Managing empathy

Empathy is a great advantage when it comes to socializing, thanks to it we can better understand the other and adapt with less resistance to any environment. Empathy helps us to position ourselves intelligently according to the situation, however, there is a fine line between feeling the other person's emotions and overriding our own, so sometimes it can be a weakness. As I often say: no extreme is good.

Empathy is usually related to the sense of justice, since in theory, a person with this quality tends to be more fair, since he/she understands the position of others, but this is not always the case, injustices can also be committed in spite of it, since in the end, everything depends on individual criteria.

I tell you that sometimes empathy is very annoying, in my case it makes me cry in almost every movie, or when someone tells me a problem, even with some songs or readings that transmit me pain, or a lot of emotion; I try to avoid that kind of content because it is really something intense for me and from a talk I heard once, I learned that our brain does not know how to differentiate if what you see or hear is false or true, if for example you get really scared watching a movie, your body reacts as if you were really living it, so we subject it to a lot of stress and we all know that it is not healthy.

When you feel a lot of empathy sometimes you have to think selfishly, by focusing on your own needs, so that you don't always put the other person's needs above your own. And here I am always helped by the commandment: "Love God above all things and your neighbor as yourself"; I have to love myself first in order to love another. We can help others as much as it hurts us. Sometimes we needlessly wear ourselves out over things that we cannot solve or that do not concern us. Supporting does not mean solving other people's problems, and even less so on a regular basis, we often invalidate people by trying to do everything for them, especially with our loved ones.

Objectively it is easy to say that we should not take things to heart, however in practice it is not so easy, because it is an emotion like fear, which is only activated when the conditions are given, and that no matter how hard you try you can not stop it, you just have to learn to live with it. It is not something that is activated or deactivated at will. The only way I see to control that feeling is to get out of the situation, to think about something else, to be absent. I also read once that solitude and quietness help to recharge the energy drain that empathy consumes, and it happens to be something I love.

So, empathy can be a very useful or exhausting tool according to the use we make of it, that is why it is an emotion that must be very well managed. As in everything, balance is fundamental.

Thanks to God for every moment of life
and to you for joining me in this reading.

_{The photograph shown is my own.
Editing with the PhotoCollage application.
Emojis made with the Bitmoji application.
The separator used was made in PowerPoint.
Translation courtesy of deepl.com}