If you are a highly empathic person, you listen to others with full attention, pay attention to their feelings, and feel their pain more deeply than your own, as if you feel it deep within yourself. Unable to care for others or yourself, psychologists here advise you on the importance of setting limits on your empathy and concern for others.
Why do we empathize with others?
Sympathy It is the ability to share and understand the feelings of others, and there are 3 ways to empathize, namely:
- Emotional Empathy: It is the ability to share the feelings of others, where a person feels fear or pain.
- Cognitive Empathy: This refers to the ability to understand the feelings of others, such as a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst who rationally analyzes the patient’s feelings, but does not necessarily share his feelings.
- Regulated Empathy: i.e. the ability to regulate and regulate a person’s emotions.
When we lack empathy
Empathy helps close relationships Building good and loving relationships between people, whether between friends, spouses or work relationships, forces us to see things from other people’s perspectives; No one person’s experience is the same as another’s and no two people think alike.
Each person brings their own thoughts, experiences, and struggles into their relationships without trying to take the time to understand and empathize with the perspectives, feelings, and thoughts of others; Relationships will not work and the parties to the relationship will feel unloved.
This matter is not limited to personal relationships but extends to wider horizons. Since the world is a dark and lonely place without empathic feelings, empathy can be a source of support and help in major humanitarian disasters.
How does empathy make us press for others?
Although empathy seems to be a human trait, helping and empathizing with others can be mentally exhausting. It can be stressful for a person to continue to help others overcome their challenges, and we know empathy, which is the ability to feel some of the pain of others and empathize with their struggles, and when you empathize for a long time, something called Empathic stressThis is a common feeling for support professionals who help people every day, but it can also happen to ordinary people who are desperately trying to help friends and family.
The term “compassion fatigue” expresses the physical, emotional, and psychological impact of helping others, which, often cumulatively, affects a person’s daily activities and has symptoms that cannot be ignored.
The most prominent of these symptoms are mood swings, pessimism, and a person becoming angry or irritable. In addition to withdrawal from social relationships and relationships and emotional detachment from those around you.
Feeling anxious or depressed is a common reaction to empathy fatigue, which can make a person question their effectiveness as a friend or caregiver and affect long-term memory.
Be compassionate without compromise
Professional caregivers or even sympathetic friends will continue to follow the life-saving mantra on airplanes: “Put on your oxygen mask before helping others.” That means paying attention to good self-care and creating a daily routine based on adequate sleep, healthy eating, physical activity, relaxation and active social interaction.
Here, self-care is not a lack of self-interest or awareness of other people’s problems, as empathy must first be self-compassion before reaching a state of complete exhaustion.
Psychologist Anna Baransky says that psychologists tend to be overly empathetic and focus more on perfecting what they have to offer, and the same goes for empathic friends. Therefore, it is important to respect that every person is a person who devotes his personal time to himself and is disturbed and affected by those around him.
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