Blog post #4 3/1/2021

Empathy can be defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.”

One extension of this:  “Developing empathy is crucial for establishing relationships and behaving compassionately.”

The ability to know how another person feels relates to all the parts of our life where we interact with other people.  Whether it’s in romantic relationships, with our children, with our friends, or even in the workplace, it is an important skill to have.

So much of our emotion is shown, not in WHAT we say, but in our tone of voice, our body language, or our facial expressions.

Empathic ability is very much tied to success in life.  In one study, children who were able to read feelings nonverbally were more popular and more emotionally stable than their peers.  They also did better in school, even though their IQs were not any higher than children who struggled with reading nonverbal cues about emotions.

Even in babies only a few months old, empathy can be seen.  Quite often, if a baby hears another baby in distress, she will start crying herself.  As children grow, they learn that others’ distress is not their own, and begin to try to comfort other children who are having difficulties, for example by retrieving a special stuffed toy or blanket for the other to cuddle.  Children whose discipline included the parent pointing out how their behavior caused someone else’s distress learned to be more empathetic.

Children learn empathy and become emotionally balanced when the adults around them respond appropriately to their emotions:  if a child is sad, the parent can mimic a sad expression and speak in a soothing tone of voice.  If a parent underreacts, a child can become passive:  “If I can’t make my dad react when I get excited, why should I even bother trying?”  Even babies as young as three months old can pick up on the mood of a depressed parent, and mimic that mood.  When a parent consistently fails to show empathy, a child can learn that s/he should avoid expressing a particular emotion -- or can learn to not feel that emotion at all.

This ability to connect with our children (or even with others!) is known as “attunement.”  If we do not give our children this connection, it can lead to them struggling with emotional health.  

If people visit with a counselor or therapist, they feel the most understood when the therapist “mirrors” their feelings, reflecting back how the patient feels.  This is very similar to how we can teach our children how to handle their emotions -- by validating them.

Validation is one way we can show empathy:  by reassuring someone that we understand where they are coming from, whether or not we actually agree with them on the particular subject at hand.  It takes into account wherever the person is coming from, whether their current state of mind or their previous experience with a given situation.  It’s what we do when we tell our friends, “No, you’re not crazy!  I understand why you would feel that way.”

If we see in ourselves that we have failed in showing empathy or validation, the good news is that relationships are continually shifting and changing, and an imbalance can be corrected.

What about people who struggle with empathy?  These could be people who are very depressed, and can barely see beyond the inside of their own heads.  They could also be abusers or sociopaths.

There is also another group of people who have a condition called Alexithymia.  This word means, literally, “no words for feelings.”  They often don’t know what they themselves are feeling, and by extension have very great difficulty understanding what anyone around them is feeling.  The emotional world is perplexing to them, and trying to discuss and describe emotions to them has been compared to trying to explain color to someone who is colorblind.  Some experts consider it to be related to (or a subset of Asperger Syndrome).  People who are in a close relationship with someone like this especially need empathy and validation from the other people around them.

In conclusion, empathy is a very important piece of what makes our lives rich, especially in reference to the people around us.

Main outside resource for this post:  “Emotional Intelligence:  Why it can matter more than IQ” by Daniel Goleman