Personal Distress
(aka, Distress, Empathic Distress, (Compassion Distress)
Different people have called the experience of feeling distress or anxiety by witnessing or empathizing with another persons anxiety, pain or suffering as, Distress, Personal Distress or Empathic Distress. Calling it Empathic Distress does not make experiential or logical sense. In fact, this distress can be a block to empathy.
Naming Responses to Empathizing
This concept of empathic distress as a reaction, has serious logical problems. If distress is a response from empathizing with someone else, and this distress is called Empathic Distress, then shouldn't every feeling that arises when we empathize with someone be called Empathy (Response)? ie
Empathic Distress
Empathic Joy
Empathic Connection
Empathic Curiosity
Empathic Creativity
Empathic Anger
Empathic Love
Empathic (your response here).
etc.
Compassion Communities Confusion
The Compassion Community is one of the major communities that uses and actively promotes the term Empathic Distress. It seems that they want to shift the negative connotations, like; compassion fatigue, from compassion to empathy. It seem almost like a marketing approach. They want to sell the concept of compassion and shift negative aspects to other experiences.
Distress as a Block To Empathy
In the Empathy as Way of Being understanding and definition of empathy, the feeling of distress or what is being called empathic distress, is actually a block to empathy. If I am empathizing with someone else and I start feeling distress, this block my presence and attention with the other person.
There are levels of distress from a slight, to intense, to overwhelming and debilitating.
When empathizing with someone's anxiety, suffering or distress I can continue to stay present and keep listening to them to go deeper. We can see this in the Empathy Circle. For example, if the speaker is expressing anxiety, distress or suffering, the Active Listener "You are feeling anxiety, (distress or suffering, pain) is there more you want to share?
this can be supportive, helpful, and healing for the person in distress to have an listener with empathic presence there.
this can be role played to demonstrate the dynamic
To Do
( ) Hold and record an Empathy Circle to explore this topic. Post the video and write up a response from the insights gathered.
( ) create some role plays in the empathy circle to show this dynamic.
( ) People from the Compassion Community to Interview on this topic.
Tania Singer.
References
These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena,
by C. Daniel Batson
"The term empathy is currently applied to more than a half-dozen phenomena. ..
Concept 7: Feeling Distress at Witnessing Another Person’s Suffering. A state of distress evoked by witnessing another’s distress—your feelings of anxiety and unease evoked by seeing how upset your friend was—has been given a variety of names, including
“empathy” (Krebs, 1975),
“empathic distress” (Hoffman, 1981),
and “personal distress” (Batson, 1991).
This state does not involve feeling distressed for the other (see concept 8) or distressed as the other (concept 3). It involves feeling distressed by the state of the other."
"we propose an integrative model and argue that compassion fatigue should instead be renamed empathic distress fatigue. "
Klimecki, O., & Singer, T. (2012). Empathic distress fatigue rather than compassion fatigue? Integrating findings from empathy research in psychology and social neuroscience. In B. Oakley, A. Knafo, G. Madhavan, & D. S. Wilson (Eds.), Pathological altruism (pp. 368–383). Oxford University Press
Empathy and Compassion
by Tania Singer, Olga M.Klimecki
"According to this line of psychological research, an empathic response to suffering can result in two kinds of reactions: empathic distress, which is also referred to as personal distress; and compassion, which is also referred to as empathic concern or sympathy (Figure 1). For simplicity, we will refer to empathic distress and compassion when speaking about these two different families of emotions.
While empathy refers to our general capacity to resonate with others’ emotional states irrespective of their valence — positive or negative — empathic distress refers to a strong aversive and self-oriented response to the suffering of others, accompanied by the desire to withdraw from a situation in order to protect oneself from excessive negative feelings. "
Maria Sundell
(a sample statement and video (by Olga Klimecki) from Compassion Community)
"Empathy is usually believed to be just a good thing, the more the better. But what many people don't know is that there is something called empathic distress.
This is when experiencing the suffering of someone else becomes overwhelming and difficult to deal with. In order to protect ourselves we naturally try to withdraw from the person or situation.
But when you learn about empathic distress, it's important to also know that it can be counteracted. With compassion. Compassion training has proven to revert the distress. It also induces a prosocial behaviour with warmth and a willingness to alleviate the suffering of the other person.
So empathy and compassion becomes a win-win. When we talk about the importance of empathy in the workplace, we need to remember that if it is not combined with compassion, it might have the opposite effect of what we are looking for."
Turn Empathy Into Compassion Without the Empathic Distress
Research shows ways to avoid empathy's pitfalls while remaining altruistic.
Dec 05, 2019
"Empathy not only can intensify in-group bias, but also has the potential to become empathic distress. This was described by Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki as “a strong aversive and self-oriented response to the suffering of others, accompanied by the desire to withdraw from a situation in order to protect oneself from excessive negative feelings.”