“Empathy, something quite different from sympathy”

Being able to pity another is one thing,

But living another’s perspective is like no other.

For comprehending another’s thoughts, feelings and emotions,

This is what makes us intrinsically human.

And to neglect this distinction, can be detrimental:

Losing sight, losing touch

Our species will spin into regression

For without love, care and compassion

Can life be worth living?

Reflection

Empathy is a term that is often understood, but yet sometimes misunderstood. Many people confuse empathy for sympathy, but empathy is much more. According to Robins (2010), empathy is a sense that we can truly understand, relate to, or imagine the depth of another person’s emotional state or situation. It implies feeling with a person, rather than feeling sorry for a person.

Many say our health care system lacks empathy- but why are health care practioners finding it difficult to show empathy, love care and compassion towards patients? I believe it is important to realize the factors that get in the way of health care practioners utilizing and experiencing the power of empathy in clinical practice. Fear is the root that is preventing health care practioners from showing empathy, essentially to protect ourselves emotionally therefore detaching the patient from our own emotions. We treat our patients with detached functionality rather than empathetically. There is nothing wrong with fear, it is a natural human emotion, which have positive aspects to it, if you are willing to own it, admit it, express it and move through it. Fear is the emotion that keeps us all individually safe, as each individual will be fearful of different things. There are lots of things, people and situations that cause fear within us, however we tend to blame the fear on ‘them’, our patients, instead of owning up and realizing that fear comes from within us. It is a protective mechanism to protect ourselves against threats, and this makes it difficult to experience the power of empathy. As a result of fear, we see our patients as just a number, another name to our checklist which we need to tick off by three in the afternoon.

In order to empathize with your patient, good communication is of the essence. Personally, poor communication has been a reason as to why I empathize less or nothing with my patient. I am unable to hear my patients thoughts feelings and emotions and as a result lend to treating the patient functionally. This happens unintentionally where in specific situations, without even noticing, automatically make us feel no empathy towards our patients. Finishing our patients sentences for them as if you know what they are going to say to hasten up the conversation, changing the topic of the conversation to the thought you had so that the conversation shifts towards you and thus away from the patient, focusing on solving a problem that you think is the patients main concern instead of listening and discovering what their concerns are. These are all examples which I myself am guilty of in order to protect my own emotions. Emotion has a significant influence on the cognitive processes in humans, including your perception, attention span, learning, memory and reasoning (Tyng, Amin, Saad, Malik, 2007).  Empathy is well expressed in the famous novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee. It reads: “You never really know a man until you understand things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it” (Lee, 1999).  If health care practioners allow patients to affect them emotionally, and as a result have poor communication and listening skills, we are unable to ‘walk in someone else’s shoes’ to try understand the patient’s situation in the present moment.

Being honest, open and true to ourselves can give us as health care professionals the ability to be more empathetic, therefore showing more love, care and compassion towards our patients and ourselves. In order to achieve this, good communication skills towards our patients is of the essence and will influence how much we empathize with our patients.

 References:

Lee, H. (1999). To kill a mockingbird (40th Anniversary ed.). New York: Harper Collins Publishers.

Robbins, M. (2010, October 13). Retrieved from The Importance of Empathy: https://mike-robbins.com/the-power-of-empathy/

Tyng, C. M., Amin, H. U., Saad, M. N., & Malik, A. S. (2017). The influences of emotion on learning and memory. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 1454.