How I Met Empathy

My childhood was difficult, but I didn’t have time to be sad or to feel bad for myself. Because of this, I informally learned to suppress my negative emotions, and expected others to handle their emotions the same way.  It was my goal to only focus on being happy.

In my final year of college, I was thinking to myself, “What am I going to do with a Bachelor’s degree in psychology?”.  With my life experience of resilience, having a mother with a mental health diagnosis, and having served a two-year LDS mission I thought I had the qualifications to become a mental health counselor. I decided to pursue a Master’s degree in mental health counseling.  Going into my program, my understanding of counseling was that you meet with people, give them advice, answer their questions, solve their problems, tell them how to be happy and have sympathy for them. NOT TRUE. I learned that counseling is about, listening, understanding, assisting others in exploring their strengths, values, and goals, helping them come to their own solutions on their own time, and empathizing with them.

Graduate school is where my journey of empathy began:

First, I recognized that I lacked empathy. In my second semester, our course work required me to show videos of myself counseling at my internship sites. One common theme in the feedback I received from my peers was that I needed to show empathy. I didn’t understand. At the time, I thought I had empathy. Well I did, just not a whole lot of it. I had gone my entire life ignoring all my painful feelings because I was always looking ahead for solutions, and I thought everyone else should do the same. I was still a caring compassionate person, with lots of sympathy, but I was overlooking the feelings of others and focusing on the solution. I learned a lot from their feedback. I learned that I could still be a good person, do good things, think good thoughts, have good feelings and still lack empathy.

Second, I googled the differences between sympathy and empathy. I even bookmarked a few pages on my internet searches. I looked up videos on the internet.  I found this one by Brene Brown very helpful, which I had also seen in one of my classes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw

Third, I read a book by Brene Brown called Daring Greatly. I wanted to work on vulnerability, because I knew that this journey would be difficult and humbling for me. I needed to prepare myself to make changes.

Fourth, I needed to emotionally process my own life experiences that I had been ignoring. I scheduled and met with a counselor for the first time. I talked about my life experiences and processed through negative feelings I had ignored. It was liberating to acknowledge my feelings of sadness, anger, hurt, pain, and resentment. This allowed me to more fully feel happiness because I was no longer choosing happiness.  I was truly experiencing happiness by being honest with my feelings as a whole. This was a turning point for me because I could now recognize my own emotions and I could then recognize and be open to others’ emotions.

Fifth, I needed to stop trying to solve others’ problems. I always had an answer. I always had a solution. I could fix any problem, but I learned that others have the answers and solutions too. I learned that people want to be heard and understood first.  It reminds me of the video with a woman with a nail literally stuck in her head speaking to a man about the pain and problems she was having. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg. I was the man in this video. Clearly the solution was to pull the nail out. Obviously, she knew that there was a nail there but she wanted to be heard and understood.

Sixth, I became aware of my judgmental thoughts. These thoughts often began with, “I don’t understand why they…” or “can’t they just, do this instead of that…,”. These judgments disconnected me from others. Instead of having judgmental thoughts, I tried to understand how the other person was feeling by identifying the meaning behind their statements.

I am certainly not perfectly empathetic. I still have a long way to go. I will say that since I have strived to learn more about empathy I have found that I genuinely have better connections with people. I have been able to honor and recognize my emotions and the emotions of others. My personal relationships have improved. I feel a greater amount of love and compassion for others, beyond what I have experienced before and I am genuinely much happier.