Did anyone tell you Empathy is hard?
All of you have probably seen news on what’s happening around America with the racial injustice and now violence and protests. As I was thinking about how we can do better, the topic that came to my mind, that can really make a difference, is if we all learn to be more empathetic.
So lets talk about what is “Empathy” and why it matter and why is hard and how we can learn it.
What is Empathy?
Definition: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Some people describe it as “suffering with others”. It like when you see your child or best friend very upset, and you feel sad with them, this is you empathizing.
Empathy can show up in many ways:
- when you know and understand what the other person is feeling.
- when you feel with the other person
- when you can imagine what they might feel
In any of these ways (knowing, feeling with, imagining) what is crucial is:
- Perspective taking: you have to kind of put yourself in their shoes and see the world like they see
- Avoid judgement: to not be judge their circumstances, experience or feelings. To not say “oh that feeling is wrong or right or good or bad”, or “you brought this on yourself” etc.
- Acknowledge: to communicate that you hear them and reflect your understanding of that person’s feeling
How Empathy is not Sympathy?
Sympathy is when we “feel for” and empathy is when we “feel with” other person. I feel sad for you. “Poor you”. It’s a judgmental space where we feel we are in a better place than the other person and then we look down on them and feel pity for them. And maybe even start giving them advice and solving their problem because somehow we know better. Instead of taking them perspective we try to give them a new perspective by sometimes silver lining their situation.
Why is empathy important?
1) It fill our basic needs: To be heard, seen and understood is a basic human need. How many times have you personally been in tough situation in life and all you need is someone who can hear you out, understand your POV and feel your suffering and that’s it.
The same is true for all other people. We are all looking to be heard, seen and understood both during our victories but more so during our tough times when we suffer.
For example let’s say a child falls down and get hurt. He immediately runs up to his mother. And the mother obviously cannot reduce the physical pain from the fall but when she just sees his pain, says “its ok, I am here”, the child stops crying. Has the injury healed? NO. But he feels his pain has been witnessed, understood and somehow that actually reduces his emotional pain and surprisingly physical too (possibly as physical pain is can be modulated by our brains based on our perception of the situation and injury).
2) We are wired for it: Empathy is important, otherwise nature would not have wired us for it. That’s right humans are wired for empathy in our brains. If you have heard of “mirror neurons”, which basically trigger us to imitate others both in action and emotion. When I see someone who is sad and I feel sad, my mirror neurons are involved here. These cells enable everyone to mirror emotions, to share another person’s pain, fear, or joy. Some people who are highly empathetic are thought to have hyper-responsive mirror neurons, we deeply resonate with other people’s feelings
3) It’s the basic ingredient for human connection: When we are able to empathize with others it connects us in the most meaningful way.
4) It helps us learn and also succeed: Even outside our personal life, at work, having the ability to understand and feel what your clients or bosses might feel, gives us information to design our products, sales pitch, communication etc. Let’s say a customer who is angry writes in. A non-empathetic response could be “it’s not our fault. You did not read the instructions”. But if you take time to read and feel their pain, you may have an insight that maybe your instructions were not understandable or maybe the manual should be more visible. Let’s say your boss is under tremendous pressure to deliver results and giving you some grief. If you empathize, you can show up differently to say something like “I see you have all these deliverables. Are there any projects that I can drop and focus on something to take off your plate to help with our goals?”
In short, empathy allows us to build better human connections, to learn about the world, people, build better products, innovate more and it definitely makes this world and our human experience more meaningful.
Why is it hard?
One of my beliefs is “If it is important, it will be hard”. And same goes for empathy.
It is hard because:
1) Emotional part: Empathy is hard because it induces pain. If I have to “feel” with you whatever you are feeling anger, sad, and I have to feel angry or sad, this is hard. I am also wired as a human to avoid pain and unpleasant feelings. So why would I do the hard work or really trying to understand your pov, and actually feel the way you do. This is hard work!!!
2) Cognitive part: Sometimes we don’t have enough information to really understand and see the world other person does.
A trivial example from my life. I used to be a person who would always respond to text/ call immediately. So when I used to ping people and they did not respond, I would get angry and think they don’t care. Then I got too much work, started prioritizing my rest /self care, and I missed replying to people either timely or even completely. Now given I have gone through it, I can understand and empathize with people who don’t respond immediately. But it was really hard for me to empathize with them in past.
