The last few posts I’ve shared strategies to become more resilient to shame and it’s isolating, identity-harming effects. This final post features one more important tool for defeating shame and freeing women to become healthier, more confident, and more connected. Empathy.
Shame researcher Brene Brown defines empathy as “the ability to tap into our own experiences in order to connect with an experience someone is relating to us.” She emphasizes that having the capacity for empathy is not an innate trait. It is a skill that we can all learn.
Let me repeat that. Empathy is a skill that we can all learn and develop. This is good news because empathy is good for all of us.
The bottom line is that empathy is essential for building meaningful, trusting relationships, which is something we all want and need. Given its power to overcome shame and its key role in building many different types of connections, empathy is something we would all be wise to learn and to practice.”
Dr. Brene Brown
And here are some key skills that we must develop to be more emphatic with others.
Empathy requires an ability to see the world through someone else’s lens.
Our personality, culture and life experience color the way we see the world. We cannot help seeing everything through our particular set of filters, which leads to our particular way of interpreting everything we see and experience. No human can be completely objective and “lensless”. But we can be aware that other people don’t perceive the world the same way we do, because their lenses are different than ours. To extend empathy, we need to take our lenses off and try to see things from someone else’s perspective.
Empathy means choosing to be nonjudgmental.
Our minds automatically apply judgments to everything we experience or think. We assign things to “right” or “wrong” categories, whether the topic is how to raise children, the best methods for staying healthy, or how one should respond to a tragedy. And yet, we cannot truly empathize with someone when we view them through the lens of judgement. Thus, empathy involves intentionally choosing to meet a person where they are, without fixing them, saving them, advising them, or setting them straight. This is difficult, but not impossible.
Empathizing means understanding another’s feelings.
When we’ve taking off our own lenses and are viewing someone’s behavior and thoughts as nonjudgmentally as possible, we are capable of sensing that person’s feelings more accurately. We must try to accept their emotions as valid, regardless of how we would be feeling in this situation or how we think they “ought” to be feeling.
Empathy communicates your understanding of the other person’s feelings.
The key thing here is to show that you want to understand them, not that you have correctly diagnosed their emotions. It’s harder than it sounds to grasp another person’s feeling accurately, because our personal lenses and experiences can lead us to misinterpret them. Thus, we must have the courage to state what we sense, while also having the humility to accept when we’ve guessed incorrectly.
For example, we might say, “It looks like you are disgusted about what he said.” To which they might reply, “It wasn’t what he said that upset me, it was the way I caved and placated him instead of standing my ground.”
Ah! Now we’re beginning to understand. The key to empathy is to keep listening until the other person truly feels seen, heard, and understood.
3 barriers to empathy
Showing sympathy instead of compassion. Sympathy says, “I pity you because you have this problem.” That may sound kind on the surface, but sympathy implies that I am not where you are, and I want to keep my distance. It says I feel sad for your pain. In contrast, empathy says I care about your pain enough to join you in feeling it.
One-upmanship. Hearing another’s pain is hard. Sometimes we try to protect ourselves (unconsciously) by minimizing their pain through bringing up a worse painful situation. We may think we are trying to encourage them by showing them that life could be worse, but one-upmanship isn’t a helpful way to communicate this. One-upmanship comments often include the phrase “at least.” As in: I’m sorry your kids aren’t making healthy life decisions, but at least you don’t have a kid in drug rehab like my friend Alice. Empathy never tries to minimize another’s feelings or situation.
Thinking we can’t relate because we’ve not experienced that trauma. We don’t have to share the same experience as someone to empathize and connect with their emotions. We have all experienced moments when we’ve been humiliated, misunderstood, judged, ignored, etc. Therefore, we can access the emotions we felt in those sorts of situations. What caused our pain may be different than what caused theirs, but we can find emotional common ground.
For example, I have not experienced the death of a child, but I have experienced other losses of loved ones, and I know the emotions that occur when I am concerned with my child’s wellbeing. This allows me to empathize with someone grieving the loss of a child, even if I can’t fully imagine what their pain is like.
You can become better at empathizing, one small act at a time
If empathy is a skill, then we can all learn to be better at it. Here are two things you can do this week.
- You can build your empathy skill muscles by practicing taking off your lens and putting on someone else’s lenses every time you hold a conversation.
- You can build your empathy skill muscles by paying attention to the moments when judgment wants to creep into a conversation and doing your best to see past it. To agree to disagree on an issue. To remember you don’t know the whole story. And to love them even when you don’t understand their choices or condone them.
Developing our empathy skills is not easy. Shame is a complex problem that requires a complex solution. Each of the four attributes of empathy requires us to know ourselves, act authentically and engage with others using our minds and our hearts.”
Dr. Brene Brown
Yes, practicing empathy is hard, but it’s a powerful antidote to shame, blame, fear, and disconnection. Which means it’s worth the effort.
The shame resilience strategies
- Know your shame triggers
- Step back and gain perspective
- Trust your caring community
- Practice empathy on yourself and others
Material excerpted from I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t) Making the Journey From “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough.” by Brene Brown, Ph.D.
