People in the academic realm, like many other areas of study, can’t seem to agree on what empathy actually is.
Simply put, my guest today Karla McLaren’s goal with her work on empathy is not to contend, necessarily agree with or go against any of the research, but merely to make empathy accessible to regular people out in the world who are trying to live their lives.
Karla defines empathy as a social and emotional skill that helps us feel and understand the emotions, circumstances, intentions, thoughts and needs of others such that we can offer sensitive perceptive and appropriate communication and support.
She talks about empathy on a scale of hypo to hyper empathic and offers some characteristics of each to help you decifer where you land on the spectrum and how to develop a better relationship both intrapersonally (with yourself) and interpersonally (with others).
In The Art of Empathy and in today’s interview, Karla gets into some practical tools you can use to center yourself and manage overwhelm or bring in some calm to give you a necessary cognitive pause.
She even dives into some ways to manage input from various sources, like TV, social media, and really any marketing channels. A very interesting correlation she draws is depression in younger generations as a sort of biological response or balancer to slow us down in such a fast paced world.
Recent research even shown that just having a larger vocabulary for emotions gives you emotional skills all by itself.
Getting familiar with your emotions and understanding what they are really calling for also seems like it can start to rewire your conditioned emotional response. Karla gave an example about anger and how a healthy emotional interpretation would sound more like… “There is some boundary or rule that has been broken right now and what do I need to do about it” rather than what most people do which is “I’m angry, who’s going to get hit.”
There’s a lot in this one, and here are a few big ideas I extracted…
- Emotions are reliable and they bring you gifts and skills – Each category of emotion (4 in total – angers, fears, sadnesses, and happinesses) always have a specific message unique to the emotion
- Often times when we find emotions other people have uncomfortable for us to be around, we tend to have a problems managing that one ourselves
- Using an Emotional Vocabulary List to catch an emotion in it’s soft state and before it escalates to medium and intense states
- There is no such thing as good and bad emotions and each emotion is a part of our basic cognitive function. In actuality, what you do with emotions whether they are positive or negative, can be a good or bad reaction
- There is a healthy expression of shame
Karla’s Bio
Karla McLaren, M.Ed. is an award-winning author, social science researcher, and empathy pioneer. Her lifelong work focuses on her grand unified theory of emotions, which revalues even the most “negative” emotions and opens startling new pathways into self-awareness, effective communication, and healthy empathy.
Karla also developed the groundbreaking Six Essential Aspects of Empathy model that makes all of the processes in empathy easily understandable and accessible — so that people can develop and manage their empathy intentionally.
Karla is the author of The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life’s Most Essential Skill (2013), The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings are Trying to Tell You (2010), and the multi-media online course Emotional Flow: Becoming Fluent in the Language of Emotions (2012). She is also the coauthor (with cult expert Janja Lalich, PhD) of Escaping Utopia: Growing Up in a Cult, Getting Out, and Starting Over (Routledge, 2018), which focuses on the stories of 70 people who grew up in and escaped from cults spanning a dozen countries.
In this episode you’ll learn
- Ways to slow down and examine your choices when different emotions arise.
- Tips and practices to overcome the anxiety of our modern world.
- The reasons you shouldn’t run from your emotions and how to work with the ones that make you uncomfortable
- Why emotions are neither good or bad, and how you can use them to your benefit
- How shame can be used in a healthy way to help you control your actions.
- Learning to read other’s emotions so you increase your caring and empathy
- How to increase your emotional vocabulary and better handle feelings when they arise.
- Ways to decode and adjust your destructive behaviors and patterns
- How a practice of grounding can get you in touch with your body and the present moment.
- Learning to navigate the emotions evoked by social media that are leading to higher levels of depression.
- How you can hold space for your emotions and cultivate a sense of calm
Click to Tweet Karla’s quote
– Karla McLaren
Connect with Karla on social media
Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Website | Empathy Academy
Resources
- Pick up The Art of Empathy on Amazon
- Pick up your FREE Emotional Vocabulary List here.
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