Practice Empathy: Skill 4: Identify 12 essential aspects of empathy

Each MCD Relationship Competency identifies 6 Skills, along with specific practices for learning each. For more context about MCD Relationship Competency 2: Empathy, see Skill 1: Identify the differences between empathy and other responses to difficulty, Skill 2: Identify what prevents you from offering empathy, and Skill 3: Use a diverse vocabulary of feelings and needs.

Skill 4: Identify 12 essential aspects of empathy

Empathy is a form of attunement. Empathy is giving your compassionate curiosity to another by  silently or verbally guessing another’s feelings and needs. For example, “Do you feel discouraged because you need support?” A formal empathy guess follows this structure: “Do you feel ____ because you need (value) ____?” 

PRACTICE

Empathy is a deep and subtle practice. The following 12 essential aspects of empathy only begin to describe this rich consciousness and practice. Read slowly through each one and notice what thoughts, feelings, or memories come to mind. How do you live or relate to each of these?

1. Empathy is a heart-based response to a heart-based expression of needs met or unmet. 

2. Empathy requires the intention to connect and honor the other person’s experience as valid, regardless of how it compares to your experience.

3. Empathy is a form of responsiveness that depends on an internal sense of spaciousness and equanimity. 

4. Empathy requires you to stay centered and self-connected. You are not taking responsibility for the other person’s feelings and needs.

5. Empathy often requires the ability to be comfortable with uncomfortable emotions and witness the suffering of others without trying to get them out of it. This means letting go of any agenda for the other person. (Requests about the behavior of others occur in your direct and honest expression, not in empathy).

6. The ability to offer empathy increases when you trust yourself to be true to your own experience.  That is, you know that offering someone empathy doesn’t mean you are abandoning yourself.

7. You know how to set a boundary when you are done offering empathy. You know when you are not able or willing to offer empathy.

8. Offering empathy often means being okay not understanding content when it serves the connection. You are able to let go of your own need for mental clarity regarding the facts and details of what someone is sharing if it doesn’t serve the connection. 

9. Empathy is grounded in the knowledge that when someone is heard deeply, they have greater access to wisdom and compassion.

10. Empathy can be silent or aloud.

11. Empathy is not always the best response for every encounter. Empathy is useful when the other person has a need for empathy. 

12. Empathy can be offered when you disagree with another’s opinion, memory, or perspective.