Empathy

Empathy is like opening a window into an inner world.

Empathy is not about sympathy or commiseration. Empathy is about offering a safe presence.

Often, empathy sounds like silence, for it is the silence that offers a safe place for someone to explore their feelings and unmet needs. If words are offered, they are offered as questions. These questions are short, based on a guess of what another is feeling and needing. Embedded in the question, then, are suggested feelings and needs.

The questions look like this: “Are you feeling _____ ? Do you need _____?” The blanks are our opportunities for guessing feelings and needs that are often palpable in another individual but not yet acknowledged by that individual. It isn’t important that the guess is accurate. What is important is that an individual connects to their feelings and needs.

It is quite easy, for example, for someone to stay in their heads and to share their stories without ever connecting to their feelings and needs. They might say, for example, “My sister was the worst. I have never seen anyone as selfish as she is. Even when we were children, she thought only of herself, as if she were the only one who lived in the universe. I remember one time . . . .” These stories can continue for minutes or hours without the individual acknowledging her feeling of frustration or resentment or her needs to be seen or to matter.

Guessing their needs by asking, “Are you feeling frustrated? Do you have a need to be seen?” offers the opportunity for them to connect to what is alive in them; and, from that connection, discover what else may lie beneath their pain or distress. Often what one shares in empathy is merely the tip of the iceberg; there is more beneath waiting to be explored and discovered.

As Marshall notes, “When we are thinking about people’s words, listening to how they connect to our theories, we are looking at people—we are not with them. The key ingredient of empathy is presence: we are wholly present with the other party and what they are experiencing.” Not only is empathy a respectful listening, it is also a healing listening, opening a window into an inner world that, when seen and acknowledged, often ends the pain or confusion or frustration.