The Art of Empathy (33 page)

David
(laughing softly)

Rosalie
(sighing, relieved): Thanks, whew!

What David and Rosalie did was deeply empathic, but David didn't follow any rules or procedures or steps. He kept Rosalie company and let her set the pace. He stood up for her, questioned her, laughed with her, and used silence effectively—but most important, he listened; paid attention to her numerous, shifting emotions; and engaged empathically. This was an
interaction,
not a technique. (We'll revisit this interaction later in this chapter.)

I do have procedures and techniques for specific situations when communication breaks down or when you need to tune in with others. However, it's really important to remember that empathy is a skill you already possess and that you can just relax and hang out with people, listen to them, make mistakes (and apologize if you do), and be empathic simply because you already are.

IF YOU DON'T HAVE ACCESS TO EMPATHIC PEOPLE

Empathy is developed in interactions, but those interactions don't have to be with other humans. If you're isolated, or if you realized in the previous chapter that you're surrounded by people who don't understand you and you're currently stuck in unfulfilling relationships, you can still develop your empathic skills. You can use your Einfühlung capacity to interact with art, literature, nature, science, ideas, drama, dance, meditation, movement, poetry, mindfulness practices, computer activities, hobbies, science, or mathematics. You can still interact even if your relationships with other people aren't currently workable. And, of course, animals are almost always waiting for someone to interact lovingly with them.

If your current relationships with other humans are troubling, you may find that they'll shift or improve if you can simply change the way you approach communication. Remember that most of your empathic work and emotion work occurs in the hidden and rather subtle world of nuance, undercurrent, gesture, and intention. If you can lean into this world empathically and make small shifts in your approach to others, you can often build a better ground for empathy between you.

LEARNING TO IDENTIFY EMOTIONS IN OTHERS

A great deal of the trouble I see in communication springs from incorrect assumptions about what people feel and what they mean—it's a problem of Perspective Taking. However, this problem actually tracks back to poor Empathic Accuracy. Think about it: if you're inaccurate about the emotions and intentions of others (or yourself ), your ability to empathize pretty much stops right there,
bam.
You won't be able to understand the person's perspective, because you're not even in the right emotional ballpark. Skillful Perspective Taking springs from your ability to accurately identify what's going on.

Incorrect emotional assumptions can also track to problems in Emotion Regulation, and I notice that people will often lose their empathic abilities in the presence of emotions they themselves don't know how to deal with (anger and anxiety are two that come to mind). All of the empathic skills and practices you've learned so far will help you develop better Emotion Regulation skills. If you identify specific emotions that trip you up, then that's awesome. That's something you can work with intrapersonally so that you can develop better relationships with your own emotions and open up your emotional range to accept those emotions in others.

As you work with troubling emotions in yourself, remember to resource yourself when other people are feeling them (or repressing them). Yes, those emotions may be problematic for you right now, but remember your
resourcing practice
and remind yourself that there are places in your body that are grounded, focused, calm, and resourceful.
Both
things are true—the problem is currently true,
and
you have the internal resources you need to support yourself through difficult times. Both things are true.

Emotion Regulation skills are intrapersonal, and this book gives you many ways to work with and improve them. Your accuracy skills, however, develop in interactions; you learn by interacting, by asking, by listening, and by making mistakes. Some people make your attempts at Empathic Accuracy very
simple, because they're open books emotionally—they're easy to read, and what you see is what you get. But in many cases, you actually have to learn people in the way you have to learn a new city or in the way you have to learn how to ride a new horse or drive a new car. I mean, the people you know very well—the people who really feel you and understand you and whose subtlest, secret, wordless glances can send you into fits of laughter—you almost certainly had to learn them, and they almost certainly had to learn you. Although we aren't aware of this learning, the act of learning to read people empathically is intentional (though usually nonverbal) work that occurs in that secret interactional world I referred to in the first chapter—where gestures, body language, subtext, nuance, relational behaviors, and undercurrent are the curriculum. Let's approach this curriculum more deliberately.

LEARNING PEOPLE INTENTIONALLY

Let me be clear before we start: This next empathic technique may have a very short shelf life, and you can't use it with everyone. You'll need to let people know you're using it, and you'll need to let them know why, because this process breaks some privacy boundaries. It's not abusive—I'm not going to teach you to hurt people—but it intimately accesses people's private, peripersonal space, so you have to be sensitive about when and where you use it.

In
Chapter 1
, I wrote about the ways that body language and facial expressions can give you an entrée into the emotional lives of others, and I gave you some direct examples of how to use body language and facial expressions to open conversations about empathy and emotions. Let's look at those again: “When you curve your body downward and sigh out loud, it seems to me that you're feeling discouraged, or maybe really tired, or both. Is that what's going on?” or “When you use short sentences and don't look at me when you speak to me, it seems that you're feeling impatient and frustrated with me. Is that true?”

