empathy

A Canadian survey published this week found that feelings of empathy have eroded over the course of the pandemic, with only 13% feeling empathetic, down from 23% since before the onset of the pandemic. “The deterioration of social relationships … [comes] at a time when we need each other more than ever,” writes the lead researcher. “Empathy is essential not only for building positive and healthy relationships, but also for reducing divisions between people and in our communities.” [1]

I first encountered the concept of empathy while studying counselling psychology in the early 70’s. At that time the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers (1902-1987) hypothesized that “an empathic way of being with another person means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it. It involves being sensitive, moment by moment, to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person, to the fear or rage or tenderness or confusion or whatever that he or she is experiencing. It means temporarily living in the other’s life, moving about in it delicately without making judgments …” [2]

More recently, social neuroscientists have made progress in revealing just how we’re able to feel what another is feeling. The evidence shows that such sharing of emotions is associated with activation in the brain’s nervous system. Functional neuroimaging studies reveal that when we perceive others in pain or distressful situations, we use the same neural mechanisms as when we’re in painful situations ourselves. [3] 

I can think of an example of how that works. Way back, when first I volunteered and, later, when I stepped in for an ailing chaplain, I found myself, time and again, weeping while attending grieving family members. Those were real tears from deep inside! With the help of my mentor I soon learned to distinguish tears of empathy for others from tears sparked by unresolved grief of my own.

I bow in gratitude to all who taught me..

[image] Statues of Jizo Bodhisattva in Kyoto ©2019 Brinkman Photography  [1] Canadian Mental Health Association. Press release, May 2, 2022.  [2] Rogers, Carl R. (1980). A way of being, p.148.  [3]  The social neuroscience of empathy, p.209. Link.