March 2024 Newsletter: The Balancing Act of Empathy

Every one of us faces trials big and small every day, and it is a natural urge to want to be validated and heard through these challenges. For someone else to provide this they need to respond empathetically, endeavoring to put themselves in your shoes. Every one of us can sometimes be great at this and sometimes fall short. Our empathy is most often threatened by either falling into the trap of apathy or becoming so invested in the other person’s experiences that their experiences begin to feel like our own. Cultivating this skillset of balancing between those two emotional states can both strengthen our relationships with others and our understanding of ourselves.

To be most effectively empathetic we must allow ourselves to let down our guard. When we cannot access our own vulnerability, we can become apathetic, disconnected from others’ experiences and emotions, and our mind becomes clouded with comparisons, judgments, and seeing things only from our own viewpoint.

Sometimes we may instead become too involved and centered within another person’s experience. Empathizing requires looking into ourselves to relate to the person we are talking to, and it’s natural to see things from our own perspective. Yet we need to remain firmly rooted within our own bodies and minds when engaging in empathy, both for our own sake and for the sake of the other person.

Empathy requires us to see the other person in their full personhood. It requires us to ask ourselves questions: what would it feel like to be in their shoes? How can I seek to understand how their behavior and reactions make sense within their own framework and how they see the world? It’s okay to not “relate” to the specific situations of someone else—generally, people aren’t looking for you to understand their exact scenario; empathy is not agreement, it is deep listening.

We become more capable of coping and changing when we feel validated in this way. When we recognize this it can force us to reckon with our own vulnerability, to see ourselves as similarly flawed, emotional, or prone to mistakes. This process may be uncomfortable, but without vulnerability, our empathetic connection to others is less meaningful. When we connect with empathy to those who are challenged by difficult things, we can build our own vicarious resiliency. Vicarious resiliency occurs when we integrate the learnings, compassion, and impact of someone else’s resiliency into our own worldviews. This is only possible when we simultaneously make ourselves emotionally available and vulnerable and view the world through the lens of another person. As Amy Harmon writes in The Unknown Beloved, “The truth is, the harder we are, the easier we shatter. It takes some softness to absorb life’s blows.”

It’s inspiring to see what happens when there is a group willing to come together to engage. During our program “Improv in Community” with instructor Emily Harris (which you can read more about in the Jewish Chronicle here), even outside of the classroom they practice in you can hear the group fall into anticipation then burst into laughter, exploring the emotional spectrum together and emerging in conversation and in new friendship.

Last Tuesday we held a pilot program called “Trauma and Resiliency: Understanding Our Own Fear,” where we explored current fears and anxieties around antisemitism while exploring the narratives that we pass on, generation to generation, around what it means to be Jewish. Thank you to everyone who attended and had these vulnerable conversations with one another and provided us feedback so that we can continue to fine tune this program.