic people live with the experiences of their loved ones and acquaintances, they can show a high level of empathy towards the characters of films and literary works. Each skill can be expressed differently: for some, to a greater extent, and for others, to a lesser extent. Important aspects of this ability depend on what type of empathy a person relates to more.

Is empathy good or bad?

Many people ask the question: Do people need empathy? There can be two answers to this question, and each of them has its own explanation:

1. Empathy is necessary because it strengthens social bonds in society, allows people to be human and express their emotions. By sympathizing, we show that we care about the person.
2. If a person is upset, then sympathy can further undermine his state of mind, increase the manifestation of negative emotions and aggravate the situation. In this case, sympathy will be unnecessary.

From the responses considered, we can conclude that sympathy is necessary at certain moments, depending on the situation and the emotional state of the person to whom it is directed. It is important not to overdo it and to know when the manifestation of such an emotional state will be appropriate in order to truly help the person, and not, on the contrary, aggravate the situation.

Do we need empathy and compassion in life?

A very complex, slightly philosophical question - do people need empathy and compassion? Most people would likely say that it is necessary. Such qualities are a manifestation of caring, caring attitude. It is important to convey to children about them during their upbringing and personality formation. Constantly receiving a portion of the emotions of compassion and empathy, a person can demand them more and more often - he will get used to it or will wait for a permanent solution to his problems. He can manipulate his condition to achieve goals. Therefore, it is not for nothing that the expression “everything is good in moderation” exists.

How to learn to sympathize?

The answer to the question of how to express sympathy will depend on the specific situation. It is important to be able to sympathize correctly and in a timely manner. A person needs to show that they understood him, shared his experiences, but at the same time gave him strength to get out of the current situation. Often required:

For a more complete and profound understanding of the meaning of this term, you can refer to some books, both for adults and for children. For example:

1. Author Ruth Minshull's book , How to Choose Your People,
   talks about what you can look for when meeting people and how to choose those whom you can later call “yours.” The book has a separate chapter dedicated to the concept of empathy.
2. Alex Cabrera “Fairies Talk About Compassion”
   is an excellent book that makes it possible to convey to a child the meaning of this concept and teach him to show empathy at the right moments.

Books about empathy and compassion allow people to become more open and kind, and teach children to be caring in certain situations. By periodically reminding yourself of what empathy is, and that sometimes you cannot do without it, you can make the world a better place. The manifestation of such a feeling, along with compassion and mutual assistance, leads to the unity of society, the establishment of social relations within it, the maintenance of traditions and the connection of generations. This is important for the development of a full-fledged, mature, stable society.

Compassion, or empathy, is the ability to feel the same things as other people. This skill is important in forming new relationships and maintaining existing ones. Some people have this skill naturally, while others find it more difficult to feel what people close to them feel. If you find that you are not good at putting yourself in another person's shoes, there are things you can work on to develop empathy. This article discusses the meaning of empathy and how you can develop this skill.

Level of empathic tendencies

Abilities are divided into empathy levels, of which there are 4.

• The level of empathy is increased. Expressed by the ability to understand the problems of others.
• The individual no longer separates problems into his own and those of others, so his personal life suffers greatly. Such individuals feel an unjustified sense of guilt and often cry due to vulnerability and impressionability. Many psychologists consider this level of empathy to be affective. People who know how to control their feelings and show them only when necessary use this gift in their professional activities. They become good specialists in the field of psychology and other areas related to communication.

• The level is high - they understand the feelings and emotions of others, and do not harm themselves. These individuals treat their friends and relatives with great interest and are careful. They get along well with strangers and are passionate about social life. It happens that a person with a high empathy characteristic wants to receive approval and support from strangers, and if he does not receive this, he loses his temper.
• The level of empathy is normal. Almost every person has this degree.
• It manifests itself with sympathy and indifference towards others. Understanding and support are only for close people.
• Low level. Such individuals are called anti-empaths. They do not want to pay attention to other people's problems, and also do not want to accept a position that is not their own. An individual with a low level of empathy is focused only on his own difficulties and problems, and feels discomfort in communicating with strangers. Because of this, he has few or no friends.

Steps

Part 1

Discover your empathy

Listen to your feelings.

