Empathy is Not a Superpower.
It’s a complex and subjective emotion, but one that’s familiar to most humans.
EMPATHY: “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.”
But what makes a person an Empath with a capital “E” other than experiencing this emotion? The definition of this phenomenon varies but here is what multiple sources agree upon:
- Advanced ability to understand (and feel) the emotions of others.
- Highly sensitive and easily overwhelmed with emotion.
- Vulnerable to toxic people (or “energy vampires”)
- Intuitive
- Introverted, quiet, and good listeners.
- Burnt out by crowds. Prefer one-on-one conversations.
- Motivated to help others to the extent of being self-sacrificing.
Let’s dive in to what this obscure concept really boils down to.
Empathy
Empathy can be understood through the tendency for humans (and rodents) to mirror each other, gage what someone else is going through based on our own similar experiences, and our ability to imagine ourselves in their shoes.
Beyond reasoning and the visceral second-hand reaction to some else’s emotions, the rest is mostly inferred through your own biases and assumptions.
For example, I’ve heard that most people have a decent grasp on body language, subtext, and social cues. From an autistic perspective, as someone who takes things at face value, this ability seems superhuman to me. No doubt, there’s a world of subliminal meanings to be found between the lines of human communication. But by the same logic as self-proclaimed “Empaths”, does the ability to read between the lines make someone a Telepath?
The Spiritual Art of Setting the Bar Low
Where does the belief that empathy is a gift only an enlightened few experience? If you watch the news these days, it’s easy to conclude that world is a cruel place and that is the fault of many cruel people. Surely if everyone was an Empath, injustice, abuse, discrimination, suffering, and greed would never have existed.
But this is putting empathy too simply. Humans aren’t divided into a large percentage of cold-blooded “Energy Vampires” who cause problems and a small percentage of Empaths who give a shit about others. It’s more nuanced than that.
Claiming to be an Empath is a easy way to distance yourself from those responsible for negativity. It creates a divide between yourself and the destructive Energy Vampires who are beyond hope. As an Empath, you’re unable to contribute to the chaos. Being the antidote is your burden to bear.
If we take the hocus pocus of these terms seriously, it pains a black and white image of the world. Are Energy Vampires really incapable of love and empathy, or does their personality just clash with yours? Are self-proclaimed Empaths only capable of kindness and helping, or do they have the potential to be hurtful and destructive too?
Everyone has different priorities in life. For those who prioritise helping others, empathy must drive this motivation and encourage them to act on it. For example, nurses and therapists must have strong levels of empathy to do their jobs. While they may become desensitised over time to the sufferings of others that they must work on everyday, the desire to help people helps them endure it. It’s a delicate balance, but you can be emotionally tough and empathetic simultaneously if your situation calls for it.
As for the people who become toxic suckers of good vibes, most of them are capable of empathy, but their priorities may suppress them. They may be in a career that leads them down the path of seeing people as statistics. They may be willing to inflict or disregard the suffering of others for their own material gain. This isn’t justifiable, but the problem doesn’t originate from the inability to feel empathy; they’ve just lost touch. Due to their priorities and duties, empathy becomes an obstacle that they must put aside.
For both ends of this spectrum, a person’s empathy is conditional to their own unique set of values. Everyone has the ability to be charitable and selfish, accepting and prejudiced, caring and careless. That doesn’t mean the answer is to just accept that some people are inherently compassionate and others are raging pieces of shit. While empathy is inherently subjective, the values and priorities that shape a person’s perception of others are learned. Therefore, the overall goal should be to dismantle institutional pressures of selfishness and discrimination and to encourage individuals to reevaluate their beliefs.
For example, a cisgendered female women’s rights activist may be driven by her own experiences of misogynistic discrimination and, out of empathy, wants to prevent other women going through the same thing. However, this same person could be extremely transphobic and exclude transgender women from her feminism. This could be due to her different life experiences to trans people whom she can’t relate to. Her research may be biased against the trans community which convinces her that through discriminating against trans women she can protect cis women. As this person has the ability to be empathetic to the sufferings of some and dismissive of others, she’d be difficult to categorise with black and white terms.
In short, there’s a little bit of both the considerate Empath and the narcissistic Energy Vampire in all of us.
If you are in tune with your empathy, that’s amazing. But putting yourself on a pedestal is counterproductive. It suggests that being a good person is a innate rarity that cannot be obtained by most. The goal should be to encourage everyone to bring their empathy to the forefront.
