What the Frak is an Empath? Part 1

Notes and Considerations

This video is part of an ongoing series.

Empathy is defined by The Oxford Dictionary as, “The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” (One might ask another what?)

There is more than one definition of empathy. They tend to reflect some version of the Oxford definition with some variation.

In graduate school, the wording used in a counseling class I attended was much like the following: “The capacity to step into another person’s psychological experience with the ability to step back into one’s own psychology.”

The “step back” aspect of empathy is very important for one’s psychological health.

This is to say that empathy is a skill. To some people empathy comes naturally and can happen naturally. Those folks can learn to get better at it and to control it. Other people have difficulty learning empathy, but it can be learned.

An empath is someone who is really good at empathy.  *Gasp*

Empathy is not a magical or supernatural force that can be passed down through generations like witchcraft is in B movies.

One could have a genetic propensity for empathy, but there is nothing mysterious about it, and it is a useful tool for therapists, psychologists, and everybody else.

Cognitive empathy is the ability to intellectually understand another person’s perspective including that person’s emotional experiences.

Emotional empathy is the ability to feel the emotions that another person is experiencing or communicating. This ability could be likened to the the concept of resonance.

We could say that someone who is doing both versions of empathy listed above as performing dual empathy.

Motor Empathy is identified as the automatic response of mirroring another person’s body language or speech. Example: Yawn Contagion.

Interestingly, psychopaths show deficits in motor empathy. The implications of this motor empathy deficit are not yet fully understood.

We lay this groundwork in order to understand how empathy can be developed, can be used to improve our lives and the lives of others, and how we can understand it well enough to defend against empathy being weaponized.

We can also struggle to understand dark empathy. These concepts will be explored in future videos in the series.