To be able to feel the same as someone else, you need to understand those feelings. Are you fully aware of your emotions? Do you understand when you are happy, sad, scared? Do you allow these feelings to come out? Do you express them? If you tend to suppress feelings and don't allow them to be a part of you, try to correct this.

• Very often people try to suppress negative emotions. For example, it is much more pleasant to distract yourself with a movie or go to a bar than to sit and think about what happened. But if you constantly push negative emotions away from yourself, over time you will forget how to perceive them at all. If you can't express sadness yourself, how can you empathize with someone who is sad?
• Try to let your feelings out every day. Instead of trying to drown out some unpleasant emotions as quickly as possible, allow yourself to feel them. Be angry or afraid - whatever emotions come to you, don't be afraid to face them. Cry, write down your thoughts, or talk to friends about how you feel.

• Listen carefully.

  Pay attention to changes in the speaker's intonation - even the slightest fluctuations will tell you how the person is feeling. Facial expressions are no less important: a person’s lips may tremble or their eyes will shine, they may lower their eyes all the time or appear indifferent. Try to put yourself in this person's shoes.

  Imagine that your interlocutor is you.

  Have you ever read a book that was so exciting that you forgot that you are you? For a while, you became the hero of the book, and you knew exactly what it was like to see your father for the first time in 10 years or to lose a loved one. Empathy is similar to these feelings. If you listen carefully to someone and really try to understand them, at some point you will begin to feel that person's emotions. This will give you an idea of ​​what is bothering him.

  Don't be afraid to feel discomfort.

  Empathy can hurt. Feeling someone else's pain is unpleasant, and it takes a lot of effort for a person to learn to become close to another person in this way. This is probably why empathy is becoming less and less common: it is much easier to reduce conversations to meaningless trifles and prevent intrusion into your personal world. If you want to empathize with people, you can't always run away from other people's emotions. Remember that other people's feelings can affect you, so you may feel completely different after talking to someone, but this will help you understand them better and build a closer relationship with them.

  Show the person that you care.

  Ask questions to prove that you are listening. Use gestures and facial expressions: look into the eyes, lean slightly towards the speaker, do not fiddle with the hem of your clothing or jerk your leg. Nod or smile at appropriate times. All of these are ways you can show empathy. Seeing these signs, the person who decided to tell you everything will feel that you can be trusted. If from the outside it seems that you are busy with your own thoughts, if you look away or otherwise demonstrate a lack of interest in what they are telling you, the person will most likely become silent and will not share anything with you anymore.

• Another way to show empathy is to talk about how you feel. Explaining to the person that you are just as vulnerable as they are can help you build trust in each other. Stop trying to hide your emotions from others and participate in the conversation.

Part 3

The Power of Empathy

Think of empathy as the ability to feel what another person feels.

Empathy is the ability to feel.
It requires immersion into the human world and his emotions. It’s easy to confuse empathy and sympathy (sympathy is when you feel sorry for a person because of all his troubles and try to help somehow), but empathy is a deeper feeling: you don’t worry about
the person, you empathize
with
him.

• For example, your sister is in tears and tells you that her boyfriend just left her. You see tears running down her cheeks, listen to her story, and after a while you realize that there is a lump in your throat. You not only feel sorry for your sister, you empathize with her grief. This is called empathy.
• Empathy can also be seen as understanding, as the ability to project someone else's experience onto oneself. Trying to put yourself in another person's shoes is empathy.
• Empathy involves the ability to absorb all emotions, both negative and positive. Empathy makes a person receptive to all the feelings of another person, making it clear what anyone in his place would feel.

Compassion, empathy, inclusion. How to take the place of another?

On the eve of summer, I want to use one funny example to tell you how you can understand another and make sympathy appropriate. There are many different definitions of sympathy, empathy, empathy, inclusion, some overlap and I’m already confused about them, so I’ll give examples.

When we talk with another person, we understand him as best we can, and experience different emotions - we sympathize, empathize. Psychotherapists have their own methods of listening - empathy, inclusion, presence. In both cases there is one thing in common - we allow ourselves to be influenced by the other: emotionally, intellectually - and respond in one way or another. Sometimes the emotions of another person are so strong that when we look at bodily manifestations or hear emotional sounds, we react to them instantly and uncontrollably. Once on the platform at the Belorussky station, I saw my grandmother get off the train, but her little grandson didn’t make it in time, the driver closed the doors. I heard a groan - the boy’s face was distorted with despair. Instantly I felt pain in my chest. This is empathy . The ability is explained by the work of mirror neurons. Developed differently for everyone.

