Empathy

Empathy is a crucial topic that requires understanding the difference between sympathy and empathy. Empathy involves connecting with someone's emotions by drawing on our own past experiences. It is important to listen and not make the conversation about ourselves. Judging or invalidating others can create a barrier and hinder empathy. However, it is also possible to show too much empathy, which can be limiting and overwhelming. Rational compassion is key to maintaining a balance. Acting and reading are effective ways to develop empathy by exploring different perspectives. Empathy is a valuable tool for building connections and supporting others. It is especially important in peer leadership to make others feel heard and understood. The second most impactful topic that we learned about this semester was empathy. I think that this topic is one that I continually circle back to, relearning throughout my life. The difference between sympathy and empathy is a huge learning point that I always need to remind myself of. The comparison that was described this semester that was super helpful for me is that sympathy is feeling for someone, while empathy is feeling with someone. Empathy requires digging into your past experiences and extracting the emotions that you felt from that experience, and then using those feelings to connect with how you perceive someone else to be feeling. One time that I had to show empathy was when my boyfriend felt comfortable enough to share with me about his struggles with his father growing up. In the past, I would have felt the need to share my own experiences with issues I had with my father, animated the talking over me, or someone else in the family, or him just wanting to have control over every situation, but instead in this moment, I had to practice not sharing about my own experiences out loud. What he was telling me was making me recall these situations in my head, but instead of sharing them with him, I just took the frustration, isolation, or invisibleness that I felt in these moments to place the emotions that he might also be feeling when he was telling me this story. This helped me to listen to his experiences, but also show him that I was processing what he was saying in a deep and emotional way. I wanted him to feel supported and not alone, but I didn't want to change the conversation to be about my experiences. An important note is that we won't always be able to draw from our past emotions from a past experience in order to connect with someone, and that is okay. We won't truly be able to fully understand what emotions others are feeling. In these moments, there just needs to be a greater level of investment into listening to someone else's perspective, not judging what they're saying, and fueling a deeper conversation with your active listening. When people feel like they're being judged, then they won't feel as connected. They'll feel a sense of disconnect from you, and there will potentially even be a barrier or a wall that they put up. In any comments of doubt, invalidation, or even switching the topic of conversation can cause a person to build up that barrier. These are situations that we identified this semester as empathy misses. When a person misses an opportunity to practice their empathy. In the same way that it is possible to show too little empathy, it's also possible to show too much empathy. A person might feel too much empathy for others, and it can be limiting and almost paralyzing for that person as well. I've seen this in one of my roommates before when she wanted to help a man who she met as her Uber driver, who reminded her of the stories that she heard of her own immigrant parents when they were trying to establish themselves in America. I know this is a very complicated and unique situation, but my roommate so badly wanted to help this man find his place in Blacksburg, and also to help him find a stable job and really be able to find his community, but she didn't have the right resources or really the knowledge to know how to help him. She spent her free time for a couple of weeks, almost a whole month there, meeting with him, and it really became a burden on her and limited how much time she could really spend focusing on her full-time job, which was school. If we end up feeling too much empathy for others, then we end up limiting our rationality and understanding our limits of how much we really can help them and step in in their time of need. This is why the concept of rational compassion is so important, because as with anything else in life, there needs to be a balance of practicing empathy. One way to practice or develop empathy skills that I never realized until listening to the Empathy Gym podcast by Hidden Brain was that reading and acting are some of the best ways to develop empathy. When you're acting, you're embodying another person or character, and you have to force yourself and your brain to think the way that another person would. In a similar way, when you read, you're inside the head of another person or a character, and you are learning about how their brain processes and perceives certain situations. These are both great ways to practice building greater understanding of different perspectives, which is one of the most important takeaways when practicing empathy. I think the biggest takeaway for me when we were learning about empathy is that it's a great tool for building connection with others. I think that this is why it's so important for peer leadership, because it helps a good peer leader make others feel heard, supported, and feel like they have someone to share the load of their struggles with. This doesn't imply an inherent understanding or that the peer leader will have a similar experience to pull from those struggles for, but just that the good peer leader has the ability to share the burden and tap into their own emotions to build connection with others.