“I can see how difficult this is for you.”

I was 16-years-old, and it was my first therapy appointment with Dr. Light. It was also my first time hearing words of this nature. They sounded compassionate and understanding, like I wouldn’t be punished for expressing myself the way I was often punished at home. A feeling of relief filled my torso, unleashing a deluge of tears that felt as if it had been held back for years. In a world that constantly told me how bad and spoiled and ungrateful and irresponsible I was, I finally felt...safe.

In the ensuing appointments, Dr. Light said many things like this to me, often resulting in the same relief and deluge of tears. It was my first taste of empathy, and the first time I was able to consider that perhaps I was okay after all. She didn’t offer me advice or solutions to my problems. She simply listened and tried to understand how the world felt to me. Her office was the only place where it felt okay to be myself. It was my favorite place in the world.

What Is Empathy?

Empathy is the process of temporarily suspending all judgement, interpretation and solutioning in order to enter the world of another. By “enter the world of another,” I mean to become interested in and aware of the perceptions and feelings of another person in order to see the world as they see it, to feel the world as it feels to them.

Empathy is not merely repeating another person’s thoughts and feelings back to them. It is the complete acceptance of another human being exactly as they are, attempting to understand how the world sparks inside of them, without adding in opinions, advice or interpretations. 

To empathize means to understand the intent behind another person’s message and the feelings that underlie it. When the other person senses that our intent is not to judge but to understand, there’s a relief, a sense that this is a safe space to reveal oneself.  Within this safety, the person permits themselves to feel more deeply into the scary parts of themselves, the parts that are typically judged or misinterpreted when shared. When a person feels judged for what they have shared, it not online disincentives them from sharing those scary bits of themselves with others in the future, but potentially results in them suppressing those scary bits from themselves. 

Why Is Empathy Important in Relationships?

When someone empathizes with us, it signals that we are not so strange and demented after all. We are understandable to another person. We are no longer isolated.

Empathy creates an atmosphere of safety and acceptance, and a sense of social connection with another, all of which facilitates forward movement. By “forward movement” I mean the discovery of new belief systems and decision making that makes life more wonderful, which is most successfully initiated by empathy rather than solutions or advice.

Relationships with a high degree of empathy result in closeness and forward movement. Relationships with limited or no empathy result in feelings of disconnection, isolation and stagnancy. 

When we receive empathy from others, we learn to provide empathy to ourselves. We begin to see ourselves through a lens of benevolence, as if we were our own child who has gotten mixed up in some confusing stuff, but who ultimately needs love and understanding to unlock forward movement. Our top priority in life becomes to take care of ourselves by viewing our thoughts, words and actions through the lens of empathy rather than judgment.

When to Provide Empathy

As we know, to empathize means to temporarily suspend judgment and interpretation, which is not always in the best interest of a situation, nor is it humanly possible to do all the time. We also know that empathy is the most effective catalyst for forward movement, which means it is the best remedy for stuckness. 

Therefore, when we notice stuckness in ourselves or others, it is a sign that empathy is the best course of action. Stuckness can be gauged by the following scenarios:

1. When another person is evidently feeling disappointed, confused, anxious, upset, angry or hopeless.

2. When we sense in ourselves a welling up of judgment or interpretation.

3. When another person is at a loss for what they feel, disconnected from their experience, or unable to name what’s going on inside of them.

In some instances, empathy will sound like a summation of what the other person has said: “I can sense how difficult this situation is for you, how unsettling it is to not know what to do next.” In other cases, it may sound like reading between the lines of what the other person has said, attempting to excavate the truth of what they’re experiencing from underneath the surface of their words: “Am I guessing correctly that you are feeling quite angry with your boss for passing you over for the promotion?” At other times, empathy might be expressed silently, where the other person is comforted merely by the presence of someone with a compassionate, non-judgmental attitude. 

When to Not Provide Empathy

It will feel difficult or impossible to engage in a process of empathy if we are in need of empathy ourselves. In this case, it is best to excuse ourselves from the situation temporarily until we receive the empathy we need to experience a shift and forward movement.

If we’re lucky, we have people in our life who are talented empathizers who we can turn to at times like this. If that’s not the case, we can learn to administer empathy to ourselves, consulting our internal flow of experiencing in an attempt to understand what we’re feeling without judgment.

Only when our needs for empathy and understanding are met will we be able to set aside our own experience to enter the world of another.

How To Improve Empathy

It is difficult to empathize if we have not had much practice at it. Our culture prizes our ability to make judgments and interpretations. We believe we are helpful to others when we are giving advice and providing solutions. The practice of empathy turns all of this on its head

This is not to say that there is no place for judgments and interpretations. It’s just that there is no place for them when it comes to other peoples’ thoughts and feelings. 

In order to improve our empathizing skills, we need practice; and like anything we practice, we need to allow ourselves to be bad at it before we are good. In other words: baby steps.

• Practice with someone who you are not emotionally invested in. A coworker rather than your spouse; an extended family member rather than your mom - somebody whose problems you are not intertwined with, where you have no stake in them making one decision over another. This allows you to get your feet wet, while minimizing the likelihood that the conversation will turn south and you won’t be able to practice empathizing anymore because you will need empathy yourself.

• Listen to the feelings behind the words. Most people do not have a high degree of literacy with their feelings. Their feelings may be expressed by their tone of voice, their speed of speaking, and their body language, while never being expressly stated out loud. Practice mapping whatever it is they’re saying to a feeling, and then asking them if it resonates. When people connect with their feelings, they become calmer and a sense of forward movement emerges.

• Check in with yourself to uncover hidden judgments and/or interpretations. Refraining from speaking your judgements out loud is one thing; not having them to begin with is another. Human beings are perceptive. They can sense when we are thinking something we aren’t saying. When empathizing with another person, it’s important to check in with yourself to see if you truly aren’t judging or interpreting what the other person is saying. If you find that you are, the best course of action is not to hide the judgment, but to say it out loud to the other person, such as: “I’m wanting to understand your situation how you see it, but I’m finding myself distracted by a judgment that is saying you shouldn’t have said that to your mother. I don’t want to have this judgment, but I think it’s important for our relationship that you know that I have it, so that there’s transparency between us.” 

While we will never achieve perfection in our ability to empathize, we can become someone whom others turn to in times of distress. We can be someone who makes others feel good, not because of our smarts or brilliance, but because of the way we listen and understand them.

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