You’d think I’d be used to it by now that I find myself thinking about something a lot, investigate a bit and find it’s actually more complicated and nuanced than I earlier believed. Lather, rinse, repeat. Once again this was the case with empathy. Something I thought was relatively straightforward, and I understood, nope! There’s actually multiple kinds of empathy. Who knew? Not me!
Something I’ve been noticing a lot is a pattern of over empathizing and it crossing into enabling. It makes sense to me that something that was really brought to the forefront more recently we would overcorrect and now be somewhere new but is anyone else noticing this?
It just feels like there is either a brutal lack of empathy or a fire hose of empathy but something in the middle or a practice of extending others empathy feels elusive.
I am once again asking ya’ll to pause your summer fun and give me some feedback or your questions and the ask is two part. I heard from a lot of you about arrogance which was very cool. Thank you. I also want to hear your empathy thoughts. Feel free to comment here, leave a message on the speak pipe, or send me an email.
and I are recording an episode next week and we want to hear from you! We’re doing a bit of an astro check in around Venus retrograde, a lil prep for Mercury retrograde but we’re also opening up the cosmic advice hotline if you have any questions for us. Do you want to know about your chart, share a weird Venus RX experience, ask about running a spiritual biz, whatever you want! Again you can comment here, shoot me an email annatoonk@gmail.com or leave a voicemail on speakpipe. We’ll be using only our finest and best spiritual tools to answer your questions. These are always fun to do so I hope you’ll submit a question if you have one, don’t be shy :)xx. A
Empathy thoughts:
The Brene Brown video I mentioned
“More and more, we live in bubbles. Most of us are surrounded by people who look like us, vote like us, earn like us, spend money like us, have educations like us and worship like us. The result is an empathy deficit, and it’s at the root of many of our biggest problems.”
Too much empathy is damaging
“When I am enabling someone’s self-sabotaging behaviors, it’s often because I am out of touch with my own feelings and needs, and singularly focused on just helping the other person to “feel better.” Often, this is because I believe that my safety or connectedness depends on the other person getting their needs met. Or, because I need others to feel ok, for me to feel ok.” Empathy versus enabling
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