The Empathetic Heart
I was talking to a widowed client about how she has spent a lifetime being a caregiver. She recently was in a relationship with a widowed man who was manipulating and gaslighting her. He was basically preying on her self-perceived expectation to take care of other people. She ended the relationship, but because of how he treated her, she feels “less than” in so many ways. She felt that she needed to help him, save him, take care of him. She was unable to see what was happening on a conscious level, but intuitively, she was backing away.
Her family and friends were aware of the situation. They could see how this man was playing her. The man had told her, with self-pity, that his late wife didn’t tell him she had cancer until it was too late to save her. My friend’s husband had died of cancer and so this man’s story hit her in the heart. When this man told my friend about his late wife, the emotions she felt for the man, and his wife, emerged in her as literal heart pain. She drew in their pain in as her own.
We talked about what she was feeling and I shared a comparison between an empathetic heart and a sympathetic heart. The expression “I feel sorry for you,” which is sympathy, really is a literal “feel” as we take in other people’s emotions, especially if those emotions and experiences are familiar to us, as this man’s story was to my friend.
The heart pain is real. It’s an adrenaline surge...that powerful hormone that gives us the energy to react to danger. But unless we’re utilizing the hormone as energy for our muscles to run away or fight back, it’s very painful sitting in our body.
An empathetic heart, on the other hand, would understand what the pain felt like or might feel like, but doesn’t pull it in as its own. An empathetic heart is able to care about others without becoming attached to the story and being triggered into its own sadness and experience an adrenaline surge.
One of the things I really concentrated on as I was going through my psychology and mental health counseling degrees was to be sure I was detached from the pain expressed by other survivors of childhood sexual abuse so that I didn’t feel it as my own when working with survivor clients.
I tried many methods to disassociate with empathy, but it really wasn’t until NLP in Hypnosis was applied to my life that I was able to truly be able to release myself from the sympathetic pain of my own experiences when I heard someone else’s story. I now don’t fall “victim” to my pain-feeling self. And in this way, I am so much better to give others what THEY need from me, not what I need for me. That’s true empathy – understanding what others experience without experiencing the deep personal feelings associated with it.
We all have times in our lives when others’ experiences affect us in our core. In response we get teary, angry, fearful, overly attached, heartbroken, etc. If we don’t recognize the interference these responses cause us and break the patterns, we’re quite likely to be vulnerable to them again and again, with situations and choices of relationships becoming increasingly more difficult as our brains try to reconcile and learn.
But, with access by trance work to the out of conscious area of the mind where the automatic responses live, we can identify the source of the pattern and rewire the response pattern to an empathetic heart rather than a heart that literally feels what others feel. And this is what I did with her. She was able to recognize not only that the man’s story reminded her of her grief, she was able to recognize how grief showed up in her childhood after the loss of her mother. She had not processed that grief because she needed to step in and care for her father and siblings. We broke the patterns of response that led her to caring for others and not heal her own grief.
