How Empathy Can Block Creativity

HSP Health Blog offers insight into the highly sensitive trait and its genetic and stress diseases. It offers alternative health strategies for HSP’s to support their highest functioning.

We HSPs are famous for our empathy. We are also often creative. Often we are also creatively blocked.

Is there a relationship? Can empathy get in the way of creativity and block it?

Empathy Is Precious

I personally treasure empathy. Not just for its humanitarian value, but because it is also a great tool of discovery. Empathy is a great way to learn about the world. It enables you to look at anything from another point of view.

It also helps you with all the information that your nervous system takes in. Empathy helps you relate to the energy of each piece of information and if it is a multifaceted energy, you can engage all of it.

Empathy lets you into the complexity and nuance of anything. You are able to perceive the dynamics and structure of anything.

Empathy is a holistic window to the world and so offers HSPs the potential for a special kind of wisdom that only insight can offer.

The Price Of Empathy

Empathy can cause us to feel like we are drowning in information. It can feel like we are being overwhelmed with so many factors and considerations that it can be hard for us to move forward.

Many HSPs, myself included, like to process every input conscientiously before making decisions and taking action. Hurting someone else is anathema to many HSPs; the pain is too unbearable. As a result, our awareness can become a huge burden. Our sense of responsibility may far outweigh our actual or real role or responsibility. Our skills may not necessarily be up to the information we take in.

All of this, of course, forces us to try to come up with ways to handle the overwhelming information, but nonetheless, it is a huge processing and interactive burden. And it slows us down.

Empathy Affects Our Creativity

Empathy affects our creativity because it increases the options and possibilities that we see.

It

• helps us see beyond the object to the being.
• causes us to embrace the other and to naturally care.
• prevents us from taking actions that would harm because we can become immobilized that way.
• lets our options and choices become animated and alive through our energetic experience.
• helps us see paths and directions can so numerous that we sometimes cannot choose.not from laziness or wishy-washiness, but from our own conscientiousness.

Empathy is something that non-HSPs often will not understand.

We have a right brained empathy not a left brained empathy. It is not object oriented. It is being oriented and that makes all the difference.

Empathy And Creative Choices

Empathy affects the choices we make. Like other HSPs, I certainly try to make empathetic choices.

Empathy can lead us to better choices or to weaker ones. They cause us to use our creativity to serve the greater good, or have it used to serve someone else’s self interest.

When we allow our empathy to be abused, we cannot use our creativity well and we hurt ourselves. Codependency can result in the misuse of our creative talents and that is never good. HSPs have to watch for those who are victim narcissists, complainers and passive aggressive individuals who use our empathy to serve their purposes.

Empathy can have a tremendously positive impact on our decisions and choices.  We let it inform us about when it has been used well, because when that happens we make choices that have the feeling of rightness or of a great fit that gives us a good feeling about what we are doing.

It is up to us to make sure our empathy serves our creativity well and is used in a positive way.

It is such a shame when empathy and/or creativity is squandered because both our empathy and creativity are precious.

The world needs more of both.

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