Sometimes a person’s emotions are not so strongly expressed, but we hear his story and also feel something - we sympathize . From childhood we remember the words: “And you put yourself in his place!” or “Would you like to be caught like a bug and not allowed to see your mother?!” So our closest relatives tried to move us from our childish egocentric position. To teach ourselves to mentally move ourselves into another person’s situation and feel something, so that we can be kinder and socialize.

Today I propose to take one more step (who hasn’t already) and learn what psychotherapists can do ( inclusion ). Before they sympathize, they try to understand the other. I'll explain why this is necessary with an example. When one of my clients was little, his mother died. At crowded funerals, friends of his parents and distant relatives came up to him and buried them in their generous breasts, sobbing, saying: “poor child, how hard it is to lose a mother!” The child thought at that moment the following: “My mother is no more, I can’t believe it, who are all these people, because MY mother died, why am I not crying, but they are crying as if it was their mother who died, probably me I don’t understand something, I’m crazy, I’m a stranger here.” As a result, the effect of sympathy was exactly the opposite, because women did not take into account the fact that people are different, and the same event has different meanings and is experienced differently.

To try to understand another, you need to mentally delay the transformation, not put on his shoes, stay in your own and ask: “How are you?” And if possible, ask about how the person sees the situation, what it means to him, try to model his image of the world.

In the textbook by J. Godefroy “What is Psychology” there is a wonderful comic example. We trained on beetles, let's train on ticks. Read the text.

A tick is an arachnid, slightly larger than a pinhead, that parasitizes dogs and other mammals. It digs into the skin and sucks blood. Such a description does not create a pleasant image for us. However, if we mentally put ourselves in the place of a tick, then the completely extraordinary world of this blind and deaf creature, which has great olfactory and tactile sensitivity, will open up to us. The life of this amazing creature was discovered for us by Jakob von Uexkull (Uexkull, 1956). Let's take a look at what it's like for a female tick to exist from the moment she is impregnated by a male.

She climbs the branches of the bush, finding her way thanks to the sensitivity of her skin to light, and waits until the “prey” appears, which she identifies by the smell emanating from the sebaceous glands of mammals. When the female finds that the source of this smell is within her reach, she falls. She has a very developed sense of temperature, and if she lands on something warm, she wastes no time in using her sense of touch to look for an area without fur. There she pushes her head into the tissue to suck the blood, and after drinking, she falls to the ground, lays eggs and dies. If, during the first jump from a bush, she misses and lands on something cold, she has no choice but to climb onto the branch again and wait (if necessary, up to 18 years) in conditions of complete starvation. This is the real life of a tick...

Exercise 1

So, to imagine the world of a tick, close your eyes, plug your ears, leave your nose and the sensations on your skin. Next, mentally, now you are fertilized, you need blood, find the branches of the bush by touch, determine whether you are climbing down or up by whether there is a sensation on the skin that it is becoming lighter. Climb in, sit, don’t think anything, turn on your nose and wait. Does it smell? Guess the moment and fall down into the darkness.

Warm? Feel good. Then feel with your hands until you feel something smooth. Did you feel it? Stick your head in. There's warm blood there. Nice. The goal has been achieved. Are you drunk? Stick your head out, fall to the ground. Off

Cold? Look for a branch, feel the light, crawl up, sit on a branch, smell. They say you also have a shaking reflex - let go of your paws and fall.

Come back to yourself, remember who you are. If the exercise works, the tick may appear a little cuter than before. There is a solemn feeling of touching someone else's inner world. And here is an example of taking the place of the tick and empathy.

Exercise 2

Poor woman! She gave the man pleasure, and now the pregnant woman must climb the branch. Where is this dad now? He doesn’t see anything, he climbs by touch, probably with difficulty. She sits hungry, alone, waiting, the rains pour on her, the sun bakes her. And you also have to drink blood, buh. It eats once in its life, and even dies immediately in the prime of life. It would be better if no one came for a longer time, I would live longer. But respect for the willpower - a selfless mother. Waiting so long to feed the children. It would probably be a shame to miss, I would be upset, and I would also think about whether to climb up another time, or whether it would all be in vain. And she climbs and waits - a real hero!