Empathy Epiphany

I’m lying in bed, just now diving into a book I’ve long been wanting to read- Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy With Human Behavior, by Indi Young. Yep… I’m famously a frantic voice pleading with the User-Centric crowd to allow *some* design vision to pierce the (sometimes stifling) thick blanket of Findings upon Findings upon Findings… but, that aside: I do seriously dig good, common-sense design research and well written books to evangelize it’s fruits.

A few weeks ago I wrote a blurb about my experience being raped as a teenager, inspired by all the recent hoo-ha around Roman Polanski’s case re-emerging in the public spotlight. It felt good finally writing about it, and all these years later having figured-out a way to write about it where I wasn’t some martyr-voiced survivor or a sobbing victim. I’m just me, that’s just one of many experiences that’s made me who I am today, and so it goes.

One of the few things I don’t think I noted in that piece, was a positive that I’ve experienced through my emergence from that dark cloud in my past: a serious appreciation for empathy. Rape is a physiological experience that “re-wires” you, psychologically… in a way like no other experience does. Same with war trauma, same with any specific trauma.

Much of the anger I experienced as I began pushing my way through the initial stages of dark-cloud be-damned emergence, was a frustration with the world around me. The people who surrounded me loved me- and I knew this- but they in no way could possibly relate to what I was going through… it was so, incredibly foreign to any- anything, remotely comparable. “It’s ok, I understand…” prompted thunderous clouds of volcanic ash to billow from beneath my irises, cresting my cochlea as the smoke curled from the shafts leading out from my eardrums.

They wanted to understand- with every ounce of their being, they wanted to… they just simply, didn’t- couldn’t- and they only made it worse insisting that they could. Wanting to be polite and kind and gracious in my reception of this love, I of course couldn’t say that- and so I became angrier… on and on, the cycles of anger in coping. All I wanted was a Pepsi- just one Pepsi, and she wouldn’t give it to me… just a Pepsi. I digress. Suck as the entire experience did, that was a gem of insight gained that in the years since, I’ve constantly reminded myself to never let slip past me.

Ahywho: so, reading Indi’s book, she includes in the first chapter an awesome, killer reference to a blurb on Empathy from the book Difficult Conversations, by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen. I looked-up the book online, and the complete blurb just hits the nail on the head so concisely that I felt like sharing.

Quoting the book below, verbatim, from page 183-4:

Empathy is a Journey, Not a Destination.

The deepest form of understanding another person is empathy. Empathy involves a shift from my observing how you seem on the outside, to my imagining what it feels like to be you on the inside, wrapped in your skin with your set of experiences and background and looking out at the world through your eyes.

As an empathetic listener, you are on a journey with a direction but no destination. You will never “arrive.” You will never be able to say, “I truly understand you.” We are all too complex for that, and our skills to imagine ourselves into other people’s lives too limited. But in a sense this is good news. Psychologists have found that we are each more interested in knowing that the other person is trying to empathize with us — that they are willing to struggle to understand how we feel and see how we see — than we are in believing that they have actually accomplished that goal. Good listening, as we’ve said, is profoundly communicative. And struggling to understand communicates the most positive message of all.

Isn’t that just friggin’ rad?