Turns out that being empathetic benefits not only those we engage with.
“Highly empathic people enjoy deeper relationships, exhibit more charitable behavior toward those around them, and, according to some studies, show higher degrees of nonconformity and social self-confidence,” David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
This week, we are doing a deep dive into empathy. So far, we’ve explored how valuable it is to have an empathetic friend to talk with when we are wrestling with a difficult situation. Communication, not introspection, is necessary to help us process what has happened.
Yesterday, we looked at the three intertwining emotional skills that lead to empathy: mirroring, mentalizing, and caring.
What does empathy look like in everyday life?
“High empaths can perform world-class social skills,” David notes, “such as knowing which child needs kindness when she misbehaves and which child needs sternness, understanding which co-workers need to be told directly what they are doing wrong and which ones need help in coming to that awareness themselves.
“High empaths are unusually aware of the subtleties in any situation—scents, tastes, emotional tremors.”
David writes: “I have a friend who is a high empath in just this way. She feels everything. Often she has to take a few days off from people just so she can rest and restore. But she is also one of the most effectively caring people I know. She can sense the subtle emotional tremors reverberating through a room, can locate the person who is feeling upset and left out. She identifies with that person in a way that is compelling and beautiful. She makes people feel seen.”
The really good news? We can learn how to be more empathetic. David outlines four practices we can experiment with to help us develop stronger empathy skills.
Practice #1: CONTACT THEORY: “Decades ago, the psychologist Gordon Allport built on the obvious point that it’s hard to hate people close up,” David writes. “He found that bringing hostile groups together really does increase empathy in each group.”
Lessons Gordon learned along the way included having people sit in a circle to show that everyone is equal to everyone else.
And giving the group a shared focus and a common goal, which encourages people to work together to build something. “A community is a group of people with a common project,” David observes.
Practice #2: DRAW IT WITH OUR EYES CLOSED: “People become more empathetic when they take the time to closely observe the people around them,” he notes.
One profession that tends to be especially good at this skill? Actors.
David writes: “Interviewed about how she prepares for a role, Viola Davis said, ‘Actors walk through life so different because we have to be an observer. I always say you are an observer and a thief—that you’re constantly seeing the minutiae of everything. The way someone puts their head down if you say a certain word. And you think, ‘Why did they do that? Is it something in their past? Were they traumatized? Do they not like me?'”
During his preparation for the John Adams 2008 HBO miniseries, the actor Paul Giamatti discovered a list of Adams’s health complaints: “He realized that Adams was plagued by real and hypochondriacal illnesses,” David shares. “He began to see him as a man perpetually dyspeptic because of digestive problems, toothaches, headaches, and more. He carried himself through the role in that manner.”
Matthew McConaughey once told David he looks for a small gesture in the characters he portrays that offers an insight into their entire personality and mindset.
“One character might be a ‘hands in his front pockets’ kind of guy,” David recalls Matthew saying. “He goes through life hunched over, closed in. When he takes his hands out of his pockets and tries to assert himself, he’s going to be unnatural, insecure, overly aggressive.”
Matthew makes it a point to see the situation as his character does. “A killer is not thinking, ‘I’m a killer.’ He’s thinking, ‘I’m here to restore order.'”
David’s recommendation: “If we really want our children to be more empathetic, get them involved in their school’s drama program. Playing another character is a powerful way to widen your repertoire of perspectives.”
Practice #3: LITERATURE. “Researchers have found that people who read are more empathetic.
But only specific genres: “Plot-driven genre books—thrillers and detective stories—do not seem to increase empathy skills,” he surmises. “But reading biographies or complex, character-driven novels and plays like Beloved or Macbeth, in which the reader gets enmeshed in the changing emotional life of the characters, does.”
Finally, Practice #4: SUFFERING. Sometimes, the hard things in life are our greatest teachers.
“There are certain things we simply have to live through in order to understand,” David notes. “And so another way we grow more empathic is simply by living and enduring the slings and arrows that life generally brings.
“People who have survived natural disasters, for example, are more likely to help homeless people,” he writes. “People who have survived civil wars give more to charity. Those who use life’s hard chapters well come out different.”
The ultimate skill here is to have lived through hard times but not be broken by them. To resist allowing difficult circumstances to make us defensive and defeated.
“Instead, paradoxically and heroically,” David writes, “we shed our defensive architecture. We make ourselves more vulnerable and more open to life. We are able to use our own moments of suffering to understand and connect with others.”
Rabbi Elliot Kukla tells a story that demonstrates how highly empathic people accompany others. There was “a woman who, because of a brain injury, would sometimes fall to the floor,” the Rabbi recounts. “People would rush to immediately get her back on her feet. She told the Rabbi, ‘I think people rush to help me up because they are so uncomfortable with seeing an adult lying on the floor. But what I really need is for someone to get down on the ground with me.'”
“Sometimes,” David writes, “we just need to get down on the floor with someone.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Do I aspire to be considered a “high empath,” someone who regularly leads with empathy? If yes, which of the four empathy practices that David outlines would I like to experiment with?
Action: Select one of David’s four empathy practices and run an experiment. Reflect on what happened: What did I learn or unlearn?
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