In this technique, you use another person's body language to open a conversation and find out whether what you're picking up is true. The trick to this is to keep your empathic mitts off of their behavior until the latter part of the sentence, where you ask about your impressions in the form of a question. So you don't say: “Your gloomy face and your surrendering arm movements tell me that you've given up,” because that's not a question, and you've already imposed your own emotions onto the person's body. That violates all kinds of boundaries, and besides, you may be wrong. Remember that body language isn't universal, it's not even fully shared among members of the same family.
That supposedly gloomy face might actually be a tired face, and those arms might be hanging uncomfortably off of sore shoulders—they may have nothing whatsoever to do with surrendering. Body language, gestures, and facial expressions can be an entrée into Empathic Accuracy, but there's really no way for people to retain their boundaries, their emotional realities, or their dignity when you tell them authoritatively what their bodies are doing rather than
learning
what their gestures and expressions mean for them.

In order to respect the boundaries, voice, standpoint, and self-image of others, you let them know that you're working to develop your empathic skills, and ask them whether they're willing to mentor you. If so, let them know about this three-step process, because they may want to try it on you when you're done:

HOW TO LEARN PEOPLE

1. Take note of two (or three, at the very most) expressions, postures, or gestures, and describe them without any emotional or intentional content whatsoever: So you would say, “When you raise your eyebrows,” and not “when you look surprised.” Or “When you move quickly,” instead of “when you're anxious.” Or “When you look down and to the right,” instead of “when you're avoiding me.” You want to describe the behavior precisely so that the person knows exactly what you're talking about; however, you don't want to impose your own emotions onto his or her body.

2. After you've described these gestures, stances, movements, or expressions without bias, you take responsibility for the emotions you're feeling in response to what you're seeing, and you explain them as clearly as you can. I like to use the word
seems:
“When you look upward and toward the left when I'm talking, it
seems
to me that you want to get away from the conversation. It
seems
like you're feeling frustrated.” The word
seems
is boundary respecting in that it qualifies my impressions and makes room for the possibility that I could be mistaken.

3. After you've described the expressions, postures, or gestures without bias and then stated your empathic impressions (as possibilities,
not
as certainties), you follow up with a question
that invites the other person to confirm or correct your impressions. “Is that what's going on?” or “Did I pick that up correctly?” or “Is that how you're feeling?”

That's it—that's the magic, which isn't really magic at all. This three-step process is meant to help you learn other people. It's an interaction, and it's an interpersonal skill, which means that the other people not only have a say, but also that they get to be the final arbiter of what's going on with their own bodies and emotions. This technique teaches you to use your soft, curiosity-level fear instincts to help you read and report what you see in another. It also uses your soft, self-respecting anger and your soft, otherprotecting shame to help you state your impressions without breaking the boundaries of another. When you use this process, the other person can confirm or correct your impressions—and he or she may learn surprising new information about what a certain posture, expression, or gesture might say to another person. In this interactional process, the goal is to develop stronger Empathic Accuracy, but the journey also involves making your emotion work conscious and becoming more deeply connected to the actual lives of other people. Bonus!

This technique may have a short shelf life, because it may only take three to five repetitions before you can tell whether you have a good sense of another person. In some cases, especially with people whose neurology or cultural background is different from yours (for instance, in people with ADHD, depressive conditions, very high intelligence, autism, developmental delays, Tourette's, sensory-processing differences, high or low empathy, or in people from other cultures and linguistic traditions), you may have to use this process for a longer period as you calibrate your empathic skills and learn these new people properly. But in most instances, this technique is more of an icebreaker than anything else. You can also use it in special cases when you and another person lose your empathic bond with each other. But remember, this process is meant as an entrée and not as a main course. The main course is not technique based; it's just being real with people and real with yourself. But you have to develop clear Empathic Accuracy to be able to get to that real place.

This next skill
⁴⁸
can help you arrive at that real place, because it actually invites people to share one of your empathic mindfulness skills with you.

CONSCIOUS COMPLAINING WITH A PARTNER

You learned Conscious Complaining as a solitary mindfulness skill, but you can also use it as an intentional relationship practice. Conscious Complaining with a partner is an excellent way to de-steam without blowing up, and it can help you create stronger and more honest relationships. I modified this partner-complaining practice from Barbara Sher's
Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want.
Sher writes about how important it is for you to complain openly (in a safe and healthy practice), rather than shutting down and losing your emotional honesty and integrity. It's an excellent book.