Empathy
Empathy, the recognition of the emotional states of others, requires that we imagine how others feel and what their needs might be. It requires letting go of self-preoccupation, it requires paying attention to people other than ourselves, it requires observation, listening, and understanding. We need to be able to truly focus on others and to read non-verbal messages. To have empathy we need self-awareness. If we understand ourselves and our emotions, we will more easily be able to understand another’s.
But some people have little if any empathy. People with the ability to feel a degree of empathy are capable of kindness or they can use their understanding to play on others’ weaknesses and inflict pain more effectively, (sadism).
So, even where empathy exists, it does not guarantee sympathy or compassion. Some people have no empathy, some have empathy but do not care about others’ pain, and some have, and use empathy, to understand how to manipulate, exploit or even cause maximum hurt to another.
There is a relationship between empathy and conscience—recognizing that we have hurt another, being able to imagine what that feels like, and so regret causing it—which may explain why women, with traditionally more empathy, are less criminal than men.
A friend told me about her first painful experience of conscience and empathy. As a child, she once stole flowers from a neighbour’s garden. The woman was a widow who devoted herself to her garden and volunteering in the community. She took flowers from her garden to patients in hospital and to the elderly folk on her meals-on-wheels rounds. After the initial pleasure, my friend was guilt stricken; she had taken something from a kind person and deprived sick and elderly people of pleasure. To this day she is still troubled by what she did. Many people however have no concern for the impact of their actions on others, only that they get what they want. Betraying a neighbour’s trust and depriving others of something would not bother them at all.
Some people do not even see that others have the same needs and rights as they do. Other people exist as objects of pleasure or conquest, to supply things they need, or for them to use for their own purposes. This insensitivity may vary from lack of affection and tenderness through to exploitation and violence. Such people are emotionally detached because they cannot see that others are just like them.
People who lack empathy may see their partner as a possession, a commodity or even an extension of themselves. They are unable or unwilling to offer support, encouragement or affection when a partner needs it most. They never truly listen to a partner, never try to put aside their own point of view, never truly accept their partner’s differences and never really unite with them. They don’t listen. They never really know their partner. So they have no idea what a partner really likes, what they want, what they care about. Such people are highly sensitive to their own pain but dismissive of, or indifferent to, anyone else’s.
Without empathy there is no real connection to others so that people can become more or less interchangeable. A lack of empathy can lead to stubbornness, only recognizing our own views as important, and taking no notice of anyone else’s ideas or opinions.
Lack of empathy also leads to lack of respect for others and a lack of restraint toward them that can result in callousness and even cruelty. Without empathy people often respond inappropriately because they assume that others think and feel as they do and have the same desires and motives.
Normal people get to know others by listening, asking questions, observing and being sensitive to signals and responses, but someone without empathy is not interested in anyone else’s ‘otherness’. Without empathy it is easier to have a contemptuous, dismissive attitude to other people’s feelings, wishes, standards, property, beliefs or work. Someone without empathy can be cruel in all sorts of ways because they pay so little attention to others. They do not know what others value or why (nor do they care).
They often even have trouble understanding conversations because without empathy they only have the surface words to go by; they cannot read subtle voice intonations, facial expressions, body language, or sense atmosphere. They don’t really care who other people are so don’t focus on them, listen, see, remember, pay attention. Without empathy other people become one-dimensional. And a lack of empathy encourages snap, stereotyped judgements about people.
Without empathy we do not really see people as other people, but merely as objects in relation to ourselves. Lack of empathy makes us insensitive and can lead to callous indifference and casual cruelty. There is no meaning in helping others, or living for others. We lack awareness of, and give no attention to others as beings who are as equally important as themselves.
Empathy, that uniquely human ability to imagine oneself in another’s position, to understand how others think and feel, to emotionally enter another person’s world, and to respond with compassion, is essential to healthy relationships, social unity and personal growth.
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