The Art of Empathy Read Online Free PDF Page A

discussion we had just a few pages ago. This isan interesting transition, because in some older definitions, empathy was specifically restricted to the capacity to share emotions with others and did not include a compassionate action component (such as responding to the emotions you sense and doing something thoughtful for another). Today, this empathic action component is being redefined as a sign of empathy that is fully realized. This is an especially important distinction in empathy research with infants and toddlers, 4 where children’s age-linked attainment of the capacity to do something helpful about the emotions they sense is treated as a sign that they have arrived at a specific developmental stage. At this point in our understanding of empathy, it’s not enough to merely share an emotion with another; you also have to be able to do something helpful and compassionate in response.
    Other researchers are working to create, validate, or modify tests for empathy; identify whether primates and other animals have empathy (yes, they do) and in what amounts; determine when infants develop empathy and in what forms; and understand how empathy develops (and what impedes or supports its development). There is also a great deal of interest in how empathy works in the brain and whether (or if ) neurological structures called mirror neurons and the hormone oxytocin are central to empathy. Other researchers and philosophers are arguing about whether certain kinds of people can be categorized as either highly empathic or unempathic; while still others are looking at how empathy is related to the very formation of our species as an emotionally expressive and empathically connected band of highly social primates. The quest to understand empathy is an intensive, multinational enterprise.
    The fact that you and I created a definition of empathy in our imagined café discussion a few pages back is useful for our purposes, but I do want you to know that we’re ahead of the curve here. The study of empathy is ongoing, and the academic definition is in flux. My approach comes not just from the academic literature but also from a lifetime of learning how to survive and thrive as a hyperempath and helping others learn how to thrive as well. As we move forward, we’ll rely upon the research, but we’ll focus on the lived experience of what it is to be an empath.
    However, before we enter more deeply into our empathic study of empathy, there are a few problems we need to clear up. Some of these problems come from everyday prejudices, but some actually come from the research itself, and we need to address these problems directly.
    WELCOMING THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN EXILED
    An unfortunate offshoot of all of this intense interest in empathy is that there’s been a facile and frankly unempathic quest to exclude entire categories of humans from the empathic community. As an empath, I challenge these exclusions wholeheartedly, and I absolutely won’t perpetuate them in this book. Certainly, in popular culture, there’s a deeply sexist notion that empathy is a female skill and that males are constitutionally less empathic or less emotive than females are. This terrible idea has created untold suffering for boys and men, who are often not taught much about emotions and are not treated as fully emotive and sensitive beings. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve given talks and had men come up to me afterward and whisper, as if they don’t even have the right to say it, “I think I’m an empath.” What?
    Of course men are empaths!
    Certainly, many males have been excluded from an understanding of emotions and empathy, and sexist ideas about men are absolutely commonplace, but they’re not true. So let’s look at our definition of empathy again, specifically in terms of men and boys:
    Empathy is a social and emotional skill that helps us feel and understand the emotions, circumstances,