The Groove 158 - How to Increase Your Empathy
HOW TO INCREASE YOUR EMPATHY
Today The Groove comes a day earlier as I’ll be traveling this week and wanted to have time to read your messages and emphasize how important it is that we reconnect with our empathy.
In our interconnected world of social media and technology, human interactions have diminished in favor of isolation, working from home, and living behind a screen. Add to that the echo chambers that the algorithms serve us, and the result is an eroded level of empathy, which not only doesn’t help creativity but dangerously reduces our humanity.
Empathy is the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes. If authenticity is a habit nurtured from the inside out, empathy begs us to take the outside in. We cannot feel exactly how another person feels, but we can try as much as possible to be on their wavelength and imagine what they might be experiencing.
Allowing Differences to Coexist
Eugène Delacroix in Paris, 1859.
Below there’s an excerpt of my book taken from the chapter on Empathy.
Between 1792 and 1848, the French witnessed three revolutions and profound changes in their socio-political structure and experienced long periods of severe social unrest. Into this France the painter Eugène Delacroix was born.
Delacroix was one of the originators of a new artistic era, Romanticism, which responded to political upheaval by rebelling against the establishment. Like all Romantics, Delacroix, who became the leader of that movement, emphasized the emotions of his subjects, including their terror and awe.
Understanding the emotions of others certainly inspired Delacroix. When he was thirty-two, he painted one of the world's most recognizable pictures, Liberty Leading the People.
As a painter and gifted artist, Delacroix straddled two worlds. One was the world of ordinary people. He felt a kinship with craftsmen and factory workers who used their hands to make things. On the other side, he forged connections with the intellectual elite who commissioned his paintings and supported his work.
By 1830, the French were once again fed up with their monarch. Charles X, another tone-deaf king, imposed more taxes, repressed election laws, and violated the new constitution's provision for freedom of religion by restoring the established church. The French were not having it, and after three days of fighting on the streets of Paris, on July 29, 1839, Charles X was deposed.
Delacroix watched these events unfold. He saw people fighting and dying. He saw the insurgents building barricades. He saw them raise the French flag in front of the cathedral of Notre-Dame, a scene that deeply stirred him and stayed vivid in his mind.
Although he had not carried guns or stones or mounted the barricades, he was fully aware of the social and political realities of France. He had witnessed, firsthand, the pain and suffering of his compatriots, and a couple of months after the July Revolution.
Eugène Delacroix. Liberty Leading the People, 1830. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Delacroix began painting what would become his masterpiece. In October 1830, he wrote his brother, "I have undertaken a modern subject, a barricade, and although I may not have fought for my country, at least I shall have painted for her."
Rather than highlighting the idea of victory and freedom, he focused on the uniqueness and diversity of the people. He gave each of the subjects in this painting their own characteristics. He wanted contemporary viewers to believe that they could all be revolutionaries and that everyone in France contributed to bringing forth much-longed-for change.
The revolutionaries in Liberty Leading the People represented many social classes and backgrounds. There was a young student holding a pistol in each hand, wearing a black velvet beret, with a cartridge pouch crossing his body. A factory worker sports a white shirt and an apron while wielding a sable. A bourgeois young man wearing a tailored black coat, top hat, vest, and cravat around his neck is armed with a hunting shotgun. Another boy, or gamin, from the street, probably an orphan, is crouching, holding a stone in one hand and a spade in the other, his head covered with a green bonnet that was associated with Napoleon's army.
Intellectuals, street kids, and working-class people all became rebels, guided by an allegorical figure, "Liberty." She is half nude, her round breasts exposed; her right arm, waving the French flag, is muscular and strong; the left holds a bayonet; her yellow dress is stained. Delacroix made her alive, assertive, and relatable. She's not flying above, she's not a supernatural goddess, in the middle of the action, getting down and dirty with the insurgents.
When Delacroix first exhibited Liberty at the Paris Salon (back then, the greatest annual art event in the Western world) in 1831, it drew huge crowds. Its portrayal of rebellion in all levels of society helped the French bond and empathize with each other regardless of their social status. It reminded them of what united their country not politicians, not an isolated group of privileged people, but the people as a whole.
Even with his superb skills, it would have been nearly impossible for Delacroix to make a painting of this significance, one that has moved and inspired so many generations, had it not been because of his empathetic and inclusive point of view.
Avoiding Empathic Distress
A research paper by professors Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki tells us that “While empathy refers to our general capacity to resonate with others' emotional states irrespective of their valence - positive or negative - empathic distress refers to a strong aversive and self-oriented response to the suffering of others, accompanied by the desire to withdraw from a situation in order to protect oneself from excessive negative feelings.”
Given the onslaught of negative things happening in the world, it’s normal for people to feel empathic distress. If you feel numb and detached, know that you aren’t alone.
One of the antidotes for empathic distress that psychologists have found most effective is the use of meditation-related techniques that foster feelings of benevolence and kindness. The most widely used technique is called “loving-kindness training”.
Loving-kindness meditation can also reduce people’s focus on themselves—which can, in turn, lower symptoms of anxiety and depression.
I found a free loving-kindness meditation recording and transcript by Eve Ekman, Senior Fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley University, that is worth using once a day on a daily basis and takes about 6 minutes of your time.
Further Expanding Empathy
These are also suggestions taken from my book’s Empathy chapter that can help you see things from multiple points of view while helping you expand your empathy:
1. Leave your biases at the door. When having a conversation, assume you don't really know what the other person thinks and feels, and focus on listening and understanding.
2. Position yourself from a different angle. When you start researching an issue, subject, product, concept, or process, change your perspective. Start fresh. Begin from a position of discovery and remain flexible.
3. Step outside your comfort zone. Read magazines, books, or newspapers, or watch movies or shows different from those you would normally go for. Find the other side's perspective. Go further; read or watch stories that usually wouldn't interest you. Whatever is distinctive or even in opposition to what you would normally do, that's where you'll start to find your new sweet empathy spot.
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