When I was a teenager, my dad went to rehab for addiction and started his journey with Alcoholics Anonymous. The AA community helped my dad soften towards others and have a greater level of empathy for people who came from different backgrounds than he did. People in AA often develop deeper empathy because the program focuses on accepting differences, listening to one another’s stories, and promoting compassion for one’s self and others. After my dad joined AA he was able to hold space and love for people who thought in radically different ways than he did and his empathy towards his AA friends led him to be a more empathetic father and human being.
When I was in my 20s, my dad invested many years spending quality time with a man who was a few years older than my dad, who had Down Syndrome. In addition to having Downs Syndrome, Don, had some physical limitations and walked with a cane. Every week my dad would take Don out to activities like the movies, dinner, a walk, or sometimes to visit the graveside of Don’s deceased mother. I vividly remember how patient and compassionate my dad was towards this man, because I recall admitting to myself that I didn’t see the same level of patience and kindness in me. As I reflect back on my dad’s love for Don, I am not sure that my dad would have spent so much time with this man if it hadn’t been for the way my dad’s AA community enhanced my dad’s empathy and compassion.
Before AA my dad’s priorities were his kids and his career. But being a part of an accepting, kind, and diverse spiritual community like AA, transformed by dad and opened him up to have a heart for people who were different than he was. Because my dad experienced acceptance and compassion in his AA community, he was able to live in a very open-hearted way towards people. Even though my younger self always saw my dad as the one giving his time and patience to the young adult with down syndrome, my dad always thought of Don as the one who was teaching him patience, empathy, and compassion.
Empathy is the ability to recognize, relate to, and imagine the thoughts and feelings of a person, or fictional character. Developing empathy is crucial for relating well to your children, a romantic partner, your extended family, your colleagues, and with any people in your orbit who have a different personality or perspective than you.
Empathy involves experiencing another person’s point of view, rather than just your own reality. Empathy is understanding that if you had been in someone else’s shoes and experienced exactly what they have gone through, you might be responding to life in a similar manner.
Empathy is different from sympathy. Sympathy is a more passive response, which communicates you are sorry for someone and sympathy might feel like pity to the person experiencing the hardship. Empathy is feeling with someone and trying to imagine how hard a situation might be for someone. A person feeling sympathy might say, “I can’t imagine how hard that must be,” while the empathetic person would state, “When I imagine myself in your shoes …” Empathy often involves active listening or a compassionate response. In others words, empathy is a verb.
Some research indicates that empathy is on the decline in the United States. But most people I know would not need to look at statistics to confirm the decline of empathy rates, because their own lived experience is telling them there is more apathy than empathy in today’s world. In my own private practice, I am seeing an increase in relational difficulties, more people are cut-off from family members, and there are greater tensions in the workplace. It seems obvious to most people that there is a direct correlation between lower empathy rates and the current climate of polarization within families, institutions, and our nation.
I spent so much time talking with my friends on the phone in the 1990s and early 2000s. Now it is more common to text and message friends on social media. But our capacity for empathy is often greater when we hear emotion in our loved one voices and know their personal stories. This deeper level of connection is harder to achieve through messaging one another. Research suggests people who read novels have higher levels of empathy, and this is likely because they are connecting to the feelings and story of the protagonist in the book. It is listening to someone’s feelings and story that helps deepen empathy.
In my own marriage, empathy is a bridge builder and a game changer. If my husband and I have empathy for the personal challenges and professional commitments we are holding, this leads us to be kinder and more understanding with one another. On the other hand, in seasons when we have had less capacity for empathy, this has had a negative impact and we have been more critical towards one another.
I once worked with a couple who came from very different backgrounds. The husband grew up with obsessive compulsive parents, who kept the house so clean that you could eat off the floor. The wife was raised in a family whose home looked like it could be featured on an episode of the TV show, “Hoarders.” Whenever this couple’s house got a little messy, the wife was able to disassociate and ignore the mess, because this is how she had coped growing up in her own home. The husband, on the other hand, repeated his parent’s pattern of becoming extremely anxious when the house was not clean and in order. But when this couple started to explore their family history and have more self-compassion and more empathy for one another’s stories, this empathy led the wife to respond by keeping a cleaner space and the husband became more comfortable with a home that was lived in. Empathy helps you to respond in more compassionate ways towards your loved ones.
Recently, I have seen more books being published about toxic empathy and it worries me that these titles are communicating that empathy is weak. While I agree that empathic people sometimes have to remember empathy requires boundaries, so empathy does not lead to codependency, rescuing, enabling, or burnout, I also believe our current world needs more people who put themselves in other people’s shoes and imagine what it would be like if they lived 30 days in this person’s body. Empathy could be a healing balm for the divisive state of this world.
It is important to remember that when you feel pitied or judged, this demeaning response sucks the life out of you, but when someone empathizes with you and you feel seen and loved, this act has the capacity to transform you and to change the world. As Brenee Brown aptly says, “People are hard to hate close-up, Move in.” I encourage you to move in closer to imagine what it would be like to be in the shoes of a partner, your child, a person who has a different political persuasion, or a work colleague who is driving you crazy. Empathy will keep this world going round and round.
A version of this article was originally published in The Lookout Mountain Mirror.
