I suspect that trauma generally has an effect of making people more sensitive to triggers, which also heightens a person's overall level of emotional sensitivity. Some people react with fighting instinct of aggressively shutting down or building up walls against triggers & emotions. Others react by flight, often some variation of avoidance or limiting feeling emotions. And others react by freeze, which often is dissociation or emotionally numbing.
When emotional suffering is an integral part of traumatic experience, it is easy to overgeneralize negative emotions or all emotions as the enemy or culprit.
However this approach can be highly counter-productive, and indirectly reinforces more fear conditioning. Which often translates into fear of feeling inner emotions, instead of fear of actual danger from external world.
This is where working on increasing empathy can help.
Let's start with a working definition of empathy as
'emotional sensitivity' which is generally used in reference to recognizing emotions in others. However empathy works both ways, the more you can recognize your own emotions, the more you can recognize it in others. But also the more you're insensitive or blind to your own emotions, the more you're insensitive or blind to other's emotions.
Empathy can then be broken down into two components:
Feeling and
Understanding emotions, some describe feeling as 'warm empathy', and understanding as 'cold empathy'. I am very good at cold empathy, but I think I lack some inner brain wiring for warm empathy.
Empathy can be divided into two major components:
* Affective empathy - the capacity to respond with an appropriate emotion to another's mental states.
* Cognitive empathy - the capacity to understand another's perspective or mental state.
Affective empathy can be subdivided into the following scales:
* Empathic concern: sympathy and compassion for others in response to their suffering.
* Personal distress: self-centered feelings of discomfort and anxiety in response to another's suffering.
Cognitive empathy can be subdivided into the following scales:
* Perspective taking: the tendency to spontaneously adopt others' psychological perspectives.
* Fantasy: the tendency to identify with fictional characters.
-- source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy#Types
Now, why would empathy help with therapy, and how?
A therapist who is more empathetic will be able to better understand the emotional suffering underlying a patient's story. Also a patient who feels a therapist is empathetic naturally feels safer, communication is easier, and there can be more trust developed.
Does a therapist need to have similar life trauma experience to be genuinely empathetic to a patient?
No, but the therapist does need to be emotionally sensitive and aware of his own emotional suffering (shame, grief, fear, anxiety, anger, etc.). But many therapists aren't comfortable with doing their own emotional work, so they fake empathy and hide behind their expertise and position.
Developing more empathy can also naturally help with personal healing and relationships. Emotional sensitivity can help with predicting others behavior, translating to less fear, easier relationships and more connection. Also emotional sensitivity can help with understanding and working with inner children and unresolved emotional triggers.
But, emotional sensitivity can also have downsides. Just like Brene Brown's research discovered that 'you can't selectively numb emotions', it works the same vice-versa, you can't selectively un-numb emotions, so more empathy means you feel all emotions more intensely. This can initially lead to getting triggered more, inner children become more active, memories returning, etc. These situations can be seen as opportunities for exposure therapy and integration. But they could also be interpreted as threats. How you react or respond to it would be a good test of your prior CBT work, can you stay rational and open in the face of intense emotions?
and here's a funny video explaining empathy:
