How Do You Walk In Another's Shoes?

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Empathy is one of those all-around superhero traits or skills that make us generally better humans and improves all relationship strata. It is extolled as one of the highest qualities we should strive for and rightfully so. 

Empathy is defined by Wiki as the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position according. 

I was asked recently what success means to me as a parent. In addition to qualities such as curiosity, problem-solving and independent-minded, I had empathy on my list. But if I’m not exactly sure what the length and breadth of empathy are, how do I teach them?

What we are often told about empathy is to walk in another’s shoes figuratively (its origin is from the German psychological term Einfühlung, literally meaning “feeling-in) to understand how they feel about a situation, so as to be kinder and more sensitive to other people’s plights and for us to be one big happy family world.

The main types of empathy are:

1. Affective empathy is the sensations and feelings we get in response to others’ emotions; this can include mirroring what that person is feeling or just feeling stressed when we detect another’s fear or anxiety. Empaths have been known to have visceral reactions to other people’s pains.

2. Cognitive empathy is also known as “perspective-taking,” is our ability to identify and understand other people’s emotions. This is the main type of empathy we feel. 

If we are to walk in someone’s shoes we could in fact literally walk in that person’s shoes to feel what they feel or engineer the emotion through our imagination. 

In literally walking through a person’s shoes, we must have felt what that person is feeling through a unique shared experience e..g. people that have survived a traumatic event together or gone through similar events. 

Let me explain what I mean, the first time I took a COVID test, I was so horrified by how invasive it was, it wasn’t a pleasant experience and left me with a runny nose for 3 days. 

After living that experience, I thought about how the numerous patients that I (in my previous life as a clinical doctor) and my fellow good people of the medical profession must have felt when we, without much thought shoved NG( nasogastric) tubes down their noses.

I would be more “human” if I ever had to perform that procedure again but did it have to take me taking a COVID test, which is by the way a relatively much dialled down process compared to passing a nasogastric tube to rethink the degree of sensitivity that needs to be shown while doing that?

It is practically impossible to feel or go through every possible experience there is to go through for you to know what that experience must feel like and for you to provide the requisite comfort or sensitivity needed to be empathetic.

It might also not be possible to feel what it feels like to be someone if you have never lived that person's unique experience. No matter how much you try. If you have never lost a child or a parent or being divorced or cheated on etc, can you walk in that person’s shoes and feel the emotions they are feeling?

There was the whole global uproar of white privilege after the death of George Floyd but does a person that is white and raised white know what the world is like for a black person and vice versa? 

Seeing as we will always be different and have different experiences in life, how can we “do” empathy the right way.

Mark Manson tweeted that “Our empathy is one of the only things that separated us from animals. It’s hard to practise, but arguably one of the most important of all human skills.”

Since you can’t experience everything that someone has and some things might be hard to imagine e.g. being a guy if you are a woman or being white/black, here is what you can do to create empathetic connections regardless.

There are overarching emotions that we have all felt at one time or another, emotions such as joy, fear, frustration, anger, despair, sorrow, rejection, etc. We need to use these emotions as a proxy to understand how someone is feeling. If for instance, you have never lost a child and can’t comprehend what the person might be going through, you must at some point have experienced loss, you can use that feeling as an anchor to understand how the other person is feeling. If you are white and don’t understand what it means to be black you might understand or relate to what it means to be afraid, frustrated, or resentful, unheard. In the same way, women can relate to the feeling of pressure of expectations to feel what a man especially in the African context might feel.  

But to understand the key emotion someone is feeling(you can't guess), you have to ask and seek to understand. It should always be about that other person even if you have gone through a similar experience. Another example, one of my very close friends who had lost 2 of her parents said that I was being impatient with her recovery process. 

See, I had lost my mum when I was 19 and it could be said that I have lived her experience as I had “walked in her shoes” and it can be assumed that I had the requisite experience of loss to be empathetic and supportive. Despite this, I still wasn’t able to give her what she needed. People’s journeys are different, how I process emotions may be different from how another does. The general emotion of loss and despair we both felt might be a different shade for someone who has lost both parents and as a full adult from mine, not that I’m undermining my loss. My point is that even if you have experienced a version of what that person feels, you always have to focus on the other person and their context. 

We tend to want to move the focus to our own experiences and that is not empathy.  Being preachy and overly optimistic is also not empathy. 

For my friend, I had to ask her what she needs from me. She just needed me to shut up and listen most of the time instead of trying to motivate her. You need to seek first to understand the emotion by asking questions and then follow the person’s cues to know how  best they want you to support. 

Oh, and while we are at it, I might as well highlight the difference between empathy and sympathy. Sympathy tends to masquerade as empathy a lot.

Empathy is feeling with someone while sympathy is feeling for someone. Empathy seeks connection while sympathy can be alienating by creating an uneven power dynamic. For empathy, you are in it with the person while for sympathy you recognise the pain but you are outside of it. Nothing and no one explains the difference between the two better than the authority on the topic, Brene Brown using this video. 

In conclusion, according to Brene Brown the 4 ways to be empathetic are; 

1. Perspective Taking, or putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.

2. Staying out of judgement and listening.

3. Recognizing emotion in another person that you have maybe felt before.

4. Communicating that you can recognize that emotion.

Happy Zigzagging,

Ije

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