What is Somatic Empathy?
“Somatic Empathy = experiencing what other people feel while being aware that this vicarious state is produced by someone else.”
Many of us occasionally feel what others are feeling as if it were happening to us; perceiving their headache, hip pain or sadness as if it were our own. It is a relatively common experience but scientists are only now beginning to unpack how and why this happens.
Known as somatic transference by psychotherapists, interpersonal physiology by social neuroscientists, and afferent empathy by cognitive scientists, this phenomenon turns out to be an essential aspect of social intelligence which we share with non-human animals. Because it happens to everyone (mostly beneath conscious awareness) it influences our health and well-being.
RESOURCES
My fascination with somatic empathy led me to develop informational resources:
a 300-page book Another Self detailing biological explanations and supported by academic references in the notes . Available on Amazon and Kindle. As we all experience somatic empathy to some degree, aimed at a broad non-specialist audience.
articles on my blog page, the online magazine Medium, and Psychology Today.
Workshops and webinars [see events]
an ebook Somatic Empathy: an overview (what, how and why it happens) illustrated 44 pages in my store
ANOTHER SELF: How Your Body Helps You Understand Others
Paperback ISBN 9781-80049-280-6 | and KINDLE
Another Self explains why we sometimes take on the physical, emotional, and even mental states of others. In this book—the first overview of somatic empathy—Dr Cindy Engel brings together research into social perception and interpersonal physiology to explain how and why our thoughts and feelings are not always entirely our own.
New evidence reveals that this tendency to 'catch' others' emotional and physiological condition is not merely a quirk of sensitive individuals but a fundamental aspect of human intelligence—that feeling with others is an ancient preverbal strategy enabling us to predict others’ intentions.
Understanding how somatic empathy affects us without our knowing, enables us to sidestep the perils of secondary trauma, overwhelm, and burnout while optimising our comprehension of our social world.
Be prepared to reassess your sense of self, your relationships, your occupation, and your choice of entertainment.
A few take aways from Another Self:
· It is normal to share others’ emotions, physiological arousal, aches and pains, even thought processes.
· Somatic empathy is an ancient pre-verbal intelligence, a means of understanding others by experiencing what we perceive about them.
· Physiological synchrony and brain coupling between mothers and their infants seem to establish and facilitate self-regulation later in life.
· Trauma can pass from person to person via somatic empathy.
· Neurodiversity and hypersensitivity often reflect greater reliance on somatic empathy to read social situations.
· Somatic empathy is an effective means of nonverbal communication between humans and other animals.
· Attention-grabbing media deliberately encourages somatic empathy with traumatic information such that over time we can experience vicarious harm. Be mindful of exposure to ‘news’ and violent ‘entertainment’.
· By understanding how somatic empathy works, we can avoid taking on any negative states of others while maintaining sensitivity.
