Treatment > The Three Types of Empathy

The Three Types of Empathy

The Three Types Of Empathy And Why You Need To Have Them To Be Successful

Did you know there are three types of empathy? Cognitive empathy, emotional empathy and compassionate empathy. This article teaches us about all three types of empathy and why it is important to have all three in one person, why it is relevant to every one of us to be successful in our relationships with others and how your physiotherapists at City Physio use their empathic qualities to provide caring solutions to assist you in resolving your pain and the issues that may be contributing to your feelings around your pain or injury.

Having and practising empathy is an essential quality if you want to get along with people, resolve issues, create understanding, broaden your perspective, be curious, learn deeply and provide care with a foundation of understanding to others around you. That might be towards people in your family, your workplace or your friendship circles. It can be towards someone you don’t know but come into contact with such as a car driver who cuts you off, a person who trips over on the footpath near you or for a parent with a screaming toddler in a supermarket you are shopping in. It could also be for those you do not know directly such as people you see in the news, on social media, TV or hear about their situations through other people or from observing from a distance without deeper knowledge of the situation. Often as human beings, our initial reaction is to come to a quick conclusion, label or judgment about someone or something based on our thoughts, our current mood, how much sleep we have had, our recent and distant past experiences, the information we have heard and taken as true without opting to learn more deeply about the topic or situation, which then forms our own perspective on something – mostly known as our judgment of someone or something.

What is Cognitive Empathy?

Cognitive empathy is having the capacity to detect and understand another person’s thoughts, feelings, and condition from that person’s point of view or perspective, rather than from our own point of view or perspective. It requires us to imagine placing ourselves in that person’s place and allowing ourselves to try and understand the emotions that they may be feeling through rational and logical thought processes. The ability to use cognitive empathy assists us in problem-solving and using a wide lens perspective when we are trying to get to the heart of an issue or resolution of a problem. This thought process requires us to be nonjudgemental.

What is Emotional Empathy?

Emotional empathy is what occurs when you feel the same thing as another person as if you have caught their feelings by standing alongside them. This can occur when you become involved in someone’s personal distress or it can occur in happy situations eg. when a baby smiles back at its parent smiling at them or crying at a funeral when you see the bereaved crying.

What is Compassionate Empathy?

Compassionate empathy is what most of us think of as being empathic. It usually involves taking action to assist someone who is in pain by trying to alleviate that pain by helping in some way. This might be you doing something directly to assist or it might take the form of helping that person to resolve something that is the issue that has contributed to creating their pain. This is what we generally expect from the people who care about us, our family, our closest friends and the health professionals we choose to seek help from.

Emotional Intelligence – What is it and why do we need it? How does it relate to empathy?

All three types of empathy form the foundation of emotional intelligence – Emotional intelligence is the ability to deal with other people successfully using self-awareness and self-regulation skills. Emotional intelligence incorporates identifying emotions, using emotions, understanding emotions and regulating emotions.

Having and using emotional intelligence skills helps us to better communicate with each other, it helps us reduce anxiety and stress in ourselves and in others, we can use it to defuse conflicts, we can use it to improve our relationships, the capacity to have empathy for others is underpinned by having high emotional intelligence, and probably most importantly when we are dealing with pain and injury and the emotions surrounding that, emotional intelligence creates a pathway for us to effectively overcome life’s challenges.

Back to empathy and how the team at City Physiotherapy incorporates our empathic qualities to deliver successful outcomes for you

All three types of empathy wrapped up in one are what a person in pain needs from others in order to help them. A person doesn’t only require you to understand their point of view as this only goes part of the way to helping that person – this would be cognitive empathy alone and can sometimes come across as uncaring without the other two types of empathy with it – you may have had this experience with a Dr who didn’t listen to you or ask you enough questions making you feel not heard or that they did not care enough. Our staff will listen to you, we will learn about your unique situation and experience and we will attempt to see it through your eyes so we can learn how to help the way that works best for you.

The last thing a person in distress or pain requires is someone standing next to them overwhelmed with the same emotions and not being able to provide any action or solutions – this would be emotional empathy alone. It is not helpful to receive this type of empathy from anyone, friends or family, let alone from an overwhelmed with emotion health professional. A person in pain is seeking help. Our skill lies in understanding why they feel the way they do and providing evidence-based treatment and advice that accesses the parts of your nervous system and brain involved in healing. When we provide advice with a conversation about understanding why we want to do something or why we want you to do something, this helps you to heal and establishes new neural pathways that create lasting change.

Compassionate empathy demonstrates our concern for someone and allows us to show our sympathy towards their situation, but with an additional step towards providing a solution.

A person in pain requires us to provide nonjudgemental understanding through utilising our ability to think broadly, to ask to the right questions, to have sympathy for what they are going through, in addition to assistance in and guidance to resolve the cause of their pain or distress. At City Physiotherapy our goals are to develop successful outcomes for you through creating patient-therapist relationships based on empathy and understanding your unique issues. In order to do this we must possess all three types of empathy because it allows us to readily respond to you, our patient’s needs and experiences and to provide you with practical short and longterm solutions delivered with care and understanding for each person, taking into consideration their past experiences, their current situation and their future goals. And as this article is also about how we provide empathic care, I feel I must also say that as therapists we can’t do what we do without the wonderful support staff at City Physiotherapy and the empathic qualities that they bring to the clinic both to their interaction with patients and to the relationships that they have with the physiotherapists and remedial massage therapists.

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