Balancing empathy for others with empathy for yourself When I talk about empathy, I tend to use the words healthy and intentional a great deal of the time. If your empathy is unintentional, and you’re not sure how it works, it can be very easy to enmesh yourself with other people’s emotions and needs — to the extent that you ignore your own. You can lose … Read More
Perceptive Engagement! Perceptive Engagement can be considered the pinnacle of your empathic skills, because it relies upon your first five aspects of empathy and helps you connect with others in truly supportive and workable ways. So far, we’ve looked at the first five of your Six Essential Aspects of Empathy. Today, we’ll look at the culminating aspect, which occurs when all of the aspects work together … Read More
Concern for Others Concern for Others is about caring enough — or having the time and energy you need to care enough — to skillfully empathize with others. So far, we’ve looked at the first four aspects of your Six Essential Aspects of Empathy. Today, we’ll look at Concern for Others, which is your capacity to care enough to show true empathy and compassion for others. … Read More
Learning to see and feel from the perspective of others Your Perspective Taking ability helps you imaginatively see and feel things from the perspectives of others. This skill is crucial to your ability to empathize skillfully; good Perspective Taking can help you understand what others want and need. Let’s revisit the six aspects so that we can understand where Perspective Taking fits into the larger picture: … Read More
Learning to work with your emotions Your Emotion Regulation skills help you feel, understand, and work with your own emotions. These abilities are crucial to your capacity to empathize skillfully; good Emotion Regulation skills can make your experience of empathy much more comfortable! Let’s revisit the six aspects so that we can understand where Emotion Regulation fits into the larger picture: Emotion Contagion: Before empathy can … Read More
Hello Ausomeness! We’ve come to the end of Autism Acceptance Month, and now we’re embarking upon Autism Acceptance Year, Decade, Century, and Epoch! Heck, let’s just call it Autism Acceptance Eon! I’m being silly, but I’m also being very serious. Now that we’ve become somewhat clearer about what autism is and how many different ways it manifests, we’ve realized that there are a lot of autistic … Read More
Today is International Autism Awareness Day, but I have to say, if you’re not aware of autism yet, friend, where have you been? My friends in the autism community find this day pretty excruciating, because the message about autism is so bleak and panicky — on this day, people mistake a disorder for a disease and a community of real, live human beings for an epidemic. … Read More
How good are your Emotion-Recognition skills? Last week, we looked at a vital part of the first aspect of empathy (Emotion Contagion), which is your capacity to feel your way into the emotions of others. And with the support of the concept of Einfühlung, we also opened up our idea of empathy to include your capacity to feel into and alongside nonhuman actors like animals and … Read More
Previously, we looked at the first of my six aspects of empathy, Emotion Contagion. We also talked about the importance of art for people whose Emotion Contagion skills are very strong (hyper-empathic people), and also for people whose skills are currently less developed. The good news is that the six essential aspects of empathy are changeable, malleable, and manageable throughout your life span; therefore, you can make … Read More
Hello and Happy New Year! In 2012, I wrote The Art of Empathy, and I posted about my work, about the empathy research being done in over half-a-dozen different academic disciplines, and about ways that you can work with each of the six essential aspects of empathy that I defined and organized in this book. To start us off, let’s look at the first aspect of … Read More