How do you explain to another human being what it’s like to be you, and get them to actually understand? You don’t. Each of us is unique and we each understand the world only from our own perspective.
What we can do is try to have empathy for the feelings of others. From that empathy we can decide our courses of action.
Empathy is when Person A is experiencing an emotion like sadness, which is universal, and person B can empathize with them because she has experienced sadness, too.
Person B does not know what it is like to be in Person A’s skin. Person B has no way to understand what it is like to be Person A. It’s okay. That’s the way it goes.
What you (Person B) need to be able to do is find out the feeling Person A is experiencing. Then consider what you feel like when you have that same emotion. Instead of judging them, trying to fix them, or dismissing their emotions, empathize.
Ask your Person A what she is feeling, get ready because it may be a lot of stuff.
Pick out a feeling you can relate to.
Validate the feeling by telling her you see and hear her.
Empathize by putting yourself in her emotional shoes.
Offer advice when asked, do not try to fix.
BEING A WOMAN
The reason I started writing this blog in the first place was because I saw an article that noted that critics referred to a “girl power scene in the movie The Avengers: End Game as “pandering”. Excuse me!? Women coming together to fight for a common cause is so unusual that it’s perceived as over-doing it when we do show this? WTF!?
Let me explain: There is a moment in the final battle of that movie where five of the female heroes come together and beat the living hell out of the enemy. It’s emotional, and heroic, and fabulous.
There aren’t enough of those scenes so pander away!
All I had when I was little girl to show female strength was Wonder Woman.
I have ever been able to explain this to a man. Not because there’s anything wrong with them, it’s simply that they have zero point of reference to understand what the heck I’m talking about.
Your average white male will never be able to understand what it is like to be a woman. The fear for our safety we experience in more situations than I care to get into right now. The way it feels when you know damn well you’re being judged for being a woman. How slimy it feels when men push unwanted advances upon you.
Instead of trying to get them to understand I ask that they take my word for it even if it doesn’t make sense. I ask them to try to empathize by considering the feelings I feel/felt:
Frightened
Trapped
Angry
Helpless
And then I tell him, whoever he might be, what I need. If I don’t know what I need I say that. If they offer something that doesn’t fit my need, I say no thank you. If they offer something that sounds just right, I accept it.
BEING A WOMAN OF COLOR
I know what it is like to be a white woman in the United States. I do not know what it is to be a woman of color. I can understand through the shared experience of being female, what it is like for her to be a woman.
All I can ask of myself is to try to empathize with the extra burden that comes with the color of her skin in our culture.
A man of color can understand via the shared experience of the color of their skin, what a woman of color might feel when discriminated against. However, he still doesn’t know what it’s like to be a woman.
Again, we ask him to empathize. We ask white women to empathize with a woman of color by making a connection between any time she ever had a negative experience because of her gender, and what it might be like to be judged by the color of your skin.
I’m not saying it all comes out even in the end. I’m saying we can work to listen to each other and respect each other’s feelings, even if we can’t fully understand.
BEING A GAY WOMAN
A woman could go for the trifecta being a gay woman of color. That’s a doozy. Comedian Wanda Sykes often talks about her wife, who is white, and their twin children who are also white, and what that experience has been for her.
Now, she’s doing this in a comedic way, but comedy has proved to be a wonderful way to talk about some of the most important issues of our times.
I remember when her twins were still small and Wanda talked about the looks she would get from people when she and her wife were out with them. She even talks about being mistaken for the nanny – of her own children!
Quick research tells me that, as of 2020, there were only 37 of our 50 states that recognize same-sex marriages. That means that in 13 states people are considered to have fewer human rights than others based on the gender they love.
I’m enraged by this. I feel deep sadness over this. But I still have no way to understand what it might be to go through the world as a gay woman.
So, I empathize. I know what helplessness, hopelessness, anger, fear, sadness, and all of the other emotions feel like. I take a moment to try to connect my experience of those feelings with her, whomever she might be.
WHERE TO GO FROM HERE
We’re all trying desperately to share this planet the best we can. That’s all you or I can do at any given moment. Our best. We may have more or less to offer in the next moment, but all you ever have to work with is what you have right now.
Think about empathy the next time you see someone who looks different from you. Someone who lives or loves differently from you.
Take a moment and put yourself in their emotional shoes, not their experiential shoes as you do not have that ability because you are not them. Ask others to empathize with you and your experiences even if they can’t understand.
Before I end, I want to share a quick anecdote that arose on June 24th of this year: I had an intense reaction to Roe v Wade being overturned. My husband was the one to break the news to me. He did not try to fix anything for me. He did not try to stop me when I needed to step away. He didn’t try to make me laugh like he usually does to distract me when I’m upset.
He did ask me to explain my response, if I could. So, I did. He listened. That was all I needed.
If you need help finding empathy, or facing those who do not empathize with you, Life Coaching can help. We can validate your experience while being solution-focused in the face of all that emotion.