Agnes
Interviewer: Pawel
Method: face-to-face
Interviewee: Agnes., mother of two, divorced, business-owner.
Transcriber: Pawel
What do you consider empathy to be?
Acting and re-acting from a place where you’re thinking about how another person is feeling or what they would want. Not what you feel is right but what the other person feels.
So definitely going beyond yourself. How do you know you’re in an empathic situation?
I won’t be asking myself what my expectations are or what would make me happy. Being selfless, basically.
What about the receiving end of empathy?
It feels like you’re being heard, that you might be important enough for the other person. It’s not even necessarily about what they say or do; it’s kind of like an intuition that they’re going out of their way for you.
When you say that they’re going out of your way, it suggests to me that empathy isn’t always natural, that it’s difficult to do.
Well, sometimes it is easy, without thinking. But certainly not always like that; you can’t naturally be empathic to everyone, mostly because of the different types of empathy that exist.
For instance, there’s the I’ll-do-anything-for-you kind of empathy, often what you feel for your kids. Then, there might be the I’ll-get-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-for-you empathy for close friends or family, but if it’s not returned after a while you tend to back off, it becomes harder. And it keeps going like that, in layers.
And that’s defined by a lot of factors; your upbringing, your experience with your parents, where you live in the world and how you live - for example, empathy won’t mean the same thing and look the same way if you’re living in a remote village with 200 villagers doing everything together and helping each other out, versus, let’s say, you’re living in an apartment in the big city.
What might be the results of having an empathetic approach?
You might end up learning a lot about yourself and your relations to others, and in a bigger way, the way that ‘it all fits together’ if you know what I mean.