Empathy is a word you will often come across if you are a part of the mental health field, have vaguely brushed past the field or have access to the “woke” side of social media. Being empathetic requires one to be supportive, present, yet objective to another’s plight, or to put it simply, “walking a mile in their shoes”.
Empathy differs from sympathy. When you are sympathetic towards someone, you are quite essentially feeling sorry for them. But when you display empathy, you are able to accurately understand what they are going through without losing objectivity or losing yourself in the situation. So, is objectivity such an important aspect? Numerous studies have shown that those who received accurate empathetic responses as opposed to sympathetic responses reported feeling better understood and better supported.
While it is recognized that empathy (that brings with it the important quality of objectivity) does much good to us as individuals and within relationships, it is also important to recognize when too much of a good thing can be detrimental.
Empathetic reactivity, also known as hyper empathy or toxic empathy, occurs when a person over-identifies with another person’s feelings. This can affect both the empathy provider and the recipient. For example, it is safe to assume that most of us have faced situations in which we have reached out to a friend for comfort when we are facing a tough situation, but have ended up pacifying them instead. Or we may have felt worse about our problems after disclosing them to someone that is overly emotional and magnifies the gravity of our situation. From the perspective of the empathy provider, relating very strongly to the opposite person’s distress can have physical as well as mental implications. An increase in cortisol levels is a side effect of engaging in hyper empathy. This can lead to physical changes such as muscle weakness and high blood pressure. On a psychological note, hyper empathy can lead to anxiety, depression, nervous breakdowns, inability to process emotions quickly, and burnout.
Having someone display high levels of empathy can make the recipient of such empathy feel like their boundaries are being violated wherein the opposite person is not providing space to heal. It can also add to the already stressful situation when the recipient must take care of the provider, something that usually happens when the provider ends up being overwhelmed and needs to be pacified. Furthermore, when someone under distress is subjected to hyper empathy, they can be left feeling invalidated and sometimes, overwhelmed by the empathetic response. Factors such as these are not only damaging at an individual level but also at a socio-relational level. It could, therefore, be natural to assume that most individuals would prefer not to engage with those that are hyper empathetic, a choice made perhaps to protect oneself from additional stressors.
So now that we have established that objective empathy = good but hyper empathy or too much empathy = bad however, two questions arise. The first, how do we spot signs of empathetic reactivity in ourselves and/or others? To answer the first question, spotting empathetic reactivity is relatively easy! To spot hyper empathy within ourselves, we can look for certain signs. These include feeling extremely overwhelmed by another’s issues and feeling stressed about the opposite person’s plight to the extent that you have physical discomfort and/or cannot function normally.
And second, how do we know when we are dealing with someone engaging in empathetic reactivity towards us? A few blatant signs to look out for would be - sensing that the person is unable to differentiate between their ownself and our plight, sensing a violation of our boundaries, having to comfort the opposite person when in fact, we are in need of comforting, and most importantly, feeling invalidated in regards to our stressors or grief.
The purpose of being empathetic is to provide support, validation, and comfort to someone who is going through a difficult time. In conclusion, understanding accurate empathy and weeding out hyper empathy should be the goal, one that will help foster healthier, more positive social interactions.
Kaavya Iyer
