August 28

"What is Empathy"

Through the Seasons of the Heart

John Powell S.J.

Page 252

It seems to me that the key to success in understanding and loving others is empathy. Empathy starts with an attentive listening and an intuitive reading of the uniqueness of another. empathy asks only one question: What is it like to be you? Empathy is getting inside of the skin of another, walking in his or her shoes, seeing and experiencing reality as it looks through the eyes of another. In the end, empathy offers not advice but only understanding. "oh, yes, I hear you." If the essence of empathy's listening to and living vicariously the life experience of another, the price of empathy is this: It requires a temporary leaving of one's self, one's own thoughts and feelings, one's values and belief. When I empathize with you, I leave where I am and go to be with you where you are. 

Carl Rogers

Quoted here on Page 252

Through the Seasons of the Heart

"That our experience of the human condition often involves feelings like those of a person who has fallen into a deep, dry well. the desperate man trapped in the well can't climb out, so he keeps knocking, knocking, knocking on the side of the well, hoping against hope that someone will hear him and realize his situation. Finally, after a long time of such banging against the side of the well, he hears a responding knock from the outside. someone has heard Him! There  is an explosion of joyful relief in the poor man. "Thank God!" Somebody finally knows where I am." Rogers says that when somebody really listens to us and registers understanding, we feel the same grateful explosion of relief: "Thank God! Somebody finally knows where I am. Somebody finally knows what it is like to be me!"