Ecpathy: what it is and how it influences our personal relationships

Human beings, like animals, are sentient and suffering beings, this means that we have knowledge of things and experience pain and suffering. However, the ability to recognize the different emotions and feelings in others and to share them seems to be a emotion more typical of humans, although many studies support that all mammals show certain manifestations of empathy.

The difference perhaps regarding the ability to empathy resides between human beings and animals to the extent that it manifests itself. Many people get excessively involved in the problems and pain of others, they can even identify with it and feel it as their own, creating an interaction that, far from being healthy, becomes deficient, since, on the one hand, we fail to relieve the other and, on the other, we also suffer themselves.

Ecpathy is often defined as the opposite of empathy, but far from being a selfish condition or typical of psychopaths or cold people. This mental function, according to many specialists, can counteract excessive empathy and allow us to achieve a balance in social interactions that are difficult to cope with and help us offer support to the person who is suffering or experiencing a situation traumatic.

Therefore, ecpathy would be the ability that would help us achieve a healthier empathy. But what does this little-known ability really imply? And how is it able to regulate excessive identification with the other and establish a border between oneself and others? In this article we are going to talk in depth about ecpathy and its main functions.

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What is ecpathy?

Ecpathy is a new concept, which would be complementary to empathy. Through ecpathy we are able to establish a border between our feelings and those of others. In other words, empathy is the ability that allows us not to identify too much with the suffering of another.

The word ecpathy was proposed in 2005, by the doctor in Psychiatry José Luis González. Therefore, it is a relatively new term compared to empathy, whose origin dates back to beginning of the 20th century, specifically in 1904, where it is collected for the first time in a dictionary of the language English.

To facilitate the understanding of this term, José Luis González defines it at a point in the article where reference is made to this condition for the first time, as opposite of empathy, being ecpathy "a voluntary mental process of perception and exclusion of feelings, attitudes, thoughts and motivations induced by other".

Empathy is the ability or mental function that allows us to take into account the other and perceive, understand and share their feelings. As its own etymology indicates, it allows us to connect with the other "feel inside" contrary to the "ek-patheia" which means "take out" allowing us to modulate the feeling that can cause us to see someone suffering. It is in this modulation capacity where the importance of ecpathy lies, its definition as contrary to empathy is only a facilitation for its understanding. You can be empathic and empathic at the same time, it is more, it is necessary. As Aristotle said, "virtue is in the middle."

Therefore, the ecpathic capacity has nothing to do with appearing unfriendly or cold towards others, on the contrary, a good regulation between ecpathy and empathy allows us to offer the appropriate response and the necessary support to the person who needs comfort. And it prevents me from experiencing an excessive emotional response to the suffering of others, allowing us, on the one hand, to maintain the necessary serenity and inner balance and on the other hand it makes us truly empathetic by putting the other's suffering above us in the situation that they belongs.

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What are the functions of ecpathy?

Ecpathy seemed to be a mechanism that has several functions, but it could mainly be divided into two main categories. A first category in which ecpathy would help us to protect ourselves from others and from possible manipulations to which is submitted to us and, on the other hand, it would allow us to give a really adequate response to the emotions of the other.

Ecpathy and manipulation

There are a series of pathologies, for example, narcissism, where both direct and indirect manipulation is the person's fundamental weapon. Through guilt or generating other types of negative emotions, people narcissiststhey are able to subjugate others for their own benefit. They can do this by often presenting themselves as the victim of the story, when they are criticized for some inappropriate or unpleasant behavior.

In this case, ecpathy plays an important role, since it allows us to separate ourselves from the "suffering of the other" and see the reality of things and understand that it is a manipulation. Normally, narcissists look for especially empathetic people to establish intimate relationships. As we can see, the fact of identifying with the suffering of others can be frankly detrimental in some types of relationships.

Ecpathy can also act as a defense mechanism against movies, series, programs... or ultimately against any story that look for emotional contagion as a way to get an audience or even other purposes, such as money through voting or telephone messages that promote some contests, where to save the participant you have to send a message that has a cost, by the way, much higher than what normal.

The ability to separate the experiences of others from one's own is fundamental so as not to fall into the networks of this type of program. It should be noted that not only the world of cinema, but also marketing and political campaigns make use of emotional contagion to encourage people to buy or to get the vote, and they make us make more sentimental decisions in places where perhaps reason should prevail over the heart or the impulse.

In its role as a regulatory mechanism of empathy, ecpathy can protect us from suffering certain types of conditions that could lead to more serious emotional disorders. For example, there are people who have a lot of empathy, among other conditions, and tend to put their needs before those of others. Ecpathy would be in charge of telling us and allowing us to have time for ourselves and our hobbies without feeling guilty about them, it would come in a way to compensate for this type of behaviors that from time to time are not bad, but can become pathological if the person forgets about himself, so he can develop some kind of dependency.

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Ecpathy and empathy

We have already mentioned several times throughout the article the risk that empathy presents, it can sometimes cause us to identify too much with the feelings of others. This results in two unhealthy behaviors that can occur at the same time, one is forgetting ourselves to attend to the other, and the second is that it influences our ability to give an adequate response to the person who needs to be assisted or seeks comfort, since we lack perspective as we are emotionally affected by the event.

Simplifying in terms of their differences, ecpathy and empathy differ mainly in terms of the plane in which they interact; If empathy allows us to place ourselves on the same plane as others, we can perceive and understand their emotions because we are capable of sharing them. Ecpathy allows us to get out of that plane and place ourselves in a different place from where we can be calm and focused to give an adequate response to the suffering of others.

Ecpathy does not come to take away our empathetic capacity, but rather allows us to get out of that excessive identification, where we are not able to live and share the feelings and emotions of balanced way. It prevents negative emotions such as pain, fear, or suffering from taking hold of us and allows us to give a supportive response in the interactions that need it or identify a manipulative situation for what it is, and not get stuck in suffering unaffiliated.

One wonders that just as without suffering there would be no capacity for joy, if without ecpathy a true empathy could really occur. Although these mental functions are not feelings like the first ones, we can make a kind of parallelism in their way of influencing each other. It is true that if we do not know true suffering or if we do not live in situations that are really adverse to throughout our lives, we would not be able to be joyful, since any setback would seem unbearable. Therefore, the adverse situation allows joy rather than being an opposite. It seems that in a certain way, ekpathy, like sadness, also allows an empathic response, since without it, empathy would only be our own suffering, it would only be the feelings of others transferred to ourselves, by reacting in an overly empathetic way, we would be taking part of their suffering or protagonism from the person who really cares. have.

Therefore, the ability to understand other people's feelings and be truly empathetic would be directly related to our ekatic capacity. Ecpathy allows us to respect and understand the emotional reality of the other as different from our own. This seems basic, logically the suffering of the other is not mine, it often occurs between close people, for example, in relationships of filiation (between parents and children). How many times do we avoid being vulnerable or do not show pain at home or at a family event, for fear of that our parents also suffer, this behavior also occurs in the other direction from parents to sons. This delimitation of the empathetic capacity, rather than bringing us closer to the rest, what it does is separate us and disconnect us.

Apart from understanding the emotional reality, the other as different from ours, we can also work on the ecpathic capacity by developing other strategies such as knowing ourselves and being aware of our own limitations or vulnerabilities, and above all by being able to return the other's feelings and understand that only then can we help them better.