“Empathy is a person who is very sensitive to the feelings and emotions of those around him. Empathy will feel how others are feeling on a deep emotional level.” ~ Leah Campbell
When I learned the word “empathy” about ten years ago, it felt like a great relief. I thought to myself, yes I am! Finally, an explanation of why people are so tired of me. The reason I have the ability to read people immediately and is always in trouble is to listen or support someone else’s crisis.
But now I no longer believe that definition.
I am no longer an empath.
Am I healed? Or am I not sympathetic in the first place?
For me, I have found different perceptions that unlock the ability not to feel stuck in Empathy – Prison I found myself in.
I found that I could change my response to how people felt, so I lost control of my life.
When I came up with the idea of empathy, I saw a lot of the problems I faced: attracting people to me who were struggling and in need of my support, like cockroaches into flames. Inability to get out of the stress and emotions of other people’s lives and focus on oneself. My tiredness from spending time with people.
I started following the general advice for empathy, but it started to feel like another cage. I have to orient my life around avoiding “poisonous people” around “emotional vampires”. But I found that even if I hid myself in the white light or avoided some people, it did not prevent me from feeling the feelings of my relatives, children, my husband, or my close friends on a regular basis.
It felt like I was in a permanent reaction form and it was very annoying.
A few years later, I discovered another word that changed my life in an important way: satisfaction.
Comfort is an active survival response when emotions or situations are too much for us. As with any response, fighting, flying, and freezing comfort is a response to feelings of physical or mental insecurity.
I found that I learned at an early age, as many of us do, that if I knew how to expect and support the feelings of the people around me, I would feel most secure.
The reaction of my survival, one of the things that helped me keep in touch as much as possible with the people around me, was to get emotional about them and help them.
When we learn at a young age that a sense of security comes from suppressing our emotions to help others – or at least minimize our emotional needs so that we do not float on a boat, cause confusion, aggravate our parents, or call attention to ourselves – then we spend our adult lives in the same routine.
We feel most secure when our emotions are not involved but belong to others.
We can draw on the sense of belonging, connection, and validation of feelings about others from being a supporter, a listener, a helper. Repairman.
We can also draw on the feeling of ease, security of continuity by not expressing our feelings or needs without actually expressing ourselves.
I know many times in my life I feel proud of how useful I am. I’re a ‘good person’. How sweet and supportive. But in reality it is not a response driven by real desire, it is a response driven by the need for security, ownership, acceptance and love.
For me, solving my favorite quiz was an interesting and difficult experience. It is a weave in my body, a person who presents himself as a happy person, easy, no stress, no acting.
Someone who does not add emotional burden to any group or individual but helps to take on the problems and challenges of others.
Coming out of those responses has been very insightful. I have to learn to accept my feelings, create a sense of security in my nervous system and give myself incredible softness.
I have to admit that other people’s feelings can feel scary, uncomfortable, frightening and even dangerous for me. And it is not natural for me to share what I feel and need because of these life-saving response patterns set in childhood.
But with the right understanding and the right tools, I learned to walk slowly toward the path of righteousness, safety in myself in a world surrounded by the emotions of others but not going through them like I used to.
I also learned how I was Learn to support people– By fixing things smoothly, helping endless listening comprehension – In fact, it is not the kind of emotional support that helps make a difference in it.
True emotional support occurs only when we are not in the reaction of our survival and it never comes down to the emotional value of others.
My support should not be a waste of my energy, my time or my sense of security.
For me, empathy felt like a lifelong sentence that I could not escape. But now I know that it is a learned response that cannot be learned. When we have the awareness and the tools to gently support, activate the nervous system, which occurs when we are aware of the feelings of others.
Here are some tips to help.
Awareness
Building awareness is the most powerful first step for me. We can not change what we do not notice.
We can start by noticing: How does it feel to be around people or some people when they are feeling? What happened to my body? What emotions are active in me when I am listening to or seeing the emotional activity of others?
It is learning to divert our attention from others and to ourselves. What happened to us?
Do I feel urgent or doomed or do I feel trapped? Do I want to jump in and help fix and support right away? Does it feel like I have to come up with some ideas to help someone through this? Do I sleep far at night thinking about other people’s mental problems?
If we feel this urgency that we must support doing something, it is a good sign that our survival response is open. And our brains are sending signals to the body that there is a threat, unless there is a threat to life, that is just one example that we need to engage with.
So when we feel this urgency, the next step is to bring a sense of security to our body so that we can move away from this need to help / repair / support in response to our survival.
Create a sense of security in the body
One of the ways I give my nervous system a safety signal is to do orientation exercises when I feel overwhelmed or overwhelmed.
Here’s how you can do this orientation exercise.
Start gently and slowly, look around and scan the entire room. Let your gaze fade. You can rotate your neck gently. Capture all your surroundings.
If you want to stop something that catches your attention, not a lot of things, but a collection of interesting colors and shapes.
Look above you slowly and below you. Then behind you. If you have a window, look outside and go to the horizontal line if you have one.
The horizontal line is a relief for our nervous system and. Survival reaction.
Knowing what is around you that there is no threat in the sky brings a sense of security to our body.
Do this for a minute or two and then see how that feeling is in your body.
Did you notice anything happened? Are there any changes in breathing or mood?
Leave for ten seconds or longer to allow any changes to be soaked by your nervous system and then you can continue with your day.
This is a great exercise that you can use a few times a day. Simply stop and scan allows the nervous system to orient our environment and signal security.
Creating a pause
My last tip is to create a pause. When we are in this world busy and asked for things, it can be hard to remember all the things we have to do.
When people say:
Oh, can you take care of my five children and my eleven animals a week?
Can you be late for work despite your partner’s birthday?
I know you are working, but can I come and talk? I feel very stressed.
Once we are accustomed to satisfaction, it is easy for the nervous system to read these requests as an urgent matter that needs our attention, and the word “yes” seems to come out of our mouths before we know it.
Therefore, I encourage my clients to focus on construction in suspension.
When we learn to pause, we have the opportunity to breathe, pay attention to ourselves, notice, give ourselves exercise, such as orientation.
We can notice, do I feel like saying yes?
If we feel it is an urgent need, it is a clear sign that we are in our survival response.
I recommend having some expression on hand that we can say when people ask us a story or when we feel a desire to jump in and support / repair / save by the value of our abilities, time, needs or emotions.
Thank you for thinking of me. I will think and come back to you when I know.
Gosh Stress sounds hard. Let me think of what I need to do today and get back to you.
By pausing, we create new options for ourselves. If nothing is urgent (meaning no one needs to be taken to the hospital) then we can sit with ourselves for a few minutes and give ourselves time to see how we feel.
We can ask ourselves:
Do I really want to do this? Or need?
How will it affect me?
Do I have the emotional capacity for this?
By pausing and diverting our attention internally, we begin the process of disconnecting with other people and their responses and turning to our own feelings and needs.
It is the more connected and caring relationship with ourselves that we want most when we are the ones who like it the most.
About Diana Bird
Diana Bird is a trainer and author of Neuro-Emotional, which helps people overcome excesses, panic and fear by stepping into serenity and confidence. Sign up for her free Emotional Rehearsal Workshop And get powerful tools, free training and ongoing support to change your mental well-being. Take the first step towards a lasting emotional change. Diana lives in southern Spain with her two children and her husband as a photographer.
