On Empathy
“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
― Ernest Hemingway
Definition of Empathy (www.merriam-webster.com)
1: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner also : the capacity for this2: the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it
A therapist friend who specializes in anxiety called me recently. One of her clients’ wives had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. The client and his wife are parents of young children. My therapist friend found herself surprised by her own overwhelm and unsure how to help this man, what resources to give him — she wanted my collegial counsel, since illness and grief are such a big part of the work I do.
“I don’t know how you do this,” she began crying. “I just keep thinking about how I would feel if Jimmy got this diagnosis.” Jimmy is her husband. She imagined finding herself in the same factual circumstance as her client. Most of us do this — we imagine how we would feel if this bad thing happened to us. It’s extremely anxiety producing and sometimes nausea-inducing.
I thought about that comment after I hung up the phone with her. I thought about my evolution as a therapist and person and what and how I’ve changed the way I put myself in someone else’s shoes.
If empathy is an act of imagination, in some sense, I am now less apt to imagine how I would feel in a given situation and more likely to imagine how it feels to be that other person. That man whose wife got the cancer diagnosis for example; he has a mind and heart and history that is totally unique and absolutely informs how he is doing, feeling, coping and what he is needing. In order to really empathize, I want to know more about that.
Even so, I definitely believe the beginning of our empathy development is putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. And maybe at the very early stages of life, we begin to learn this through reading and stories.
How would I feel if my dad took me and my brother to the woods and dumped us where we couldn’t find our way home?
How would I feel if all the truffula trees were chopped down and I was given the last seed?
How would I feel if I went into a magic wardrobe and a beautiful witch gave me delicious sweets to eat? Would I become a traitor of my own siblings?
How would I feel…is such a good place to start.
However as adolescents, how I feel is a place we are pretty obsessed with — not so much how I would feel in someone else’s shoes. I was in 8th grade in 1986 and 8th grade was the nadir of my empathy.
In 1986, my personal self-centeredness focused on my hair and hot rollers and hair spray. I felt actual strong emotions about my hair and assumed everyone did. A “bad hair day” could cause me to have a bad day. But something happened, some part of my brain kicked in toward the end of that year.
Like the fairy tales I read and loved as a young girl, I discovered a moral of the story one morning before school after a monumental battle with my hair: No One Cares About Your Hair. No One Is Paying Attention. Everyone Is Thinking About Their Own Hair or Not Thinking About Hair At All.
It’s a silly example, but one related to empathy as a muscle we grow and develop over our lifetime, if we choose. An aspect of maturing empathy development is recognizing that everyone around me isn’t aware through osmosis about how I feel and ready to cater to that. Not everything revolves around me and everyone else has lives that are just as important, stressful, meaningful, joyous, as mine is to me and they feel suffering too — in ways and at times that don’t always show on the outside.
And right now, the phase of empathy development that is really interesting to me, is what I call deep listening and Thic Nhat Hanh (one of my personal heroes) also calls compassionate listening. My life and relationships have transformed for the better in so many ways in the last 20 years, because the primary muscle that I exercise every day at work (and I think it carries through to my home life, mostly) is the muscle of “listening.”
A friend just shared with me a recent experience in which she felt a lack of empathy — a moment when deep listening would have made a difference. It was a minor miscommunication/squabble with another mom. Both moms have children who excel musically and these moms have waited many hours in parking lots for kids to finish lessons and practice. My friend has elementary-aged kids and the other’s kids are now in college.
My friend complained to the older mom about the practice and overscheduling - the increase in hours, the late hours of rehearsals, and the overall feeling that too much is expected of young kids and their parents — the older mom knew many of the same instructors and organizations.
Rather than commiserate, the more seasoned mom admonished my friend, “This is just what you sign up for. It’s always been this way. It’s no worse now than it was when my kids were going through it.”
My friend found herself in an argument with this other mom, defending her position and making her case. The other mom dug in. It was off-putting and altogether unsatisfying for both of them.
I said to my friend, “I think you were trying to say your are stressed out and this other person didn’t hear you.”
What I see is a missed opportunity to connect.
Thic Nhat Hanh says, You listen with only one purpose: to help him or her to empty his heart. Even if he says things that are full of wrong perceptions, full of bitterness, you are still capable of continuing to listen with compassion. Because you know that listening like that, you give that person a chance to suffer less. If you want to help him to correct his perception, you wait for another time. For now, you don’t interrupt. You don’t argue. If you do, he loses his chance. You just listen with compassion and help him to suffer less. One hour like that can bring transformation and healing.
To practice deep listening, we do two thing: we identify if we have a personal agenda. We pause and sit on the agenda/calm our itch to react, and then we ask for and listen for the next deeper level of what’s going on. How might this conversation have gone if the other mom had said, “It sounds like that is a lot in your schedule — I’m curious how you’re doing with that?”
Genuine curiosity is one of our best tools in developing empathy. When we allow ourselves to come from a place of not knowing and not assuming where another person is coming from — it opens us to one another.
This even works with our kids. Try it next time your child comes home from school complaining about something or upset — rather than offering solutions or correcting their perception, ask a question: I wonder what that felt like? How did you deal with that? What are you thinking now? Or even, how can I be helpful?
Then, listen.
I got “in trouble” this week when my dog pooped next to a neighbor’s hosta. I picked the poop up in a baggie right away, but the neighbor came out her front door to scold me, saying it was bad for her flowers. I apologized, but then got mad at myself for apologizing and walked away feeling mad at her. Then, I thought about all the things she doesn’t know about me that make me a person who doesn’t deserve to be scolded. Then, I thought about all the things I don’t know about her that make her someone so protective of her hostas and wanting to scold a grown woman.
If I could go back and re-live that moment, maybe I wouldn’t have apologized, because I don’t think an apology was warranted. But, maybe I would have asked her to tell me about her hostas and her gardening. I wonder what would have happened if I would have said, “You have beautiful plants, I can see why they are important to you.” Maybe I will be evolved enough to do that one day. I’ll keep you posted.
We live in a world that seems increasingly instantaneous and reactive. Strong, fast emotions are encouraged and viral. Yet, I consider an article I read this week about the oldest trees in the world — in California. They are thought to be over 4,000 years old. How do they survive? In part, it is thought because they grow very slowly. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/us/pine-trees-bishop-california.html#:~:text=In%20California%2C%20One%20Hardy%20Pine,Years%20%2D%20The%20New%20York%20Times
We human beings seem to be drawn to fast things, but I think our survival, like the hardy pines, will depend on the other parts of us that are slow. Real empathy and deep listening ask us to be slow — to practice, pay attention, and with a little luck, learn.
