What is empathy? It is an emotional process that builds connection between persons. It is a state of perceiving and relating to another person's feelings and needs without the need to blame, give advice or fix the situation. Empathy also means "reading" another person's inner state and interpreting it into understandable conversation which supports mutual trust.
Empathy is an intuitive act wherein one gives complete attention to someone else’s experience in order to make the other fully comprehend the essence of the said experience. To be empathetic is make another person feel secure to open up and share his experience. To be empathetic makes the person feel not entirely alone in his predicament or a stranger in the environment he revolves in.
Types of Empathy
There are several types of empathy:
- Aesthetic empathy makes sense of a text or an art.
- Relational empathy is a cognitive, affective and sympathetic encounter with external experience.
- Ethical empathy means being able to determine the consequences of a behavior whether good or bad. Ethical empathy is the capacity to know the effect of certain actions on ourselves and others. Empathy provides the necessary mental and emotional climate that will guide our behavior to be able to support moral and self-enhancing decisions without necessarily sacrificing our personal well-being.
- Spiritual empathy enables us to relate to God or another person's idea of a higher being.
All types of empathy require affective as well as cognitive processes. One important aspect in describing empathy is to distinguish feeling from thinking, but making them work together.
How to be Empathetic
All types of empathy require one to face something foreign. This is evident in relations or relational empathy. The basic challenge in trying to be relationally empathetic is to perceive foreign subjects ( such as other people) and their experiences (as well as ways they experience us).
Foreign experiences refer to experiences that are not yours, that do not happen to you. Relational empathy allows one to relate to foreign experiences even if they are not your own. Empathy works by projecting one’s self into someone else’s experience. Another is by receiving another person’s experience but pointing out that full comprehension of the other is quite difficult.
Empathy must first accept the other before one can penetrate the other person’s emotions. Receptivity is more desirable than projection. Projecting an empathetic image is not enough. One should first make the person feel that you are receptive to his opinions.
An empathetic person is able to enter into or come alongside experience that is foreign to him or her, yet is capable to fully describe the experience in a way that the other person acknowledges as accurate. The empathetic person is engrossed with the other and gives complete attention to the shared experience. Giving complete and sustained attention to the other person is a way of conveying their significance and credibility.
Empathy therefore refers to acts wherein foreign experience is fully grasped. An empathetic person can sense not only what is presented but also what is behind what is presented or the things that the speaker may not verbally say.
Gwendolyn Cuizon - Gwendolyn Cuizon is a seasoned freelance writer and a published book author. She holds a degree in BSC-Accounting. Her penchant to acquire ...
