Over recent years it has become common for people to see empathy as a desirable factor in people’s nature.
Books have been written about developing empathy and how to nurture it in children as they grow up.
It has become a powerful slur to accuse someone to be lacking empathy, inferring they are uncaring as a result.
But what is empathy? It is defined in the dictionary as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.”
Let’s tease this out a little bit and see if we can make sense of it.
According to the definition, to be truly empathic, we would have to both understand and share the feelings of the other.
Given that our feelings are subject to a lifetime of growth and experience which would not be identical for any two people, it is difficult to see how anyone could truly be empathic.
When events occur, they pass through filters which allow us to receive the information and make some sense of it.
The first filter is our senses.
The only way we can connect with the world outside us is through our senses, and no two people have the same senses.
We see, hear, taste, smell and feel things differently to each other so the information we receive is altered by how our senses work.
The next filter is our knowledge, all that we have experienced and learned. It stands to reason that this will be different for everyone.
Finally, we have our values system, the set of beliefs we have taken on. Again, this will vary from person to person.
What we end up with is a perception which is unique to us.
Knowing how another feels is not possible; we are only able to understand how we would feel given the same circumstances.
This is borne out by the angry response often given by someone beset with a tragedy when they are told by some well-meaning person that “I know exactly how you feel”.
What is possible is compassion.
Defined as “sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.”
Compassion saves us from the hubris of thinking we know how it is for the other. It allows us to act with kindness and respect, offering the support the other tells us they need rather than what we think they need. You don’t need to understand and share the feelings of others to have compassion for them.