A non-trivial example lets say you are white male, who has never feared for your life and safety. How can you completely understand, imagine and feel what a brown or black woman feels, where she is always worried about getting raped, or violated etc. A professor did a study where he used to run evening classes and when the class got over he saw male students chit chatting and strolling to their car VS females walked vigilantly, fast and with the 911 handy on their phone and car keys ready. The male students probably had no idea of how females felt. Empathy is hard as we don’t have all the information to know, understand and imagine let alone feel what the other person feels.
3) Empathy overload: In current times where our news and social media is bombarding us with all the suffering going around in the world, it is impossible for me to feel that for each and every person and event. It is exhausting mentally, emotionally and hence physically. Also I can’t care for all causes and all things equally.
4) Tricky traps: We trip over our own wiring literally. Since empathy causes us emotional pain, when we are empathizing a part of us tries to get out of that discomfort by either:
a). We dismiss the other person. “You are stupid to feel angry you should not be”. “There is no reason to cry”. “Why the hell are you upset?”.
b). We start solving / fixing the problem: instead of listening or feeling the emotion. We get into problem solving. This is very common issue women complain about when they talk to their male partners, and males try to solve their issue instead of listening and feeling. Empathy is not about response, its about building connection and sometimes you don’t need to say a whole lot to be empathetic.
What can we do to learn it or improve it?
1) Reminder that its learnable: Remind ourselves Empathy is a emotional skill and we can learn it. Just like we learn any new mental skill like a new language or a physical skill like dancing, we can learn how to correctly and effectively empathize too.
2) Do “active listening”: This is where you listen without trying to come up with a response while you are listening. Most of the time when we listen, we listen with the intention to respond and then midway to their sentence we are busy crafting our answer. What if you don’t have to come up with an intelligent response. And you really just listen. Good news is when you do this, your responses, even though slightly delayed, will be probably more intelligent and appropriate.
3) Get curious, educate yourself: To put yourself in their shoes, you have to know what their shoes look like aka sometime we are missing information to take someone’s perspective. Here we can get curious and either ask them (if appropriate) or educate ourselves with tons of resources on internet/books etc.
4) Learning to acknowledge. Most people just want to be heard. So just listen and say “I hear you”, “This must be hard for you”. That’s it. Even though you probably don’t understand or can’t imagine how hard it must be for them or what they exactly feel, you do understand — it must be hard nonetheless and that matters. If possible offer support “I am here for you, let me know how I can support”. You don’t have to start solving their problems. Let them choose on if /when they want to reach out for support.
5) Learning to be vulnerable: You don’t have to be the one who stays calm and neutral. If you feel sad or angry or whatever they are feeling it’s ok. However be careful, now to confuse vulnerability with the false practice of “trumping their story” by saying “Let me share my story of even more pain to show I can be vulnerable and I understand your pain”. Empathy is truly listening, letting ourselves be vulnerable and be moved by their story and feel with them. You can definitely share your bits after they have finished talking but that is not needed to be vulnerable.
6) Pull from your own similar experience: if you can’t relate to experience directly, we can pull from a similar experience from your life where you may have felt similarly to gain empathy. For example Lets say your friend is an athlete and she lost by .1 secs and is devastated. You are neither athlete nor into sports and can’t understand why is so upset. She can try again next year. What you can do it pull from your experience of time where you really cared for something and it did not happen and you missed it by a very small margin. Maybe you really worked hard to enter a baking competition and line got drawn just one above you, how did you feel?
7) Expand your perspectives: We have a hard time empathizing with people who we don’t like, agree with or have anything in common with. This is convenient as we all live in our social bubbles today with people just like ourselves. On top of that online social media can create echo chambers too. So it is our responsibility to get out of our comfort zone and talk to people who may have different perspectives than ours. Listen to or meet new types of people and challenge our biases and find commonalities with those people whom we can’t seem to agree with. Maybe join some causes/groups where you get to meet new kinds of people and then still come together for a shared cause. For e.g. I force myself sometimes to read fox news or what my friends who are hard core Trump supporters write. I remind myself that all humans have same basic needs, and our social conditioning gave us different beliefs and means to fulfill those needs.
One word of caution: when we over empathize we can burn out. So if you are highly empathetic then you also need to draw some boundaries and institute practices for self-care.
I will end by saying research has shown that human connection is the biggest and most critical factor contributing to happiness. And empathy is what allows us to build those human connections!
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