Ecpathy: What It Is And How It Influences Our Personal Relationships
Human beings, like animals, are sentient and suffering beings, this means that we have knowledge of things and experience pain and suffering. However, the ability to recognize different emotions and feelings in others and share them seems to be an emotion more typical of humans, although many studies support that all mammals show certain manifestations of empathy.
The difference perhaps regarding the capacity for empathy lies between human beings and animals in the degree to which it is manifested. Many people get excessively involved in the problems and pain of others, they can even come to identify with it and feel it as their own, creating an interaction that, far from being healthy, becomes deficient, since, on the one hand, we are unable to alleviate to the other and for another, we also suffer ourselves.
Ecpathy is often defined as the opposite of empathy, but far from being a selfish condition or typical of psychopaths or cold people. This mental function, according to many specialists, can counteract excessive empathy and allow us to achieve balance in social interactions that are difficult to endure and help us offer support to the person suffering or experiencing a traumatic situation.
Therefore, ecpathy would be the ability that would help us achieve healthier empathy. But what does this little-known ability really imply? And how are you able to regulate excess identification with the other and establish a boundary between yourself and others? In this article we are going to talk in depth about ecpathy and its main functions
Ekpathy is a new concept, which would be complementary to empathy. Through ecpathy we are able to establish a boundary between our feelings and those of others That is, ecpathy is the ability that allows us not to identify too much with the suffering of others.
The word ecpathy was proposed in 2005 by the doctor in Psychiatry José Luis González. Therefore, it is a relatively new term compared to empathy, whose origin dates back to the beginning of the 20th century, specifically to 1904, where it is included for the first time in an English language dictionary.
To facilitate the understanding of this term, José Luis González defines it at a point in the article where reference is made to this condition for the first time, as the opposite of empathy, with ecpathy being “a voluntary mental process of perception and exclusion of feelings.” , attitudes, thoughts and motivations induced by another.”
Empathy is the mental capacity or function that allows us to take others into account and perceive, understand and share their feelings As its own etymology indicates, it allows us to connect with the other “feel inside” as opposed to “ek-patheia” which means “to take outside” allowing us to modulate the feeling that seeing someone suffering can produce in us. It is in this modulation capacity where the importance of ecpathy lies; its definition as contrary to empathy is only a facilitation for its understanding. You can be ecpathic and empathic at the same time, in fact, it is necessary. As Aristotle said, “virtue is in the middle.”
Therefore, the ecpathic capacity has nothing to do with appearing unfriendly or cold to others, on the contrary, A good regulation between ecpathy and empathy allows us to offer the appropriate response and the necessary support for the person who needs comfort. And it prevents us from having an excessive emotional response to the suffering of others, allowing us, on the one hand, to maintain the necessary serenity and inner balance and, on the other, making us truly empathetic by putting the suffering of others above ourselves in the situation they are in. it belongs to.
What are the functions of ecpathy?
Ecpathy appeared to be a mechanism that has several functions, but could mainly be divided into two main categories. A first category in which ecpathy would serve to protect us from others and from possible manipulations to which we are subjected and, on the other hand, it would allow us to give a truly appropriate response to the emotions of the other.
Ecpathy and manipulation
There are a series of pathologies, for example, narcissism, where both direct and indirect manipulation is the person’s fundamental weapon. Through guilt or generating other types of negative emotions, narcissistic people They are capable of subduing others for their own benefit They can do this by often presenting themselves as the victim of the story, when they are reproached for inappropriate or unpleasant behavior.
In this case, ecpathy plays an important role, since it allows us to separate ourselves from the “suffering of the other” and see the reality of things and understand that it is a manipulation. Normally, narcissists look for especially empathetic people to establish intimate relationships. As we see, identifying with the suffering of others can be downright harmful in some types of relationships.
Ecpathy can also act as a defense mechanism against movies, series, programs… or in short against any story that seeks emotional contagion as a way to gain an audience or even other purposes, such as money through votes or messages. telephone calls that promote some contests, where to save the participant you have to send a message that has a cost, by the way, much higher than normal.
The ability to be able to separate other people’s experiences from your own is essential so as not to fall into the networks of this type of programs. It should be noted that not only the world of cinema, but also marketing and political campaigns make use of emotional contagion to encourage buying or to get the vote, and make us make more sentimental decisions in places where perhaps reason should take precedence over heart or impulse.
In its role as a regulatory mechanism for empathy, ecpathy can protect us from suffering certain types of conditions that could lead to more serious emotional disorders For example, there are people who have a lot of empathy, among other conditions, and tend to put their needs before those of others. Ecpathy would be in charge of telling us and allowing us to have time for ourselves and our hobbies without feeling guilty, it would come in a way to compensate for this type of behavior that from time to time is not bad, but can become pathological if the person she forgets about herself, so she can develop some type of dependency.
Ecpathy and empathy
We have already mentioned several times throughout the article the risk that empathy presents, it can sometimes cause us to identify too much with other people’s feelings. This results in two unhealthy behaviors that can occur at the same time, one is forgetting ourselves to care for the other, and the second is that it influences our ability to give an appropriate response to the person who needs to be cared for or seeks comfort, since that we lack perspective by being emotionally affected by the event.
Simplifying in terms of their differences, ecpathy and empathy differ mainly in terms of the level on which they interact; If empathy allows us to place ourselves on the same level as others, we can perceive and understand their emotions because we are capable of sharing them. Ecpathy allows us to get out of that plane and place ourselves in a different place from where we can be calm and focused to provide an appropriate response to the suffering of others.
Ecpathy does not take away our empathic capacity, but rather allows us to get rid of this excessive identification, where we are not able to live and share feelings and emotions in a balanced way. It prevents negative emotions such as pain, fear, or suffering from taking over us and allows us to provide a supportive response in interactions that need it or identify a manipulative situation for what it is, and not stay stuck in suffering. unaffiliated.
It is worth asking that just as without suffering there would be no capacity for joy, If without ecpathy true empathy could really occur Although these mental functions are not feelings like the first ones, we can draw a kind of parallel in their way of influencing each other. It is true that if we do not know true suffering or if we do not experience truly adverse situations throughout our lives, we would not be able to be happy, since any setback would seem unbearable to us. Therefore, the adverse situation allows for joy rather than being a contrary. It seems that in a certain way ecpathy, like sadness, also allows for an empathic response, since without it empathy would only be our own suffering, it would only be the feelings of others transferred to ourselves, by reacting in a way that is too empathic, we would be taking away part of the suffering or protagonism of the person who really has it.
Therefore, the ability to understand other people’s feelings and be truly empathetic would be directly related to our ecpathic capacity. Ecpathy allows us to respect and understand the emotional reality of others as different from our own. This seems something basic, logically the suffering of the other is not mine, it often occurs between close people, for example, in relationships of filiation (between parents and children). How many times we avoid showing ourselves vulnerable or do not show pain at home or at a family event, for fear that our parents will also suffer, this behavior also occurs in the other sense from parents to children. This delimitation of the empathic capacity, rather than bringing us closer to others, what it does is separate us and disconnect us.
Apart from understanding the emotional reality of the other as different from our own, we can also work on the ecpathic capacity by developing other strategies such as knowing ourselves and being aware of our own limitations or vulnerabilities and above all by being able to return the other’s feelings and understand that only in this way can we help them better.
