There are two types of empathy.
Positive Emotional Empathy
Positive or Emotional empty is an emotional reaction to the pain of another. This occurs when one person is hurting and another takes on the energy of that person, in other words, feels the pain of the person and develop an emotional reaction to it. It is feeling what others feel and internalizing.
Positive and Emotional empathy function this way; When an individual begin to randomly takes on the energy of others and internalize their experience, they don’t only imagine how they feel but have emotional reaction to something they could just empathize and move on. You take on the energy of other people because you feel what they are going through and this can cause them to develop a kind of sickness, some people go into depression due to this emotional reaction they have for other people’s troubles.
It’s something to feel, empathize and encourage but it’s not something to internalize and it becomes your problem.
In Positive Emotional Empathy we develop and grow in our relationship skills, here we just don’t get caught up by our emotions, we process the emotion as we are feeling it, we don’t allow it to register in our brains.
This is where you love a person, feel for them but make them participate in their own outcome. You teach them to tap their own resources.
Positive Emotional Empathy is when you feel for a person and you have an intelligent response that helps them to help themselves for example, ‘ I understand you… I feel you… But I am not going to take your energy into me and go there with you, that is not going to help me nor help you either, it’s not my issue it’s your problem, I am not going to deplete myself to get you out of whatever it is you are in. I am going to feel, love you enough to show you how to meet your own needs.
In Positive emotional empathy you don’t become an enabler of bad behaviour but you simply have a cognitive response to what is going, you are not going to use emotional response here, either “I cry because you are crying” Because it’s not going to help any of us but I am going to help you make an intelligent choice that could change your life. In John 5:2-9 ‘Jesus had a cognitive and spiritual response to the man at the pool.’ He didn’t help or touched him but he showed him how to get well.
In Positive emotional empathy, you love with boundaries. Here you do not have to deplete yourself of what God has given you, what you have worked for or set yourself backward to fix another.
It means you are going to love that person enough to tell them the truth, if they accept it fine and if they don’t is left to them because you are not going to allow them to infringe into your life as we all have the responsibility to do certain things for ourselves. And you are going to still love them where they are with boundaries.
It is important that know that this boundary can also be applied to even your growing children as well as your close relations. It is improper to spend your entire life trying to fix and manage someone else, they trouble and crisis they create you are always in the middle of it working hard to fix people who are not even trying to fix anything for themselves, they create problems for themselves because they know you are going to be there to fix it.
Stop being a fixer, if they create problems, how is it that their problems automatically become yours? That’s not healthy. The Bible says in Deuteronomy 13:19 “Life is choice driven”.
I have to love you enough to let you live by the consequences of your own choices.
If you choose to live your life on the lowest level I am going to love you enough to let you do that insofar as you are alright with it and I am going to love me enough to be fine with that. There are people in our lives that we want more for them than they want for themselves. “Life and death, blessing and curse choose”
Loving you does not require that I put myself on hold or does it require that I allow you to ruin the atmosphere around my life.
Draining Emotional Empathy.
Draining Emotional Empathy occurs when internalize emotional reaction of someone else’s situation begin to take a toll in your life, causing a problem and other issues which starts to manifest in form of sickness such depression, heart attack, stroke, or panic attack, some people bring other people’s heaviness, negative energy back home and it begins to affect the entire family because of this emotional empathic reaction to someone else’s experience.
This often happens when we are not mature enough to know how to process it or what to do with it and so it becomes unhealthy for us.
We must understand that energy spirit are transferrable and if we are immature and undeveloped to relate in ways that we will not be negatively impacted, we begin to suffer from other people’s stuff which are not supposed to be our business because people with deeply empathetic nature find themselves taking on other people’s issues and making them theirs.
However, there is a better way of empathizing and helping out, acting in this matter can give energy vampires who intentionally drains others a leeway to get their needs met through your supply of sad and negative emotions.
Emotional Empathy also cause people to long for people who abuse them. Sometimes we fail to realize that not all stories we hear are actually true, when people share their story with us depending on the nature of the story and instead of us to perceive the person as either a narcissist, psychopath or sociopath, we start to connect with their energy and the energy of their story, you begin to feel for the person to the point where you no longer feel what you should feel for you, at that moment you start to believe you can change them. The reality is that you are setting yourself up for abuse.
Some people have permanently taken the codependent role due to emotional Empathy, they deplete themselves by curing other people’s pain and become broken because they love and find a sense of fulfilment in meeting some other people’s needs and build the identity of being the saviour of the day, so you deprive yourself to solve another person’s crisis.
This is where most people get stuck in life finding their sense of purpose and value in meeting other people’s needs, they come back home their own needs are not met because no one is there to meet them but they are constantly giving to people who suppose to take care of their own needs, like what plays in families.
Well, the churches teaches that it is the Christian thing to do, but you end up having users who step into your life and narcissists who are there to take advantage of your Christlike empathy who have no corresponding rules, even the Bible says in 2nd Thessalonians 3:10 “He who does not work let him not eat.”
Codependency is a behaviour condition in a relationship where one person enables another person’s addiction, immaturity, irresponsibility or underachievement.
Among the core characteristics of codependency is the excessive reliance on other people for approval and a sense of identity, sometimes rescuing broken people can become your dysfunctional identity, you begin to create codependent relationships which always often start with Emotional Empathy.
The codependent needs to give everything to a toxic person to fill fulfilled and when they do that still wonder why they feel fulfilled and at the same time a sense of lack and the flip side of that coin is the narcissist who has taken everything from the person to fill fulfilled.
Many narcissists are seeking out toxic empaths who become overwhelmed with what they feel towards the narcissists, a toxic empath results from emotional empathy and becomes a codependent.