Real Hyper-Empathy isn’t as Glamorous
There are psychological conditions that can make a person experience empathy in an extreme, unconventional way. It can be too strong, non-existent, or just different compared to the average experience of empathy.
My borderline, traumatised, autistic brain has a weird system when it comes to empathy. I have strong visceral reactions to the sufferings of other people and animals. The possibility of upsetting someone or letting them down makes me panic. Crowds are overwhelming and leave me feeling drained. I even cringe when I see people mistreating inanimate objects and I used to hoard things out of emotional attachment.
I don’t believe that experiencing empathy in this way makes me a better or worse person. Sure, it’s made me go the extra mile for others, but it’s also caused me to misread people when my visceral interpretation of their emotions doesn’t match what they’re actually experiencing. Some may say this makes me an Empath. Yes, I react strongly to the emotions of others and get overwhelmed in crowds. That doesn’t save me from miscommunication, selfishness, and carelessness when it comes to other people.
Even if I fit the criteria, labelling myself as such would lead me down a dangerous path. For instance, it would be toxic for me to believe that my assumptions about someone else’s emotions have authority. In reality, no one can really know the nuances of what someone else is going through. As an Empath, there’s always an inevitable risk of projecting your own biases and misreadings onto the other person.
I’ve met a few people who identified as an Empath (or some esoteric synonym) who turned out to be emotionally abusive, manipulative, and prone to gaslighting.
You could argue that they mislabelled themselves Empaths as an ego boost or that their harmful behaviour had nothing to do with them being empaths. But their belief that they were magically receptive to the emotions of others gave them a sense of entitlement over the emotional experience of someone else. With their self appointed authority, they gave more weight to their own interpretation than the person experiencing the emotions first hand. Cue the gaslighting.
Not all Empaths behave this way. Emotional abusers often don’t see themselves as abusive, so if they get it into their heads that they are Empaths, the results can be nasty.
I’m open to spiritual interpretations of instances that aren’t yet explained by science. However, with this one, I trust in psychology completely.
The rise of Empaths could be explained through neurodiversity. In the last several years, especially on the internet, neurodiverse people have been sharing their experiences and unique perspective. This has been so beneficial in fighting the stigma that disorders such as ADHD and autism are diseases that need to be cured and that there are many positives. Since the said disorders tend to be associated and diagnosed based on stereotypes and specific demographics (i.e. young boys), many people who don’t fit this stereotypical criteria have realised from these online communities that they may be neurodiverse themselves.
Everyone has a different opinion on labels and professional diagnosis. The important thing is that people who have lived with internal struggles all their lives can finally find the vocabulary to talk about it and share their experiences with similar people. However, the semantics through which these things are talked about can reshape them. Someone who struggles with hyper-empathy may feel recognised through researching Empaths in the same way feel recognised through researching autism. When they share so much common ground, where do you draw the line?
As far as empathy-related mental illnesses and neurodiversities are concerned, these discussions are a good thing. But replacing the name of the disorder with a unfounded spiritual label makes re-shrouds them in taboo.
It’s comparable to the rise of esoteric diagnosis's such as Indigo Children. Indigo and Crystal Children are often the New Age, alternative medicine synonyms for what psychiatry would diagnose as neurodivergent. Viewing your autistic or ADHD child through a lens of whimsical magick is an improvement to seeing it as a flaw. However, these terms are born out of prejudice against the scientific diagnosis. Coming up with a fancy label that sounds superhuman distances you or your child from the label that means a disability, even though they both mean the same thing. It’s only necessary to do this if you think there’s something wrong with being disabled.
Conclusion
As there’s no set definition of the term “Empath” as its used by spiritual bloggers and New Age influencers, it’s difficult to make something concrete out of something so elusive. This is also down to the concept being exclusively to do with an individual, subjective feeling you get over other people’s individual, subjective feelings. Therefore, it can’t be proven or disproven; it’s something you “feel”. Do what you will with that information so long as you’re not using it to be holier-than-thou or dismissive of psychology.
I believe that popularisation of the word “Empath” comes from a good place. When our society and culture thrives of carelessness and selfishness, caring deeply about the wellbeing of other people can feel like an anomaly. This friction between your strong empathy and everyone else’s seeming lack of empath makes giving a shit seem hopeless and exhausting. To dismiss the theory of Empaths with “most people feel that way” would be to ignore a deeper issue. If most people are capable of empathy, why don’t we act like it? Why isn’t there radical systematic change to end suffering?
Maybe being an Empath should be normalised instead of mythicised.
