Free The Art of Empathy by Karla McLaren

day—at home, at work, with animals, in e-mails, at the store, when we drive, when we walk down the street, and when we interact with art, literature, and music. We’re in constant empathic contact with each other and with the nonhuman world, and it’s important to remember this. We humans are an actively empathic species, and though our empathy is often problematic, hyperactive, or seemingly absent, empathy is the nonverbal language we all speak fluently.
    EMPATHY FOR YOURSELF
    Did you notice something missing in my six aspects of empathy? There’s an important factor I didn’t include. You may find this omission rather startling, but hear me out. This missing aspect might be called self-care, self-love, selfempathy, or something along those lines. To be a happy, healthy, and effective empath, you have to take care of yourself first—in essence, you have to be able to put on your own oxygen mask before you help other passengers with theirs. And obviously, developing and nurturing empathy for yourself is what this entire book is about. I want to help you develop self-awareness, self-care, and self-love as central features of your life. These are absolutely vital things.
    Yet I have to be honest with you. You can perform effectively as an empath even if you’re self-abandoning and even if you’re filled with self-loathing. Some of the most amazing and hugely empathic social justice workers the world has ever known have been self-abandoning people who were running from the deep trouble in their own souls. Their homes, their love lives, and their family lives were often chaotic or nonexistent (and many of themburned out). The process of empathizing skillfully does not require that you take good care of yourself. Of course, you’ll burn out if you don’t take care of yourself, and your empathic work won’t be social activism as much as it will be martyrdom. But you can empathize pretty effectively, even if you have very little empathy for yourself. In fact, most of us have performed skillful empathy from a self-abandoning position, and many burnt-out empaths have turned away from empathy precisely because it can lead to martyrdom.
    This is a central reason that empathy is such a difficult subject—and why it can be in such short supply. To be good with empathy, especially in Perspective Taking, Concern for Others, and Perceptive Engagement, you must have empathy for the other. Empathy is not about you. If you have a healthy inner life, healthy relationships, and clear-eyed emotional awareness, empathy can be fun, engaging, and delightful— especially when it’s not about you. You can learn so much when you empathize, particularly when you empathize with people who are nothing like you. However, if your inner life is unstable, if your childhood was chaotic or traumatic, if your caregivers were inconsistent or neglectful and didn’t support your empathy development, if your personal life isn’t supportive, if your self-care and emotional awareness are negligible, or if your human social interactions are unsatisfying, empathy can drain the lifeblood out of you. But even so, you’ll still be able to empathize, because it’s an innate skill that tends to operate whether or not you ask it to, and it’s a skill we all possess to a greater or lesser degree.
    So as you move forward to build skills, awareness, support, and multiple foundations under and around you, know that all of these will make your experience of empathy more rewarding and more fun. But even on your worst day, or even in the worst of circumstances, know that you’re already an empath, and that these six aspects are already a part of your life. What we’re doing in this book is making sure that your innate empathy is a beneficial and workable part of your whole life.
    With the foundation of these six aspects of empathy, you can move forward into a deeper engagement with the process of