On Empathy

EWR:  On Empathy

There's a lot to respond to in your post so let me try and focus in on a few things that stand out for me.

I once had a brief conversation with Elaine Aron, the author of Highly Sensitive People. My sister set it up because she was doing massages for Aron and I was thrashing about after graduate school trying to figure out what kind of work I wanted to do.

What I  recall about the conversation was that she was very matter-of-fact and told me that I needed to get a schtick! Like hers. So much for empathy and high sensitivity :-)

I further recall being in a therapy session many years ago, it was a group therapy, and there was this conversation between the (female) therapist and another group member, also female,  going on. The therapist felt that the women had discounted her (the therapist’s) feelings. The woman was distraught to hear this, and was openly weeping. 

I had this deep emotional reaction to her weeping and said to the woman “I think you know what it feels like to be discounted like that”. It was a flash of insight. The women stopped crying and just looked at me. The therapist fell silent. 

Later on the therapist said to me “You have really deep insights into people”, emphasizing “deep”. She went on to say, “I don’t know if you will ever want to do anything with this ability, and it may not be a part of the work you choose, but it’s there”.

That’s not the only incident where this capacity emerged. But it unnerved me, because it was not under my control, and I felt vulnerable about it. I got twisted up in my ego, and started using it more as a parlor trick, kind of showing off. Eventually, of course, I started missing the mark and people would say back to me “No that’s not what I am feeling” and I started to doubt it. 

I tried it once with Floss, (who was quite empathic herself) and she said something to the effect of  “don’t pull that stuff with me!”. At some point I decided it was too much of a burden and I wasn’t going to focus on it any longer. 

Eventually I was able to channel it into my coaching and learned how to use it “professionally”. It became one of my strongest capacities (although never 100% reliable!) and probably contributed more to my success as a consultant than anything else. 

I don’t see myself as highly empathic but I am probably above average, at least for men. And, truth to tell, I don’t know how much that really means anyway, since the real issue seems to be how much you value it and whether it’s integrated into your way of being. The people I admire most are highly empathic and also highly self-assured and “ comfortable in their own skin.’

As for the checklist, yes and no. I did take several tests that purport to measure emotional intelligence, of which empathy is a key component, and I scored in the higher ranges. There’s much to dispute about the tests however, and there’s something a little bit off about using such crude, left-brain techniques to measure something as imprecise as empathy (too easy to generate false positives, after all, who doesn't want to think of themselves as empathic). 

There’s more to talk about here and I am certainly up for it.