Empathy. | A Weekly Word 2022

Genuine empathy requires self-awareness. The ability to sense other people’s emotions and to imagine what someone else might be going through is built, in part, upon our ability to identify and connect with our own emotions first.

Empathy has been categorized by psychologists into two major classifications – cognitive empathy and affective (or emotional) empathy. In simple terms, cognitive empathy is knowing or understanding what someone else feels. While emotional empathy is actually feeling what someone else feels, much like the type of empathy that is described in Romans 12:15. 

This line from the well studied passage about Love in Action reads, “Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.” In this scripture, we are called to not just understand someone else’s experience, but to feel it with them. A sense of compassion for others that is cultivated in, and overflows from, our own practice of self-compassion. 

More recently, a third category of empathy has been labeled as compassionate empathy. This is somewhere between the two existing major classifications. With compassionate empathy, we don’t only understand or even feel what someone else is going through, but we are also moved to help them through it.

Galatians 6:2 says, “Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”

While many of us find this type of empathy almost instinctual, bearing someone else’s burdens without the capacity to do so can cause us harm. We must first understand and feel our own emotions and then develop the means to support ourselves enough to build emotional capacity, before we can support others as we have been called to do.

Love, Maaden

Passage

Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.

Romans 12:15

Prayer

God, thank you for creating us to show compassion. Thank you for the opportunity to become more in tune with ourselves by growing more in tune with you. Thank you for helping me to set boundaries while I do the work required to manage my own burdens before I can help bear those of someone else. Help others in my circle build the emotional capacity required to serve me as well. Allow me to know myself well enough to practice compassionate empathy when I can, and to feel comfortable with taking a backseat when I cannot. In Jesus' name. Amen.

Practice

This week, I will check in with myself on where I am emotionally. I will commit to addressing my own emotional capacity before taking on someone else’s burdens.