A long post.

I recently had to write an essay for my clinical supervision class on the topic "how is empathy." It is one of the best things I have been asked to put on paper since I started grad school, because it isn't about academia and facts and touting my newfound knowledge. It is about examining a human skill, trait, necessity. So I will post the essay here. It is a long one so hold on to your hats...

The phone rings. It is late, and I don’t feel like answering. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I silence the ringer and a bit later go back to listen to the message via voicemail. Just hearing her voice brings tears to my eyes. In her message to me, she speaks tentatively at first but soon her voice breaks into a full sob. The unmistakable sorrow in her tone seeps through the phone receiver and I feel it run like a current down my spine. She has just heard the news of my father’s death.

Empathy involves a giver and a receiver. In my experience it is sometimes impossible to determine who is who...perhaps they both fulfill each role at one time or another? The receiver owns the pain, the joy, and the guilt – the raw reality of their experience. It is theirs and they know it well. The giver doesn’t own the experience, and may not even understand it all, but they are willing to at least try it on for a while. In trying on, encountering empathy is like holding onto the essence of a feeling or experience. It feels like a weight; and though as the giver you might not be holding up the exact same object as the receiver, you are able to grasp an understanding of how heavy the lifting can be.

The car is cold. I start the engine and turn up the heat as I throw my CD player and scarves in the backseat. As I begin to drive away from the building in this strange yet real way I sense that she is still with me. The way we danced, the words and feelings that were shared – when our eyes locked, I could tell in hers that she knew I got it. It was as though our souls touched for a fleeting moment, as if we were so connected that for just a second I saw and felt the world from her point of view. Hours have passed…why do I still have a remnant of her sadness lingering in my chest?

I sense this thing called empathy creating a nest for itself in my body. I guess it plans to be around for a while. It sits somewhere around the base of my sternum, lodged safely between my rib bones and spinal column, just to the right of my heart. When the nest is especially full, I can feel the shared emotion bubbling up towards my clavicle bones and into my neck. Sometimes my empathy’s home becomes so full that the emotion wells up far enough to make my voice crack. If it wells up even further it brings tears to my eyes. The more full my nest becomes, the closer I know I am to empathy. I am closer to being with the other in their experience. At times, their view is so real to me that my empathy nest becomes flooded and my own body is overcome with emotion. Even swimming in fear and pain I love those moments, and believe they are there to remind me of how alive I am, and thus how able I am to be in relationship with others. It is frightening. It is rewarding. It lives in my chest.

The room is large, uncomfortably large. It is packed with people – family and friends and coworkers and colleagues. The talking and busyness in the hall can’t drown out the all encompassing mourning hanging like a large umbrella in the air. I am over stimulated, my eyes drifting until they land on a group of women near the entrance. Our eyes meet and we all break into tears. As I embrace them, each one traveling miles to be by my side, I can feel it through the labored breathing and the shaking torsos. They get it. Somehow they have found a way to touch my sadness. They didn’t even really know him, but they can feel my grief. And although it is different, for that moment in time, it is their grief too.

Empathy is difficult. Difficult to achieve and difficult to let go of once you’ve found it. It appears to be another of life’s finely tuned skills – just when you think you’ve mastered it, you slip up and find yourself back at step one. I believe empathy is so inherently complicated because we can’t just know what another person is going through. We might say “oh, I know” but really, we don’t. How foolish to think that we, in our individual uniqueness, could know something that belongs to someone else? Perhaps we say, “I know” when what we really mean is “I care.” I care enough to show you that in my own way I have felt something akin to what you are feeling now. I care enough to try and know, and at the very least, I care enough to be there. And the deep desire to care so much you want to know, well, sometimes that is all you need. The empathy will come.

I am walking. I am always walking. And thinking. My bag weighs down on my shoulders, a literal reminder of my emotional heaviness. In light of the past months I feel older than my 20 years. I keep cycling back to what my parents used to tell us about “everyone having their own crosses to bear.” I feel, for the first time in my life, like I am carrying my cross. In my whole being I now can understand what the old saying means. No one else is hauling this with them wherever they go. No one else remembers that it weighs on me all of the time. It makes me feel alone. People try, and I love them for that, but no one really gets it just in the way that I do. And they never will. Somehow, though, I can find solace in the fact that while I have to carry my own cross, I am not responsible for carrying all of the others too.

Empathy is the ability to constantly remind yourself that everyone has their own story, their own “stuff,” or as it has been so many times put to me, “their own cross to bear.” This image especially helps me grasp onto empathy, because I bring to mind the image of Jesus carrying the cross. People tried to help him as he struggled to walk, stepping in for a moment to share the weight, but no one’s experience was comparable. While considering this, another phrase comes to mind – “stand in someone else’s shoes for a while.” Just like no one can fully understand the weight of Jesus’ cross, empathy isn’t exactly like standing in someone else’s shoes. It is more like standing so close to those shoes that you can still smell them, and near enough to the person wearing the shoes to take in the world from their perspective. You are trying to get a glance at their picture, if for but a fleeting moment.

The whole world seems to be smiling. Well, not the whole world, but everyone in my corner at this moment. That is what matters. The sun is streaming down and the wind dusting across the prairie in a soft autumn breeze. My joy feels complete. Despite the crowd I only really care about the one person attached to the hand that I am holding. He tightens his grasp, and his dancing eyes look back into mine. My breath catches in my chest as we forge on into the veil of bubbles. He is fully with me, and I with him. With.

Empathy is being with someone. It is when your presence is so strong to the other that they can sense your being with them spiritually, emotionally and physically. It is sharing yourself unabashedly. It is surrendering to the fact that as a receiver you can’t make the person understand just like you do, and as a giver you can’t change the receiver’s experience. But, that overall, through empathy you have the power to convey the message that as people living in relationship we are not alone. In our humanness we are able to share, to connect, to be with. To empathize.