HOW TO IMPROVE EMPATHIC ABILITIES IS A BARGAIN THAT YOU SECURE TO YOURSELF WHEN YOU LISTEN WITH YOUR WHOLE BODY TO FIND OUT WHAT THE OTHER PERSON REALLY NEEDS.
Learning how to improve empathic abilities is something that entails knowing how others feel and balancing one’s needs with those of others, to form enduring mutually respectful relationships.This aptitude is facilitated by regularly staying attuned to one’s feelings.
Hence, how to improve empathic abilities is not only staying attuned to the feelings of others while maintaining a full awareness of your own separate emotional experience, but it also includes feeling another person’s pain without giving yourself away or having to control the situation in any way.
Empathy is often sharp when one is comfortable and fearless and dull when one is frightened.
Active awareness of your emotions helps you to build up your physical, emotional and mental resources, necessary for creating empathy.
Thus, in the heat of an argument, the right timing to stand your ground or give some concessions is known to you. This empathic aptitude, achieving a consistent balance between your needs and those of others, is all because of your acute awareness of how you and the other party feel about the issue in contention.
Empathy does not call for treating pain and suffering as inconsequential matters or immersing yourself in others’ pain to the extent of blurring the line between your identity and those of others.
Children that are shown empathy are more likely to treat others with empathy.
To practice empathy is to listen to another without having any conversation going on in the head and to rely on your body to communicate your feelings and that of the other party to you. The upside of being actively aware is that any expression of emotion in another triggers a physical sensation almost as quickly as one feels his or her own emotions in the body. To be empathic is not to be a mind reader but to feel something palpable instead of relating with others with the cold clinical mind. Being empathic is helpful in considering the other person’s needs, important for deepening relationships.
In an empathic state, you feel, to a certain degree, the feelings of others and your own strong, unfettered, confident, energetic emotions and intentions. This distinction props the empathic one not to confuse his or her feelings with that of the interactant, not to try to make changes in the other person for the sake of his or her comfort but to remain open to the interactant’s needs, to hold on to his or her emotional wellbeing and do what is truly helpful for the interactant.
Venting statements like “you poor thing,” “I wonder if that could happen to me,” “here’s what you should do,” strongly hampers an empathic state. Such statements are disconfirming of the other party because they deny the other the right to feel his or her own unique feelings. The relationship also suffers as a genuine connection is obstructed.
How to improve empathic abilities is a bargain that you secure to yourself when you listen with your whole body to find out what the other person really needs, when you maintain outward and inward silence while waiting for a physical response and when you do not embark on any rescue mission by offering unsolicited advice, trying to convince the other that the situation is not all that bad, persuading the person not to feel his or her feelings, changing the subject or proposing a distraction.
Hence, to be empathic is to feel a shiver down your spine when someone blanches in fear and still maintain an awareness of your own steady pulse and firm, grounded stance, to laugh along with a boisterous child without feeling an iota of disrespect for the memory of a loved one for whom you are grieving for, and to understand the full import of a loved one’s anger towards you while still upholding the strength of your own convictions highlighted by your sense of positive energy, mental clarity and regard for others.
Sympathy, on the other hand, dissolves or blurs the boundary between ourselves and others, making it difficult for us to distinguish between our own feelings and those of others. The sympathy of this kind saps our energy, disorients our minds and offers no help.
