Empathy and the "wounded healer"

Empathy has been one of those popular buzzwords lately, like compassion or mindfulness, but it often gets confused with its cousin sympathy. Let me tell them apart for you.

Sympathy is to look at what is happening to someone else from your own perspective, and to feel for them. For example: "his grandmother just died. This is what I would feel if my grandmother died".

Empathy requires more, it is about trying to see what is happening to someone through their eyes, from their perspective. It is more "if I were him, and had his personality, his history of trauma etc, I would probably feel this in his situation".

Empathy will allow you not to judge, by not just looking at someone's situation "she is a victim of domestic abuse - why doesn't she just leave?" but by looking at it from their position in life "if I had been systematically made to feel unworthy, small and incompetent through years of domestic abuse, and had learned from my own family of origin the same thing, how would I feel? What would I be able to do or not do? How can I support her rebuilding her own self-esteem?"

Where sympathy is instantaneous, empathy requires a sustained effort of imagination and understanding. And this is where we can all work on dialling up our empathy.

It's about putting ourself in someone else's body, brain, heart, not just situation. When we feel sympathy, we are tempted to give advice. When we feel empathy, we offer support.

My work as a therapist is squarely on the empathy side. The more I listen to my clients, the better I can understand not just their situation, but also how they feel, where they're coming from and what they want to change. Only then will my work also encompass helping them see different perspectives - not by giving them my opinion, not by telling them what I would do in their situation and definitely not by giving them advice, but rather by offering them a different way to look through their own eyes.

In the world of psychotherapy there is a concept called "the wounded healer". It acknowledges that therapists, by the nature of their work, are not just vicariously exposed to other people's trauma, depression or grief, but that may also have suffered of these themselves.

And that is not a bad thing. Our clients' problems are not just abstract concepts, but surprisingly often things we have gone through ourselves.

So, if you find yourself seeing a therapist, rest assured that we will be empathetic, not because we have "studied empathy", but because we too may have faced those emotions you're feeling.

The experience of pain is the common ground of humanity we all share, and it allows me to feel - no matter what my clients bring to therapy - empathy and compassion, and never judgement.

Why Christmas so often ends up being shit

Are you starting to get that feeling?
Christmas around the corner, and still so much to plan, to do, to buy?
What about the seating plan? No-one wants to sit next to weird Uncle Gary, and Cousin Jo has recently to converted to (insert whatever religion you find offensive) and so is the black sheep?

But this year, it's all going to be different, right?
You'll get organised better, earlier, and this time, everyone will get along, the food will be perfect, and anyway, it should be all ok as long as there is enough booze.

What could possibly go wrong? I mean apart from the all stuff that has been going wrong every single year before this one?

Well, maybe we're approaching this whole "festive season" the wrong way.
According to my favourite blogger, the equation for happiness is pretty simple:
Happiness = Results minus Expectations.

And what happens at Christmas time?
Well, for one we expect things to go according to (a very ambitious) plan.
Then we expect to get along with people we barely see (if at all) the rest of the year (mostly because we don't like them that much).
And to make sure it all goes pear-shaped, we add copious amounts of alcohol to the mix.

So basically we expect the best case scenario, and feel cheated if a less ideal scenario gets played out - despite having lived through all sorts of stuff-ups, from average to full-blown shit-storm the previous years.

So, how can we turn this around?
How can we, for once, make the festive season a time for love, understanding and joy instead of resentment, stress, sadness and anger?

We could start by reducing our expectations.

Simplifying the menu so it's quick and easy to cook, and we could do it in our sleep.
Inviting only the people that we will actually be happy to see.
Reducing the gift-giving to only the most meaningful people in our life, so buying presents is about finding something to really give joy, rather than an obligation.
Spending less of our money, and more of our time.
And most importantly, finding compassion inside us, so we can forgive others for not fulfilling our expectations, even on Christmas day.

Have a peaceful and loving holiday.