Why should I?

What’s something most people don’t understand?

Recently I was talking to someone and asked them to show some empathy. Their response was “Why should I?” It threw me off. Like why would someone not try and understand another person? Isn’t that what makes us human? What is so difficult about imagining yourself in another person’s shoes? If we don’t care for one another I don’t think there are many things that differentiate us from animals. The animal nature subsides when our morals come into the play. The best part is, this costs nothing. It only takes a minute to decide whether you want to be kind or not to someone.

It is a sad state to even have this conversation. What even happened to being compassionate towards each other? Are we all that shallow to want some outcome from every action of ours?

This one time a person asked a Psychologist “How to show empathy?” It baffled me and a lot of people who were at that event. So lets get into it. How does one show empathy?

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

This is the simplest definition of empathy. If you go into the more complicated ones it confuses everyone with usage of bigger words. I have always felt that a definition of a word should not have words bigger than the word it is describing. Coming back to empathy. How does one show empathy? What do you do to go about it? Lets take two people. A and B. B is going through a tough time. A and B run a business together. So A knows that it is not financial B seems pretty happy for the most part. So when B slacks off or is frazzled, A gets annoyed. As far as A can see it is just B being irresponsible and annoying. So they scold B. B explains that they are having some personal problems with regards to their family. That still does not cut it for A. So the scolding continues which hurts B. And this in turn drives a wedge into their friendship as well as partnership.
What could have A done better here? First and foremost they could have used the existing information that B is usually good at what they do and there must be a reason for them to messing up. Next they can ask what is going on and give a chance to B to explain themselves. Even if A cannot relate to why B is getting stressed out over the issue, they can try and assume that B’s stress tolerance might not be as big as A’s and cut them some slack. Or they can request for more information on why this is stressing out B more than it should. All of this needs an actual interest in the well being of B. That is paramount. That interest will let A get an in-depth understanding of what is going on in B’s life and a better idea of why this is affecting them as much as it is.

This is one of the ways someone can show empathy. What you do with the information is upto you. You can offer to help. You can offer to listen to what they have to say and let them blow some steam off. All this comes under compassion. That is a different topic for another time.

So to answer the prompt question, What is something that people don’t understand? People genuinely don’t understand empathy. They confuse it with sympathy. Sympathy is feeling pity or sorry for something that someone is going through that is probably not pleasant. Empathy is just an understanding. It is just getting enough information about someone’s feelings regarding a certain situation. The proceeding feelings from our side is still up to us. We can pity them, or feel nonchalant. The choice is still ours. No one can force us to feel sorry for someone. That is technically not possible. But we can try to see their perspective and figure out why it is bothering them so much more than it generally does a person.

It is the least we can do!