Empathy: The Misunderstood E-Word

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“There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit – the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us – the child who’s hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room.”
Barack Obama, 2006 Northwestern University Commencement Address

Whenever a public figure uses a word or an expression that isn’t well-known or understood, there’s bound to be discussion, controversy, and even outrage. U.S. President Barack Obama’s call for empathy in all aspects of life—from homes, schools, and jobs all the way up to the Office of the President—has pushed a lot of buttons and made the word empathy both a subject of ridicule and a national buzzword. From speeches he’s delivered and books he’s written to his presidential criteria for a Supreme Court justice, Mr. Obama has frequently cited empathy as an essential quality in any worthwhile human endeavor.

Unfortunately, the word has so often been misunderstood that he seems to have dropped it from his personal lexicon and replaced it with phrases like “keen understanding.”

Hopefully, barroom brawls won’t break out over keen understanding. The good news is that we now have an expanded awareness of the concept of empathy on a national and even international level, and the controversy has a lot of us thinking about it, cultivating it, and practicing it.

But what is empathy?

For starters, empathy isn’t an emotion in and of itself. Empathy, rather, is an ability or a capability that’s developed over time, nurtured, and allowed to operate and function—or not.

Empathy is not sympathy, although the two are closely related. If I’m sympathetic toward someone, it means I’m actively concerned about his situation or cause, I have an affinity or experiences in common with this person, and I also hold him in high regard or have some level of respect for him.

If I have sympathy for a friend who has lost his job, it means that I might call him on the phone and offer my help in some way. I might show that I care by trying to cheer him up or encourage him. I might also send him a humorous or inspirational email once in awhile to make sure he knows that a sympathetic friend is there to cheer him on.

Empathy is not pity.

If we pity someone, we feel a deep sorrow for someone who, we feel, is not an equal to us. We don’t feel sympathy if we feel pity because we don’t share experiences or commonality with that person; he or she is not someone we socialize with or respect and is not someone we want to know personally. Pity may evoke a fleeting sense of sadness for someone we view as hopeless or beyond help.

Sometimes people give coins to a beggar on the street because they pity him—and their reasons for giving might not be sympathetic. Giving money out of pity is an ego-serving act: they may feel virtuous and proud of themselves that they gave money to a beggar. They may feel generous and that they’ve fulfilled religious or civic duty. They may feel neither sympathy nor empathy because pity serves only oneself.

Empathy stands alone as an ability to feel and understand what others feel.

I can feel sympathy for someone who has lost his job, and I can also feel empathy, because I’ve been there. I know what it feels like to lose a job and wonder which way to turn next. Because I can imagine myself in his shoes, it makes me a better listener, a better friend. I don’t scoff or offer platitudes; I let him know that I recognize and feel his pain and that he’s not alone.

The English word empathy literally means in passion or in suffering with someone else.

It derives from the Greek pathos—suffering, emotion, feeling—and can mean that we feel the same emotions as someone else while they feel them, as if by some spiritual osmosis or tele-empathic ability. Most commonly, though, empathy refers to an ability to comprehend the emotions and motivations of another either because we have felt similar emotions or because we can imagine them.

I cannot truly empathize with a homeless person sitting on a steam vent, with hand outstretched, in the dead of winter.

I can, however, puzzle together bits of loneliness, confusion, desperation, cold, pain, helplessness, and being a victim of powers beyond me and imagine what it’s like and feel sympathy—and be thankful that it’s not me.

Barack Obama writes, in The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, that trying to understand people who are struggling doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand those in better circumstances or those with whom we disagree:

“That’s what empathy does–it calls us all to task, the conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressed and the oppressor. We are all shaken out of our complacency. We are all forced beyond our limited vision. No one is exempt from the call to find common ground.”

Empathy isn’t a warm and fuzzy sort of thing. Having empathetic understanding doesn’t mean we need to sympathize or agree with someone, and it doesn’t mean we need to take on or approve of another’s feelings just because we can sense or understand them. Empathy only means that we’re able to feel and see things from another’s vantage point—grief, sadness, joy, happiness, motivations, needs—even if we don’t share the same viewpoint and emotions.

In The Audacity of Hope, Mr. Obama states that “a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those people who are struggling in this society. After all, if they are like us, then their struggles are our own. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves.”

Empathy, then, is knowing that others are like us, no matter who they are or where they live or what they do.

Empathy is knowing ourselves, too, for without knowing our own feelings we cannot understand what and how others feel.

If we have empathy, our egos and self-serving vanity have less need to judge others and judge ourselves: if we are alike, we are neither better nor worse than anyone else. Where empathy lives, antagonistic competition cannot exist. Cruelty and violent aggression cannot thrive, for if we are malicious to someone who is like us—someone who lives and breathes and feels and loves and mourns just like we do—then we brutalize ourselves and one of our own.

Understanding another by imagining what it’s like to be in his or her shoes and what the world looks like—from his vantage point—means taking off our own rose-colored sunglasses and putting on those of another: that’s empathy. And empathy is always the first step in solving problems, resolving conflicts, and living more peacefully together.

Special thanks to Giulietta Nardone over at Giulietta the Muse for the inspiration.

Comments? Complaints? Arguments? Opposition? Join the discussion.

For additional reading:

In Court Nominees, Is Obama Looking for Empathy by Another Name?

Once More, Without Feeling: The GOP’s misguided and confused campaign against judicial empathy.

Obama Pushes for ‘Empathetic’ Supreme Court Justices