I’m not sure what empathy is or how to feel it. It’s sometimes left friends and partners feeling frustrated with me when I can’t comfort them in the way they need and it causes me to be upset that I don’t understand it. I want to understand what it’s like.
Edit: tagged as chemistry because I guess technically it’s brain chemistry.
Edit: I’m talking about this issue with my therapist later today.
Edit: just got done with therapy. Turns out I do feel empathy, but it just comes off as not caring because I get frustrated that I can’t always figure out how someone needs to be comforted. I might look into getting tested for autism because it happens a lot.
In: 7230
Empathy is compassion and understanding. The ability to put yourself in someone else’s position to get a better perspective on their world view.
Yay, a question regarding my field of study!
Scientifically, we do not know entirely how it works, but we have a good general idea. Time for the explanation:
When you get home after a very hot summer day and grab a glass of water and gulp it in two seconds, you do this because you are thirsty. You did all the things you did (open the cupboard, get a glass, fill it with water, raise it to your mouth, swallow the water) because you were thirsty.
All these actions had one cause: you were thirsty — an internal state no one can “see”, a feeling.
When you see someone do a certain set of actions or displaying a certain behavior, you interpret what they are doing as if that were you (with some adjustments depending on how well you know the person).
So, when you see a family member come home after a hot summer day, immediately going to the kitchen to drink some water, you don’t merely see their actions, you also feel their thirst (on a very moderate level), because you know what it is like to be thirsty.
In short: you do/express X because you feel Y. When you see others do X, you’ll perceive them as feeling Y.
A bit more in depth: empathy seems to have its origin on something called “mirror neurons” and to be connected to our constitution of ourselves as individuals and our relationship between our mind (internal states) and our physical body. Our familiarity with the other is also very important, which can be seen in cases where, for example, owners know exactly what their pets want, even though they don’t express any human-like behaviors (and the opposite is also true, since it is almost impossible for us to empathize with, for example, a spider, since its reality is so distant from ours that we can’t fathom what it is like to be a spider in that moment).
EDIT: Well, this exploded! Thank you everyone for your amazing feedback! I have been trying to reply to people, but it’s taking some time. If you want to talk about the topic, you can drop me a PM so it’s easier to track and remember.
Empathy is the ability to put yourself in another’s place. To understand the circumstances and reactions to those circumstances from the point of view of another.
I’m going to say that everybody’s individual experience with what empathy is is going to be different. We hear the word and then we connect that word to a certain feeling or process we have.
Personally, I have three different things I connect to the word “empathy”: two are a feeling and one is a process.
The feeling is pretty basic: I feel a certain negative emotion when seeing or hearing about the pain of someone else. The pain is not always the same. Sometimes it is a feeling similar to guilt, probably like “survivor’s guilt”. In other cases, it’s like a feeling of sadness or pity. I call them both “empathy” but we can analyse them as distinct feelings / reactions.
The process is more like a logical thing: I see someone’s situation, and try to understand it: how they got there, why they feel the way they do, why they make the decisions they do, etc. It’s trying to be as free of personal bias (ie: “this is what I would feel or what I would do”) and prejudice as possible. It’s the perspective that everybody makes decisions informed by their knowledge, feelings and life experiences and therefore all decisions are “rational”, it’s just my job to understand how they could be seen as “rational” by the person. Obviously, this isn’t a feeling or an emotion, it’s more like an epistemology.
1. you could have empathy but still not be able to comfort people, being able to comfort and being able to know what or how someone feels are to very different things… but knowing how someone feels could help.
2. empathy for me is coming into a room full of happy people and feeling happiness myself. or being near someone and having a gut feeling that they are sad or anxious. Most people know the latter by microexpressions and demenour and is something you can learn.
basically empathy is the ability to position yourself in one’s shoes. to know how they will react if you say something or proposition something. knowing why saying a derogatory term can hurt someone or why laughing with cancer is not (always) the way to go when your friends grandfather just passed.
think to yourself: do i like it when someone calls me dumb, probably not, now imagine someone who is a bit anxious and has a big fear of failure, calling them dumb would ruin them.
You see a turtle on its back. It’s baking in the sun. But you don’t help it by turning it over. Why aren’t you helping it Leon?
I would be careful with the idea of putting yourself in other people’s shoes.
I agree with the sentiment, but keep in mind that other people aren’t you: something that wouldn’t upset you might upset someone else and you might hate what someone else would enjoy.
And that it bothers you that other people get frustrated when you try to comfort them tells me that you have some empathy. As others have said, there’s a difference between not having empathy and not knowing how to comfort.
But definitely talk to your therapist. Reddit isn’t necessarily the best place to resolve this sort of thing.
I think there’s a big difference between empathy and sympathy.
To me, empathy is when I can *feel* at least a portion of how the other person is feeling. When someone I can about is angry or sad about something I also feel angry or sad about it *as if it was happening to me*.
Sympathy is when someone is sad or angry (or happy, this applies to good feelings too!) I don’t necessarily have the same strength of feeling. I can tell they’re experiencing the emotion and I understand how they’re being affected by something, but it’s not as visceral for me. I can still be sad, angry, or happy *for them*, but I can also then move on with my day and disengage from those feelings.
I think that people are born with different levels of empathy, which get developed more or less over time as you grow up. You can certainly build empathy with some time and effort if you choose, even as an adult, I think.
It’s an excercise of consciously putting yourself into another person’s shoes and *their experience of the world*. That last part is crucial to the exercise. You can’t just think “If I had XYZ happen to me, how would that feel?”, because you have a different perspective by virtue of growing up the way you did and your own personal history. You have to think deeper “If I grew up, XYZ, and I value ABC, and this thing happened to me, how would that feel?”
That’s a LOT more work and requires the ability to suspend your own experiences and opinions. It requires you to maybe learn about the perspectives and life experiences of different types of people *and take them at face value* even if you disagree with them. Because all of those things shape those people’s reality and affect them in different ways.
How do you get those glimpses into the lives and mentality of different types of people? That’s a bit harder. Reading books, opinion pieces, autobiographies, all of that helps. I LOVE the Humans of New York series and Post Secret for exactly that. They’re glimpses of the experiences of other people that are authentic and genuine. It’s stories of love and fear and sadness, and how these people handles situations so different and unique to them personally but somehow all part of the same human experience, and you’re bound to find something that resonates with you about an experience you had. Maybe that person took something completely different from that experience or handled it completely differently.
Anyway, I’ll stop there because I’m rambling.
Edit: thanks for the awards and fantastic discussion!
Here’s a great video. I felt I needed to learn empathy as well as an adult. This started things off for me and made things click. It’s an ongoing process and now that I understand it more, I realize very few people are good at empathy. It’s just not natural for most. But it can be learned and is so important! Good on you for working on it and improving yourself. https://youtu.be/1Evwgu369Jw
This could sound mean, but not meant to be. Are you on the spectrum and that’s why you don’t understand or feel it?
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