Ecpathy As A Strategy To Take Care Of Your Emotional Health

Ecpathy is a very valuable mental process that allows us, among other things, to limit the emotional contagions that we receive from others. It is about being aware and fully participating in the emotional realities of others, but without getting out of our shoes. Only in this way can we provide more valid help and avoid those emotional floods that often block us.

Something that often goes unnoticed is the contagious power of emotions. This is something we all know; however, it often goes unnoticed.

The world of cinema uses it, as does neuromarketing when designing advertising campaigns, those in which they manage to awaken in us a specific feeling capable of driving purchasing behavior.

The political sphere also uses them in its speeches, instrumentalizing fear to capture votes in one direction or another. Emotions not only flood us at times, but they affect us to the point of modulating behaviors.

We experience it in certain relationships based on dependency and manipulation; We also feel it when we spend time with people who go through difficult times.

The human being has an exceptional ability: the ability to empathize. Thanks to it, we understand others, we identify with them and we can provide help, support or comfort. Now, that affective connection must be balanced and adjusted. Ecpathy has that purpose: to serve as an intentional control towards the feelings of others.

Ecpathy as a strategy for building healthy relationships

This concept is relatively new. It is important to note that the term ecpathy was introduced by Professor of Psychiatry José Luis González de Rivera in 2005.

In the scientific journal Psiquis where he published his work, he highlighted, for example, the influence of certain people when projecting their emotions onto others with a clearly instrumental and harmful purpose.

This is something that is often seen in the most damaging relationships, as well as in the psychopathic personality and its subtle ability to manipulate and emotionally drain others.

Likewise, it is important to highlight a reality that all those professionals who work in the health sector frequently experience, such as compassion fatigue.

This psychological condition originates through that therapeutic help that is provided  to the person in need of any type of attention or assistance. Little by little, the delicate and vulnerable reality of the patient ends up causing a patent wear on the professional, to the point of invalidating his work, of not feeling capable of being useful.

As we can intuit, there are many situations in which both the vulnerability of others, the bad arts and the manipulation that others inflict infect us, flood us to alter values, self-esteem and self-concepts. Therefore, it was necessary to have a term that would capture that very healthy strategy, ecpathy.

Ecpathy and empathy, how are they different?

Empathy allows us to go beyond our own reality to understand other people’s realities. In other words, this psychological strategy is like taking a trip to others to connect with their emotional realities, their thoughts, desires and behaviors. Something like this allows us to understand and act accordingly.

Now, as we have been pointing out, empathy has a risk, and that is that on that outward journey we sometimes forget to return to ourselves. What’s more, one can return to their own shoes, but we carry an extra baggage, a weight that is not ours.

Ecpathy, on the other hand, is a word that derives from the Greek ( ek-patheia ) and means “to feel outside”. Something like this translates into a series of very clear strategies:

• Regulate the degree of emotional involvement.
• It is not raising a wall to prevent the other from touching us with their affections. It is putting filters, it is opening windows to look, but without jumping into the void. It is to continue in our shoes while we visit the emotional home of the other without taking anything with us.
• Likewise, we should not conceive of ecpathy as the opposite of empathy. In reality, it is a complementary quality and both must work together in harmony to guarantee our well-being.

How can I activate my ecpathic abilities?

We are clear that ecpathy is not only a useful skill, but also a necessary one to improve our relationships, to gain happiness and even health. However, how can we awaken our ecpathic potential?

Dr. González Rivera explains it to us in his research work. It would consist of working three dimensions:

• Be aware of our own emotions and also our vulnerabilities. Being connected to our internal reality is the first step and that rudder from which we cannot separate.
• Perceive the other as someone separate from us. Your emotional reality and ours are two different spheres. Despite this delimitation, closeness is possible and necessary to connect and understand.
• Once we connect with the person in front of us, we have to go back. Dr. Rivera defines it as establishing a return of feelings to their original sources. As a strategy, we could say something like “I understand what you feel, but now I leave you with your emotions and I take mine. Only in this way will I protect myself from you and only then will I be able to help you better ».

To conclude, we are facing a relatively new term that is passing into everyday language. It is interesting, it is useful and, above all, it seeks to guarantee our emotional balance a little more.