Empathy has become an increasingly common buzzword (in the truest sense of the word) in conversations on relationships over the past few years. And unfortunately mostly in a negative context: “I don’t feel seen. I feel misunderstood. You are selfish.”
So what is empathy? What does it take to be able to better empathise with others? And, building on this, how do pity and compassion differ?
Empathy basically means the ability to put oneself in another person’s shoes as much as possible – or even better, to FEEL into another person. It is therefore less about cognitive imagination and more about being able to understand the feelings of the other person and possibly even feel them yourself. Now some will say that they do this all the time, and others that it feels impossible to them at all.
Two things are therefore important: First, you can train empathy. And secondly, there are some potential pitfalls in doing so. So how can one succeed in “being more emphatic after all”?
First of all, empathy requires a genuine interest in the other person who is there opposite you. And secondly, the ability to really “put yourself in his or her shoes”.
To do this, it is first necessary to suspend one’s own ego for a moment (i.e. to let it take a little break), and that is sometimes more difficult than we believe. Because the ego is strong and has many tactics to get attention and be heard.
Accordingly, the first pitfall is already in listening. Are you really with the other person who is telling their story? Or, while listening with one ear, do you just think the whole time about what this experience would do to you: “How would I perceive this? What would it do to me? How would I react?” In this case, you are actually already with yourself again – although you believe to be with the other person …
So, in contrast, it is much more about really being with the other person and empathising with what moves him or her? How does this make him/her feel? What he/she feels and why? If you do this, you are more likely to ask and listen than to counter at the first opportunity with a “Well, last time this occured to me it was like this or that for me …”.
This is very difficult for some people at the beginning because they are so much with themselves (which is also good in other situations!). But the good thing is, you can train it, and then you become a better and better listener. Someone, where the counterpart truly feels to be seen and taken seriously. In this sense, empathy also has a lot to do with attention, sympathy and respect.
But there is another important pitfall to watch out for in this context and that is how you deal with what you hear and feel with regard to the other person. And that is the difference between compassion and pity. It is not helpful at all for the person concerned to feel sorry for him or her! This may sound strange at first. Haven’t we even been told in our upbringing that „feeling sorry for others” is something to strive for? If so, then it is at least a misunderstanding.
To approach the difference, it makes sense to first approach some important terms semantically – that is, to ask what they actually mean. Let’s start with the term SYMPATHY, which has already appeared above. It means that I really take part in what the other person is telling me. And that, in principle, is nothing other else but empathy. Furthermore, we will only be able to really put ourselves in the other person’s shoes if we not only try to understand cognitively “what is going on”, but also try to feel what he or she is experiencing.
In the face of this, it makes no sense at all to PITY him or her. Firstly, we cannot really experience the suffering that the person sitting opposite us is going through. For example, the grief the person experiences because of i.e. a loss cannot be our grief because it is not our loss. We can pretend, but it will not and cannot be the same. In addition, it leads us to infect ourselves with what we perceive to be the negative feelings of that other person, and thus to inflict emotional stress or damage on ourselves.
But even worse, pity reinforces and manifests a person’s victimhood. This is tantamount to incapacitation, because a victim can do “nothing at all and is at the mercy of the situation”. But this is usually not true at all. Therefore, it is important not to suffer with this other person, but to strengthen the self-efficacy of that person on the basis of sincerely felt compassion. Often this is not possible immediately because it may be too “fast” for the person concerned, but if I really feel seen as a human being by my counterpart in a stress or crisis situation, I am much more willing to accept advice or to start working together or for myself on a solution to the problem.
And why are empathy and compassion important for building resilience?
Empathy and compassion have primarily a supporting function in relation to the development of resilience. Because we are often ashamed of the fact that “we are not well”, we don’t want to talk about it with others and pretend that everything is fine. Or we try to “arrest” others and make them part of our problem. The former usually leads to us getting stuck in our negative feelings and not finding a way out ourselves. The latter, makes the others who could actually help us part of the problem.
In this respect, empathy and compassion are “third-party assistance” that enable us to overcome stress, fears or crises more quickly. But our counterpart also gets something out of it. In addition to the intense social connection to the other person, getting involved with another person and being able to help them is always a form of feeling one’s own self-efficacy – combined with realising that going through the corresponding negative feelings together is in the end “less bad and hopeless” than one has experienced oneself in comparable moments before. In this sense, empathy and compassion always strengthen one’s own resilience. Win-win!
