Relationships affect how we feel. When we connect with others it can be healing, but sometimes too much closeness can cause us pain. I’m referring to the uncomfortable interplay of another person’s feelings with our own, those times when we feel too pulled in. For example, we might be filled with a partner’s tension after their stressful day at work or an aging parent’s despair or loneliness. Experiences that weigh others down don’t need to crush us too. When they do, however, empathy has gone too far and the space between the two people has collapsed. That’s when it’s time to find our way back into our own skin without cutting off our relationship to the other person.
Understanding how we empathize is the key to healthy relating. The goal is to experience empathy without getting lost in it. One way to achieve this is through the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness helps us awaken to our experience and choose how to react when thoughts and feelings first arise. It is self-awareness without judgment. In the practice of mindfulness we track an audible inhale and exhale. As we listen to what’s going on inside–starting with the breath– we are by nature in union with ourselves. We are in our bodies.
In my roles as psychoanalyst and mother, I value self-awareness a great deal. Awareness of the breath grounds me in my reality and enables me to experience a purer understanding of others. In my opinion, self-empathy is the precursor to genuine empathy. Sensing our own experience, knowing where we are in space helps us delineate where we end and others begin. A fuller relationship with our embodied self paves the way for a boundaried way of relating with self-empathy as the foundation. Just think about the safety advice you get on an airplane when they tell parents to put their oxygen masks on first before assisting any children. Self, then others.
When we deepen our connection to our bodies–by way of the breath– we pave the way for healthy and easeful relating.