Hi, I'm Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist,
and I make mental health education videos.
Empathy is the ability
to see something from someone else's perspective.
Empathy helps you feel connected to people
and helps people feel connected to you.
Some of the personality disorders,
like borderline personality and narcissistic personality,
have one of their core features as lack of empathy.
It's not that hard to recognize
when someone is overly self-focused
and therefore not very concerned about your needs,
but there are more subtle ways
that you can show a lack of empathy
and here are four of them.
The first one is one upping.
You can do this when someone shares a disappointing
or hurtful experience
and you jump in with your experience
that was worse than theirs.
So I say, "My dog died today."
And you say, "Something must be in the air,
"'cause my cousin died last week."
Dog, cousin.
I guess I'm done.
You may think that you're empathizing with me
because you're telling me an experience
that you had that was similar,
and I may feel some kinship because of this,
but if you're experience is much worse than mine,
your response can leave me feeling
like I'm making something out of nothing
and I just need to go sit down.
So instead of winning the whose experience was worse game,
just say something like, "Aw man, I'm sorry."
Or ask more details about what happened.
Get them to share more.
Number two shutting things down.
This is when you give a response
that closes off the opportunity for the other person
to tell you more about what they were experiencing.
An example of this is,
I say, "I had a rough time getting started today."
Now, there's no details there,
you really don't know what I'm talking about.
But you follow up with,
"Oh, that's a shame, sorry to sorry about that."
And that's the end of that conversation.
If you're talking to a person who's somewhat reserved
and doesn't normally reveal everything about themselves,
sometimes they will test the waters
by giving you a little information to see how you respond.
Are you interested in hearing more about this?
Can I bend your ear on this one?
I don't want to bore you with details
if you're not interested.
So when I tell you about how something made me feel
without many details about what happened
and you don't ask for any details
before you give your closing statement of,
"Oh well, that's a shame, sorry,"
I'm left feeling like
you probably don't want to hear the details,
so I'll move on.
Now, you may say, "Well, I don't want to pry.
"If you wanted to tell me more, you would.
"If you leave out details,
"I assume it's because you don't want to talk about it."
But if I didn't want to talk about it,
I wouldn't have brought it up at all.
You may think,
"Why should I have to pull things out of you?"
You don't if you don't want to know more,
but understand that some people
will give you bread crumbs at first
because they're inhibited about talking about themselves
and they want to get permission to give you more information.
The way you give them permission is to ask for more details.
That could be as simple as, "Why, what happened?"
If the person doesn't want you to know more
and just wants to publicly declare their frustration
with no follow-up conversation,
then they'll say something like, "Oh, it's nothing."
Then you can move on, but at least you showed interest
and that matters.
Number three is storytelling.
This is where you respond to someone's statement
by telling them about your experience.
This is similar to one upping,
but you're not focusing so much
on the experience being worse than theirs.
Instead, you're hijacking the conversation
with a long story about yourself.
So I say, "Can you believe
"that I was standing in line to pay for groceries
"and this person in another line jumped in front of me,
"saying that they should go first
"because they were waiting longer than me?"
You say, "Oh yeah, there was a story on the news today
"talking about how as a nation we're so impatient.
"In fact, I made a Facebook post on this,"
and blah, blah, blah, the story goes on.
By the time you're finished,
we're talking about public policy
and it feels silly for me to go back
and try and bring up my grocery store experience.
I may not even remember what I wanted to tell you about it.
The net result, I feel very unsatisfied
that I didn't get a chance to vent
and have someone listen to me.
An empathic statement could have been,
"I hate when people do that."
Or, "What did you do?
"Did you tell 'em jump in front?"
With that, I know that you're listening
and you're right there with me in this conversation.
Number four is educating, advising or fixing.
This is where you respond to someone's statement
with unsolicited advice or solutions.
If you're always coming from a position
of authority and knowledge,
you may demonstrate how wise you are,
but you can make yourself unrelatable.
For example, I say, "It took me two hours to get downtown.
"I almost missed the show."
You say, "Well, you should've checked the app
"to see which route to take."
Now, I'm just venting.
I don't want to be made to feel stupid.
But you may think, "But I just want you to know
"that there's a better way to travel
"so you don't have to experience this again."
So a more empathic response is,
"I'm glad you still made it.
"Have you ever used Waze or Maps to see traffic patterns?"
With this response, you're recognizing the positive outcome
that I arrived on time, even though it was frustrating,
then by asking if I used an app,
you're giving me the benefit of the doubt
that maybe I don't know about it.
You're also continuing the conversation
by asking a question of me rather than chastising me
with a statement that I should've known about
or used the app.
You may be wondering, "How can I know what to say to people
"without having to memorize these responses?"
Well, there's a theme to these responses.
The theme is to be curious and ask questions
to get more details about what the person experienced.
Resist statements that criticize or show judgment.
If they ask for your opinion or help, give it,
but if not, don't.
At least not immediately.
You're not trying to teach someone something.
If you want to connect to their experience,
you have to hear about it and understand it.
Try and place yourself in the scene,
as if it were happening to you.
It may be something that's completely out of your league
or lived experience, and that's okay.
You don't need to have it have happened to you,
nor do you need to agree
with the way that the person handled it.
You just need to get as close as you can
to seeing the experience from their perspective
by listening intently and asking questions.
Then the last thing that you can do
to show that you were listening
is to repeat what they said for clarification.
You can say things like,
"Did I hear you right when you said this happened?"
Or, "So you're saying you don't have any money left
"from your last paycheck?"
Questions like this give you a chance to say something
and shows the person that you were listening
when they hear parts of their story repeated back to them.
Watch this video for more
on establishing better connections through conversation.
Thanks for watching. See you next time.