Excessive empathy can impair understanding.

A recent study in Germany enabled scientists to prove that people who tend to be empathic do not necessarily have the additional skills to understand people well at a cognitive level.

The study also discovered insight as to how the different networks in the brain are orchestrated, revealing that networks crucial for empathy and cognitive perspective do interact with one another, and in highly emotional moments

for example when somebody talks about the death of a close person

activation of the insula, (which forms part of the empathy-relevant network), can have an inhibiting effect in some people on brain areas important for taking someone else's perspective. This in turn can cause excessive empathy to impair social understanding.

Personally from a counsellor’s perspective there is a fine balance between empathy and cognitive understanding when entering into a client’s world and attempting to see things from their perspective.

“Is it possible as therapists to keep our empathy under control so it doesn’t run to excess?”

I think so... I feel a sense of duty of care to my clients to ensure my feelings don’t run away with me in light of their situations. That seems to keep my empathy in check and allows me to dip into it throughout the session.

After all, uncontrollable empathy can turn to sympathy which is not professional and in fact detrimental to client progress. Although it hasn’t happened to me yet, it’s possible that someone could just tip me over the edge with a sad story, and if I find my emotions too much to handle, I would need to seek supervision to guide my decision on how best to serve that client.

The study sees cognitive understanding and empathy as two different social skills, but the scientists proved they can affect each other and that heightened empathy around a person’s predicament can reduce your cognitive understanding of it.

That is certainly something we don’t want happening in Therapy! Part of the counsellors job is get a real understanding of what everything means to the client. The client can sometimes do an excellent job of describing their thoughts and feelings to the therapist, and our job is to read between the lines, and for that our cognitive perspective ideally should not be diminished by over empathising.

Growing up I remember getting very upset when I didn’t understand someone’s meaning. My emotion would start to swell at the beginning of a conversation sometimes in expectation of the fact that I wouldn’t comprehend. So I soon realised my excessive emotion was the culprit in my diminished understanding not my intelligence.

Was this the beginnings of me learning to control my emotion? Possibly.... Maybe that’s why I now feel I have a good handle on my empathy in therapy, allowing me to really listen to people.

So as counsellors, there are many good qualities and skills we should have, but perhaps it’s not just about simply having those qualities but...

How we use them and how we control them, after all, these are skills in themselves.

Ultimately our aim is to provide the most successful and productive sessions we possibly can for our clients.

If you or someone you know needs help, please contact Sam at Therapy for Life
Source of Scientific Research