discodoris

 Empathy seems to be a term that is increasingly being misused.  Wondering whether I was the one misunderstanding the intent of the work, I looked up some dictionary definitions.  I disregarded those that were to do with interacting with objects such as artwork, because I was interested empathy amongst people

"Identification with and understanding of another's situation, feelings and motives"
"the power of understanding and imaginatively entering into another's feelings"
"the power of entering into another's personality and imaginatively experiencing his feelings"

These definitions are all to do with appreciating that others have their own minds and respond emotionally to events individually.  By using our intellect, we can place ourselves somewhere which comprehends what they are going through, rather than conferring on them our reactions to the same events.  Sometimes, this can be used to great effect, to formulate good interactions, to modify our own actions, if we are the source of negative emotional reactions, or to provide warmth and comfort if grief is the emotion gripping another.

This type of empathy is not easy, it doesn't come naturally to anybody, as we've only ever experienced life from our own point of view.  It requires a great deal of calibration and validation*.  To understand others, we have to question them.  It is not enough to assume that what one imagines is going on with another is sufficient or correct.  If you want to empathise you have to ask how and why they react to situations.  That's a difficult task in itself, as if you want to know about negativity, you're asking the other person to remember or relive past pains and angers and analyse them.  So if you're going to do it, you need to be prepared to sometimes get a very strong push back when you probe uncomfortable boundaries.  And not to blame the other person for that response, to think that it's somehow wrong of them to react emotionally, when the truth is that we provoked it.  Humble explanation of why you chose to probe that boundary and apology for taking them somewhere uncomfortable will be necessary.

What empathy ISN'T, in my opinion, is picking up on the overall mood of others and converting that to one's own mood, making it stronger, more amplified and all about self. [I see you are sad, I shall become depressed:  I see you are cross, I shall become angry.]  That's not empathy, if there's a technical word for it it's probably aligned more closely with sympathy in the way it's used in the phrase sympathetic vibration.  For example, a particular musical note played at a certain amplitude can cause the destruction of a wine glass, or a wind of certain velocity and direction can cause a bridge to thrash wildly.  But in terms of human feelings, it's more emotional vampirism.

It feeds on others to validate a feeling of self-importance in the world.  It trivialises and dismisses the originator of the feelings, disenfranchises them from owning those feelings and is distressingly hurtful.  There's no understanding, no move to communication, no ability to diffuse tension.  There's no learning, no growing as a person, no spiritual enrichment.  And ultimately, behaving in this way that a person has incorrectly labelled as empathy, may suffer the same fate as the victims of sympathetic vibration.  They ultimately damage themselves, whilst remaining remote from the source.  The musical note will be briefly interrupted by the sound of the shattering glass, but can continue; the wind is briefly impeded by the contortions of the bridge, but continues regardless.  A transient harmful effect on the cause, but survivable, unlike the catastrophe that befalls the amplifying agency.

Wisdom lies in constantly calibrating, constantly gathering data - listening to what others say, understanding cultural frameworks, questioning to see whether your understanding matches what they were trying to communicate.  Each person is the centre of their own universe, we cannot function otherwise.  However, we can choose to expand our horizons by intersecting and sharing another's universe which will enrich them.  When we seek to expand our universe by ripping chunks out of others, or justify our universe by the existence of another's universe, others will ultimately reject that behaviour and withhold the voluntary sharing, refuse to engage or completely excise us from their worlds and justifiaby so.

* I am using the terms calibrate and validate as they are used for scientific modelling as I consider them the closest and most precise semantic terms to correctly identify what has to happen.  Scientific modelling, predicting the behaviour of a system, sets up a "picture" of reality, a description of the current state of things and seeks to show how things will change given certain inputs.  Just as in empathy, we seek to imagine the actions of others rather than how we would react.  Calibration is the testing process, have we got the right current state and the right direction that change will occur in?  And validation is in the observations of reality and how they match the predictions of the model.  If the validation process fails, then we are obviously missing either a correct description of the current state, or the direction of the reaction, so back to calibration and gathering more data on current state and likely vector of reaction.