Empathy is like walking up and down a staircase

Our individual journeys take us to different heights, for each realization is step up in our uphill climb to self actualization. The passion of every realization oozes from our smiles as we embrace new ideas. Isn't this a great feeling? well. Such experiences can be personally empowering. Such experiences may even make us place our wisdom on a pedestal. We may then think we must empower people around us with such knowledge. Doesn't this happen? Personally yes, it happens to me. 

However this very phenomena that has the power to enable can disable people we want to empower. Empathy is the first kindness that is due to all from us. This empathy is like a staircase that we need to walk down from or walk up to, to understand different levels of experience to really conceptualize someone's position. In our empowered enthusiasm and in our passion to empower we may forget to come down the staircase of our realizations before we start preaching. 

Speaking from the heights of ones own realizations can be counter productive. It can overwhelm the help seeker than empower them. The help seeker needs to be taken through the process of realizations instead of being told facts or affirmations. If we want to inculcate empathy we have to realize that empathy is about emotional reaching. It is only after reaching that someone in need of help can be helped. The point of empathy is not to inspire but to facilitate a feeling of being heard and understood. 

One cannot be understood if they are not given agency or respect. People vary in their pace on their journey of growth. The helper could be on an advanced track while the one seeking help may not be there yet. This may create an unequal ground in our heads. It may push us as helpers to trivialize the less advanced ways of coping, reacting or behaving. Respect and trivialization can hardly be used together in the same breath. Empathy cannot be divorced from respecting the agency of the one being helped. Empathy is about reaching the one seeking help by understanding why they stand where they stand and understanding their mental state at that point. Carl Rogers has emphasized on empathic accuracy and has described it as the ability to be in tune with another's perspectives. 

The simulation theory of empathy is a theory that looks into how people usually try to understand others which is not really accurate empathy. It says we use our own cognitive processes to understand how others make sense of their circumstances. We essentially ask ourselves what would we do if we were them to understand or evaluate others actions. Empathy is about understand how others have arrived at the conclusions they have, irrespective of our own convictions and realization's. Mirror neurons help us understand the possible reasons for someone's pain. Heed me, these are just possible reasons. this has a survival advantage as this ability has helped us understand our collective peoples. This is however a very rudimentary understanding. It does not help us with accurate empathy. It only gives us a caricature of possibilities. 

For accurate empathy we have to circumvent this natural bias that makes us privilege our own perspectives, cognitive processes and beliefs over other peoples beliefs that are a product of their unique journey. One has to be able to deduce another's beliefs through their past beliefs and experiences alone without assuming ones own beliefs as common sense or superior to another's beliefs. Through respect for anothers stances and positions in their intellectual and emotional life we will better be able to gauge their journey and be in tune with them. This will further help us practice accurate empathy, a pre requisite to help.