Empathy A Psychic Phenomena
Empathy often comes up in most discussions of psychic phenomena, with many claims made about it’s usefulness and especially it’s ability to overwhelm people. In understanding empathy, what seems to be overlooked is that it is a hard-wired biological process, that almost everyone has. That’s not to say an “extended”, psychic, version of empathy doesn’t exist, but rather that if you want to understand and control the psychic side of empathy, it is crucial to understand the biological basics.
Biological & Social Empathy
First however, to define empathy: “An involuntary, vicarious response to emotional cues from another person or from his/her situation.” While this serves as an excellent definition of the biological side of empathy, it doesn’t serve to explain the issue completely.
There are a number of conditions that need to be met to define an emotional experience as being empathy. The first is rather obvious, and that is some degree of emotional arousal is necessary on behalf of the individual. However, emotional arousal doesn’t necessarily indicate empathy. For example, seeing a person suffering can generate feelings of anger at their oppressor. While it’s an emotional response to their situation, it is not empathy. There has to be some degree of match between the emotions experienced by the two people.
However, it’s still not enough to experience the same emotion as the other person to claim it as empathy. While I may feel pain when seeing another suffering, it may be due to the actual act of watching them suffer, rather than feeling pain for suffering the same reasons they do. This is where the concept of “vicarious” comes in – an emotional response is empathic if the observer responds as if they were experiencing the same things as the model.
So, now we have a somewhat clearer understanding of what empathy is and isn’t, we can begin to look at some of the further implications of empathy.
The first thing to realise is that empathy is an extremely basic phenomena. It can be seen as underlying a vast number of social processes, including but not limited to sympathy, compassion, embarrassment, shame and guilt. They all spring from empathy, that is, the ability to relate to someone else. These are fundamental emotions that are felt by everyone, and all work on the principal of empathy.
It would be rare to find someone without any forms of empathy and their related emotions. I’d hazard the guess that only true psychopaths, people that treat others are simply tools rather than individual beings, would be devoid of any empathy whatsoever. For the rest of us, empathy happens, we feel for people, and it motivates us to help them.
However, it happens that it becomes “all too much”. There is a lot of negativity in the world, and if we feel morally obliged, for whatever reason, to take on a part of the suffering, it becomes a tremendous burden. There are essentially two methods of dealing with it.
The first comes from looking at psychopaths – people with no empathic responses. By taking a more intellectual view of other people, empathic reactions can be reduced. Essentially, the victim is dehumanised. By subjecting the victim to intellectual scrutiny (eg, “they’ve got two hands, they could of done something about it”), the other person’s emotions are rationalised away. By implication (and definition), the vicarious empathic response is also reduced. Similarly, fragmenting the victim or taking a detached view can also be used to cope with empathic response.
While these methods may work, there also appears a degree of callousness within them, that may not be tolerable to everyone. And so the second method of dealing with empathy is suggested. It stems from the idea that empathy is a basic emotion, and other interpersonal emotions (sympathy, guilt, etc.) stem from it.
The basic idea is that excessive empathic responses are misdirected empathy. If a person feels too much for others, it isn’t because they generally “feel too much”, but rather, they feel in an inappropriate way. Experiencing large amounts of sympathy or pity for other people may seem rather altruistic and enlightened, but it’s totally useless if it hurts the person. What I propose is a channelling of empathy away from sympathy, pity and the ilk, and rather into emotions such as compassion. In such cases, it recognises and acknowledges the emotions felt by others, but also realises that emotions are sometimes necessary, but altogether impermanent.
Psychic Empathy
After the discussion on empathy as a social phenomena, the question arises, “so what is empathy from a psychic sense?”. Like most psychic abilities, it’s an extension of the original processes through non-ordinary means. Or in other words – communication of emotions beyond the usual means.
The prototypical example of empathy is when one person feels a strong emotion, and another person at another location, feels the same emotion for no apparent reason. It most often occurs between people that are extremely close together, such as twins, siblings, or spouses.
The other example of psychic empathy would be the projection of emotions into others. So, any item, location or object that causes emotions to arise in others, for no discernable psychological reason, would be considered psychically empathic.
Such cases are typically less reported as being problematic for individuals, so a discussion about methods of control don’t seem to be pertinent. Safe to say however, that there are few situations where a sufficient grounding and shielding would be incapable of doing the job.
Conclusion
The claim “I’ve been empathic all my life!” seems to be often repeated in discussions of psychic abilities, however there appears to be little understanding of what exactly differentiates psychic empathy from social empathy. Since emotions play such a vast role in people’s lives, it would be almost an aberration to not be empathic all your life. While it may seem like hair-splitting to draw distinctions between the two types of empathy, if one wishes to understand and use empathic abilities, it is worthwhile knowing the difference between what can be controlled using simple cognitive manipulation, and what needs more drastic psychic involvement.
author(s) emthren
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