“Put yourself in the other person’s shoes.” The advice is familiar. This practice is often associated with the golden rule of treating others as we want to be treated; but we rarely think how the advice should be interpreted.
There are two mistakes to avoid. First mistake: Assume that imagining yourself in the other person’s shoes gives you new knowledge.
All that imagining can do cognitively is to prompt you to recall what you already know about the other. Understanding others is harder than we think. Research shows that even helping professionals overestimate their ability to discern the needs of their clients through empathy. We need training and practice to learn to test our interpretations of what others say and what feelings they express. The more the other person is different from us, the more we need to work to understand the person.
Second mistake: Assume that imagining yourself in the other person’s shoes is the key to ethical conduct.
Sometimes we can intuit what is right in a situation without having to imagine ourselves in the other’s shoes. And just performing that act of imagining does not necessarily guarantee that we’ll come out with the right ethical answer. Sometimes you need to consult with the person(s) affected by your decision. And a habit of seeing ourselves through the eyes of the dominant social group can be discouraging to minorities.
Despite these caveats, there are reasons to imagine how the world looks from the other’s perspective. This is more productive than the emotions aroused by the spectacle of the other’s suffering. Imagining the effects of our action from the other’s perspective can awaken sympathy, understanding, moral reason, spiritual insight, and love.
Imagining oneself in the other’s situation gently displaces our customary self-centeredness. We come to focus on the needs of the other person. Thus the self-centered self is de-centered and re-centered in identification with the other.
How do you identify with others? What experiences have helped you see the world through the eyes of others?
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Identifying with others has come about through the realization that at the basic level of existence we are all connected. It is this spiritual thread that allows for the capacity of empathy. But empathy can only arise as has been noted when one takes the time to know, understand, discern the motive, and learn to love the individual. Love is the ultimate basis for showing empathy. When you love someone, really love them, and want what is best for them, then it is easy to identify with them. In this situation, you rejoice when they rejoice and you suffer when they suffer. You view them through the eye of the spirit.
The best way to develop empathy for an individual is to enter into a committed relationship with that individual. In this way you come to know how not only to identify with them, but to really do something good for them. A parent does not literally experience what their child experiences, but in all the emotional aspects, moral and spiritual aspects, he/she does. The parent’s grief and sorrow are real, and the true parent would gladly lay down their life for their offspring if it were required. No greater love than this exists.
The experiences that have helped me to develop the capacity to show empathy is the development of love for my patients, and to resist the temptation to avoid the uncomfortable uneasy feeling that one experiences when confronted the need to show empathy. I learned to understand that I could enter into the spirit of their suffering without unraveling myself. Indeed entering into this experience made me stronger emotionally. I learned through experience that this willingness to walk in another’s shoes, not only gave great comfort to my patient’s even in the most dire circumstances, but also deepened my appreciation for the human condition, and the need to love unconditionally.
By learning to unselfishly love members of my own family, and then my neighbors, and finally my social group, I learned to be empathetic. Learning empathy in the first group equipped and qualified me to develop empathy in the succeeding groups, and finally helped me to realize that we are indeed all connected and all deserve to love and be loved, to be a giver of empathy as well as a receiver of it.
Dr. Perry
Isn’t it amazing how a brief but careful account can cover so much territory so well! This is the hope of a blogger; the second hope of a blogger is to have a colleagues who does this.
Identifying with others has come about through the realization that at the basic level of existence we are all connected. It is this spiritual thread that allows for the capacity of empathy. But empathy can only arise as has been noted when one takes the time to know, understand, discern the motive, and learn to love the individual. Love is the ultimate basis for showing empathy. When you love someone, really love them, and want what is best for them, then it is easy to identify with them. In this situation, you rejoice when they rejoice and you suffer when they suffer. You view them through the eye of the spirit.
The best way to develop empathy for an individual is to enter into a committed relationship with that individual. In this way you come to know how not only to identify with them, but to really do something good for them. A parent does not literally experience what their child experiences, but in all the emotional aspects, moral and spiritual aspects, he/she does. The parent’s grief and sorrow are real, and the true parent would gladly lay down their life for their offspring if it were required. No greater love than this exists.
The experiences that have helped me to develop the capacity to show empathy is the development of love for my patients, and to resist the temptation to avoid the uncomfortable uneasy feeling that one experiences when confronted the need to show empathy. I learned to understand that I could enter into the spirit of their suffering without unraveling myself. Indeed entering into this experience made me stronger emotionally. I learned through experience that this willingness to walk in another’s shoes, not only gave great comfort to my patient’s even in the most dire circumstances, but also deepened my appreciation for the human condition, and the need to love unconditionally.
By learning to unselfishly love members of my own family, and then my neighbors, and finally my social group, I learned to be empathetic. Learning empathy in the first group equipped and qualified me to develop empathy in the succeeding groups, and finally helped me to realize that we are indeed all connected and all deserve to love and be loved, to be a giver of empathy as well as a receiver of it.
Dr. Perry
Isn’t it amazing how a brief but careful account can cover so much territory so well! This is the hope of a blogger; the second hope of a blogger is to have a colleagues who does this.