Empathy: understanding the three variations

THE THREE VARIATIONS

Having empathy

That Merriam-Webster definition of empathy is a pretty standard way of explaining the notion of having empathy.

What really sets having empathy apart from the rest is through the process, you can also feel the emotions. Not only do you have the ability to see, recognize and acknowledge when someone is crying, but you might want to cry when they cry. You might want to get angry when they’re angry. You might feel happiness when they’re happy.

This is known as affective empathy, which the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley refers to as “the sensations and feelings we get in response to others’ emotions.” This type of empathy allows you to experience the emotions of others, which generally leads to feelings of compassion for what they are going through.

Having empathy is also the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes so that you can understand what they are going through on a more personal and emotional level. The Greater Good Science Center calls this cognitive empathy, which is “our ability to identify and understand other people’s emotions.”

Cognitive empathy is usually seen as step one in the empathy chain of reactions: once you intellectually understand someone’s situation completely by putting yourself in their shoes, you can then move on to the affective empathy stage of embodying that person’s emotions. Of feeling with them.

However, it is important to note that you should never feel pity for others during this process. If that happens, then you are dealing with sympathy, not empathy.

According to Dr. Brené Brown, “Empathy fuels connection. Sympathy drives disconnection.” This is because sympathy creates an uneven power dynamic that can make people feel even more isolated. On the other hand, empathy makes people feel understood and supported. Empathy brings people together.

Having empathy is also a key attribute in determining a person’s emotional intelligence (also known as emotional quotient or EQ). Believed by some to be more important than a person’s IQ in determining their success, EQ is about perceiving, using, understanding and managing our emotions effectively, as well as the emotions of others.

Having a high EQ helps to improve all aspects of one’s life: personal, home, community, work, etc. For example, at work, an employee with a high EQ is better at communicating with others, building strong client relationships and working effectively within a team.

In fact, research carried out by the Carnegie Institute of Technology showed that 85% of a person’s financial success comes from skills in “human engineering,” in which your EQ plays a huge part. The Harvard Business Review also found that 90% of top performing employees have a higher level of emotional intelligence.

On the flip side, someone who is lacking empathy typically has a low level of emotional intelligence and struggles within society because of this.

While some people are naturally more empathetic than others, the good news is that those who are somewhat lacking in the empathy department can always improve their EQ by making a conscious choice to practice having empathy for others.

This is ultimately what makes having empathy different from being an empath and from having the CliftonStrengths’ Empathy theme in your top five ranking. While you can always work to improve having empathy, the latter two are natural talents that you are born with.

Being an empath

A descriptor that’s generally used in a spiritual sense, empaths are known for being emotional sponges. It is for this reason that being an empath goes a step further than simply having empathy.

Not only can they recognize and sense the emotions in a room, they often take on the energy from those emotions – whether they want to or not. Empaths aren’t putting themselves in someone else’s shoes in order to understand an emotion, they actually receive a direct transfer of that person’s emotions.

Empaths are an extremely rare occurrence. While roughly 20% of the population is composed of highly sensitive individuals, who are often mislabelled as empaths, estimates suggest that only 1-3% of the population are truly empaths.

Possibly due to its rarity, there has not been as much research done on empaths. But with what has been researched, it seems that being an empath is physiological — happening at the core of the body. One explanation is that empaths probably have hyper-responsive mirror neurons, which are the brain cells responsible for feelings such as compassion. While these cells allow everyone to mirror or share in the emotions of others, empaths' mirror neurons are working on overdrive, which might explain why they absorb the emotions of others rather than just having feelings of empathy for them.

Some signs that indicate an empath are feeling drained after spending time around certain people, feeling sudden bursts of unexplained emotions when in crowds, and needing time alone to restore their emotional reserves, among others.

Empaths can also turn low, negative emotional vibrations into high, positive ones. Because of this, empaths are known for being natural healers. Many people actually believe that the purpose behind empaths absorbing emotions is so that they feel prompted to take action to turn those negative vibes into positive ones. They do so not just to selflessly help others, but also to reprieve themselves of the negative vibrations being transferred to them.

Many clients of the Strengths Performance Centre who have Empathy as a dominant Strength, have also described themselves as being an empath. However, just like having empathy is not the same as being an empath, the same idea applies for those with the Empathy theme.

But if you still truly believe yourself to be an empath, it is highly recommended that you read up more on it, as there is lots of important and useful information out there on how to better protect your energy.

Within Gallup’s CliftonStrengths assessment reports, people with the Empathy theme are summarized as being able to “sense the feelings of others by imagining [themselves] in others’ lives or others’ situations.” But the Empathy theme goes even deeper than that.

As intuitive beings, people with Empathy can perceive people’s pain or joy before the emotion is even expressed. They are experts at anticipating needs and can hear the unvoiced questions. They do not necessarily agree with the choices of others, but they can understand. Their edge comes from their instinctive way of understanding — which is something that sets Empathy apart from other themes.

They might sound the same, they might even feel the same to some people, but as you can see, having empathy, being an empath, and CliftonStrengths’ Empathy are all very different.