This week in lockdown, I am working on self-awareness and how it contributes to the ability to empathise with others.
Empathy is a kind of emotional imagination; it is the ability to map the knowledge of your own feelings to those of someone else in order to gain a deeper understanding of how those emotions influenced their mental state, their thoughts and their actions. This has the added benefit of showing the other person that you do understand them on a deep, emotional level. It is somewhat easier to do this in a one-way conversation like a counselling session, as you can focus wholly on receiving and holding someone’s pain or grief instead of simply hearing what they are saying and then saying your part, then they say their next part, and so on.
I truly believe that self-awareness is a superpower. Self-awareness is not to be confused with being conscious – all humans are conscious and can think, but not all humans go a level deeper and consider why they think and behave the way they do – this is self-awareness. It is especially important when it comes to negative thoughts and behaviours, because with self-awareness you can alter these negative patterns that may be doing harm to you or those around you. And in relation to empathy, it can help you identify why you act, react, or think in certain ways, which in turn helps you identify the emotions you were feeling – this makes bringing up those emotions again more straightforward.
In terms of my own personal issues, I can see how important it is to be understood empathically. I have always been quite a sensitive person, and thought that I was somehow broken because of this. No-one around me seemed quite as sensitive as me. I always saw it as a weakness and tried to compensate for it in so many ways. Family would ostracise me for not wanting to go on fairground rides. I would become socially exhausted and go quiet after a few hours around friends – they would notice and take it personally. It played a part in my developing severe anxieties as well, as the fear of doing things like learning to drive a car, or meeting new people fed off my sensitivities, and like a vicious circle, just kept going round and round and getting worse and worse. I just needed to be kinder to myself, accept that I was highly sensitive, and realise that maybe I needed more time to adjust to new scenarios. In time I would learn to do this.
Being a “Highly Sensitive Person” is a recognised phenomenon in neuroscience. It basically means that the part of a person’s brain that governs their emotions, the amygdala, is hyper-responsive. It is common for highly sensitive people that are misunderstood throughout childhood to develop anxieties and depression later on in life, due to not feeling acceptable to others as their organismic self, and having to behave in ways that feel abnormal to them in order to fit in. Highly sensitive people often come across as abnormal because their fight/flight/freeze adrenal responses have been fried from over activity. I can personally attest to this!
I rarely felt understood empathically as a child (or even now as an adult for the most part to be quite honest), as people just thought I was being lazy, or rude, or “too sensitive”, when in actual fact I was massively overstimulated, and in some cases it felt like my brain had overheated and stopped working, and I needed some time away to let it cool down. People wished I was more “normal”, to the extent that I continually felt abnormal. I saw it as a weakness, and felt it explained why I felt like I didn’t fit in. I repressed my sensitivity, essentially ignoring a key aspect of the way I was, and I wished I was more “normal”. I did everything I could to disassociate myself from my sensitivity, but I was essentially lying to myself, and I now know this to be a deep incongruence. I very much felt like an outsider growing up, and this has helped me develop a sense of empathy with others that feel they are being treated as outsiders themselves; I can empathise with those that feel they are not being understood empathically.
It was not until after (or maybe during) my mid-life/existential crisis I realised that I couldn’t change being sensitive, so rather than denying that side of me I should use it in my favour. The advantages of being a highly sensitive person are manifold. I tend to notice when things are different, or when moods and energies subtly change in a room. I have a large natural capacity for empathy, by which I mean I find it quite easy to bring forth emotions and feel alongside people – I first noticed this ability growing up watching TV. Rather than being emotionally stirred by the event being portrayed, I was able to put myself into the shoes of the two people on either side of what was happening, and not just see their perspectives, but feel the emotions guiding their motivations. I find it very easy to use my emotional imagination to feel as others feel, and experience their emotions vicariously. I have noticed that my son has a strong emotional imagination as well, he can get into someone else’s feelings quite easily.
It’s important to work on your own personal issues as a counsellor, not only to ensure your safety and the safety of your clients, but it also enables you to become more empathic with others. It keeps you safe because if you have worked through all your personal problems then whatever the client brings is unlikely to trigger unexpected feelings inside you. I’ve had quite a few difficult events in my life that at the time weren’t so fun, but looking back now I can see how they formed me as a person, and have given me this deep empathic resource to draw from. For example, I was once on the edge of suicide. I walked off into the night with the intention of killing myself. The pain I felt in my chest was like nothing I had ever experienced before in my life, and it was reinforced by the thoughts going around in my head telling me that everyone else would be better off if I weren’t around. It was a horrible feeling, but it has enabled me to understand what others are going through when they are feeling suicidal, and bringing those feelings up inside myself enables me to empathise with them.
If I hadn’t worked on understanding this personal suicidal life event, and a client came in to me as a counsellor and he was suicidal, it would likely cause me to bring those feelings up unexpectedly and they would cause problems not just for me as a counsellor but for my client as well. Another example was when my Nan died. I felt the grief, it hit me hard. To me it looked like it hit me harder than those around me, but I can’t be sure. I tap into the emotional memory of my grief when working empathically with others that are feeling grief.
Working on your own problems as a counsellor also increases your empathic range. The wider the range of a counsellor’s empathy, the more problems they can apply their identification and understanding to. And the deeper that empathy has been developed, the more nuanced and finely tuned it can be when applied to a client’s emotional state. I think that when exploring your own personal issues, it is important to keep an open mind, and have a willingness to find the truth, and not just arrive at an end point that makes you feel good. Often times the truth will not make you happy, but it will lead to more questions. I first properly explored my own personal problems by having Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – I found it very useful and insightful, especially with regards to finding out what my core beliefs were. Core beliefs are the rules by which a person lives their life – and when I realised how skewed mine were, that recognition gave me the ability to rethink and reshape my core beliefs to something more positive.
There are stark differences in “being heard” and “being understood”. Being heard is having someone physically hear what you have said but doing nothing with the information, or not taking what was said into account to tailor their response. Being understood is when someone physically hears what you have said, and then processes it to gain a deeper insight into how the words you just spoke reflect your inner self.
Often, in an argument, there is a rush to simply and quickly respond to what the other person is saying, sometimes in anger. One person hears what the other is saying as an accusation or attack, so they defend themselves, or maybe attack back. There’s no consideration there. No wonder one or both parties come away from arguments not really feeling like they’ve been listened to. No wonder the problems persist. This is the basis for communication breakdown, sadly.
I think I used this example in my year two work as well, but I feel that the time I was most understood empathically was the time I was signed off work for two weeks after being diagnosed with depression and prescribed anti-depressants. I went in to work to hand in my Doctors note, expecting to be bombarded with questions, but my manager simply took it and wished me well, and told me not to think about work for two weeks, to concentrate on getting better. Only later did I find out that she had previously suffered from depression, and I really felt like she was empathically drawing on her experiences to listen and understand where I was coming from. Maybe she was once in my position and treated with respect and dignity, so she treated me the way that made her feel respected; or maybe she was treated in the exact opposite way and she vowed to treat others better – with a little bit of self-awareness both scenarios can be used as tools for growth.
I enjoy these self-reflective units, and always find that after going over such a topic I gain an increased understanding of myself and my personal issues. I enjoy having a good think and writing it all down really is a powerful way of getting to know yourself, understanding your problems, and working out how you’ve grown as a person and increased your professional knowledge as a prospective counsellor. I know it’s a journey that will never stop as personal development is a key aspect of being a counsellor, and increasing your self-awareness and expanding your empathic range is massively important.
