Free The Art of Empathy by Karla McLaren Page A

becoming an accurate, emotionally well-regulated, self-aware, self-respecting, perceptive, happy, and healthy empath. And I’m telling you that it’s not only possible to do this but also actually achievable. If you have difficulty getting into sync with others, I’ll teach you simple ways to empathize more gracefully. If you overidentify with others, I’ll show you many different emotional and social awarenesstools that will help you create effective boundaries to regulate your own emotions. If your empathy has been more like uncontrolled martyrdom than intentional activism, and even if you developed empathic burnout a long time ago, empathy is an innate feature of human nature and human intelligence, which means you can retrieve it. But this time, you’ll be able to engage with your empathy in a way that will work for you.
    Throughout this book, I’ll refer to these six aspects of empathy as we delve into your emotional life, your home life, your communication skills, your work life, and so forth. These six aspects will help you gain a tangible understanding of your empathic abilities so that you can address your specific empathic strengths and challenges.
    WHEN ALL SIX ASPECTS ARE CHALLENGED
    In Chapter 1 , I shared my empathic observation of Joseph and Iris so that you could experience a felt sense of empathy and see the world through a kind of empath-cam. I chose that situation carefully, and most important, I chose the time period carefully, so that you could feel how empathy works for me now . As I wrote in that chapter, it hasn’t always been like this for me. In my childhood, the world of emotions, empathy, and interactions was a very painful place indeed.
    When I was a little hyperempathic child, I felt every emotion in every room. I compare myself to a malfunctioning radio, because I picked up all emotional frequencies from every direction—yet I couldn’t home in on specific ones, and it all felt like static. I experienced a constant sense of emotional overload (unless I was alone with one calm human or in the presence of animals), and I felt fundamentally unsafe in the human social world. Being in a crowd, at school, or at a party was excruciating. There was even a joke in my family that parties didn’t really start until little Karla dashed around the house, threw up in response to all the commotion, and had to be put to bed. Yeah, that’s awful! I wish things had been different, but an empath wasn’t even a thing when I was little, so my family gets some leeway for their ignorance and insensitivity. At least they used humor; they could have punished me instead. I’m glad I grew up in a funny ignorant family instead of a cruel ignorant one.
    I grew up the fourth of five children in what is a fairly normally dysfunctional family. My mother was a brilliant woman who was not able to go to college; she was also a brilliant painter with five children and an unfortunateperfectionist streak that prevented her from being able to fully live her artistic life. She was a childhood trauma survivor and had trouble with a number of emotions (though she could be an absolute champion in the face of abuse). Mom could be emotionally erratic, but she was not emotionally loud or obvious; her emotions were deeply felt, but they were usually only expressed in undertones. For instance, when she was angry, she never swore or expressed it outright; instead, her body would heat up, and she’d avoid eye contact, or she’d move more quickly and avoid talking about what bothered her. My father was also a brilliant man who wasn’t able to complete college and a wonderful writer who published two children’s books but primarily worked as an insurance adjustor. Dad was emotionally very steady and rather unaffected. He didn’t display most emotions openly, but unlike Mom, he didn’t actually feel them very strongly either. If I had an extreme emotion to deal with, I