Learning empathy takes effort

I have blogged in plenty about the need for empathy and, in a number of posts, have also written about a horrible human being seemingly with no sense of empathy being elected by 63 million as the President of the US.

To me, empathy has always been about the others. "Empathy is other-focused, not self-focused."  This is important to understand.  Because, sociopaths like tRump seem to easily zoom into what makes the "others" hurt:

Someone with sociopathic tendencies can ‘read’ other people well and understand their emotions. But a sociopathic person reads others in order to manipulate or take advantage of that person.

Empathy is not about merely understanding the emotions of others.  Empathy "is a tool or skill that provides people with information from which we are then free to take actions, or not. Empathy itself is neutral. What we choose to do with it is up to us."

It is up to us.  And up to us to invest the time and energy to understand the others.

The challenge with empathy is to be open to gaining knowledge about others. We tend to be biased when it comes to empathy. We are better at reading those who are like us than at reading people who are different.

tRump openly expresses his hate for, oh, Muslims and Haitians. But, his heart bleeds if a white person somewhere is attacked by a brown person.  It is not that he is empathetic to the white person in distress--the guy is simply biased. He is bigoted.

The "us-versus-them perception diminishes the ability to empathise. So, what can be done?"  The author distills the full array of empathy into seven behaviors; read them.

I will end this post with the final paragraph from that essay:

If we see ourselves in others, if we walk in their shoes, we have little to fear and can allow empathy to help us decide how to react and behave. It is a challenge to engage in empathy, it is not easy. Some days in some situations, empathy might come easily, other times it won’t. When people are scared, stressed or anxious, it can be difficult for them to step away from their own feelings and tune into those of another person. However, because of mirroring, empathy begets empathy. The more we use it, the more others around us will use it. Everyone wants to be heard and understood. Every group wants to be recognised. It can’t happen without empathy.

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