Empathy is hard.
It’s so hard that only the people who really care about social nuance and other people use it, and only the best of those people work at it and fine tune it.
The thing about empathy is that in order to really practice it you have to dig into the ugly places within yourself. You can’t truly understand what it’s like in another persons shoes until you understand how all of the bad stuff feels and works inside of you.
Shame is awful and so is rejection, abandonment, and isolation. We work tirelessly and unconsciously to protect ourselves against these feelings. Running programs we aren’t even aware of.
I used to shut my heart down and become cold to avoid the ugliness. My knee jerk reaction was to push people away … usually because they hadn’t treated me the way I “deserved” to be treated. I could be mean, critical, and full of blame and I could justify every single hurtful thing I did.
In hindsight I can see that all of that only made the situations worse. I was using other people’s bad behaviour to excuse my own. Sometimes it helped in the short run. But ultimately it damaged the long run. It drove me away from the people I loved and hurt my relationships.
Now when I feel myself heading down those paths I realize it’s time to have a chat with myself. When I’m blaming someone else, criticizing their choices, or starting to shut my heart down I stop myself and connect with the person instead. Not face to face, but I connect with how they might be feeling or what could be driving their behaviour.
I ask myself when I’ve done something similar and think about the reasons why I may have acted that way.
This is when I’m being my most empathetic self.
This kind of empathy has taken my relationships to new levels, it has healed some major emotional pain, and it has connected me with people I never could have imagined.
Not everyone is capable of it because they don’t have the skills. I didn’t used to have the skills either. The more we learn, the more we share, the better we can all be.
I read this article this morning. This is a great example of what I’m talking about.