EXERCISE 8.3

Empathy

Mixed Emotions

Purpose

To give participants the opportunity to recognize that many emotions arise when someone is having a strong response to a situation and expand their skills to be empathic when this occurs.

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60 minutes

The participants consider two situations and undertake to become aware of the complex emotions someone else is feeling. They grow their understanding of how different points of view affect someone’s emotional responses.

Outcomes

Audience

Facilitator Competencies image image

Easy to Moderate

Materials

Time Matrix

Activity Estimated Time
Read the first scenario and discuss 25 minutes
Read second scenario and record possible feelings 15 minutes
Discuss insights and feelings as a group 20 minutes
Total 60 minutes

Instructions

1. Distribute pens, paper, and the Mixed Emotions Handout.

2. Ask participants to work in pairs on the first scenario. If there is an odd number of participants, the last group can contain three. Have them read the handout and proceed with the exercises as indicated.

3. After twenty minutes give them a five-minute warning, and five minutes later ask them to all begin working on the second scenario, which they will do independently.

4. After ten minutes give them a five-minute warning, and five minutes later ask the participants to discuss their experiences as a group. The following questions may be helpful:

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In real life, emotions are often bundled together, sometimes with confusing contradictions, and they certainly are interpreted according to our view of a situation. Learning to recognize the implications that someone’s perspective has on his or her responses, as well as the complexity of feeling multiple emotions, will greatly increase your ability to be empathic.

When you are in a conversation with someone, you can often best demonstrate your empathy by reflecting back the two critical parts of the message he or she is trying to communicate, namely the meaning and the feeling. As the situations in our lives become more and more complex, we often find ourselves adrift in a puzzling array of emotions. These feelings are chemical and electrical responses occurring in several different locations within our bodies, so they don’t always announce themselves in precise words that tell us what they mean. Accurate reflection promotes clarity.

Scenario One: Ships in the Night

The Story

Imagine that your college-aged daughter leaves a message on your home answering machine saying that she has Friday off and she’ll be driving home for the weekend. You expect her about noon. She arrives at dinnertime with a girlfriend, and they stay only long enough to change clothes, as they are going to the grand opening of a new dance club. They get in about three o’clock in the morning and then sleep until eleven the next day.

They go out shopping and catch lunch at the mall, getting home in time for dinner, when at last you get to talk. It’s a very interesting discussion, but you have expensive tickets for a play you’ve been waiting to see for months, and by the time you return home they are out again. They get up when you are at church and have already left for the long drive back by the time you get home. She leaves a note saying, “Thanks, it was great to see you—I had a wonderful time.” How do you feel?

Instructions

Working in pairs, take five to ten minutes to discuss how the parent could have reached out to the daughter to let her know what was going on with him or her better at the critical points during the weekend. Put yourselves in the role of being close friends of the parent. The value of talking with close friends is that they can help us contextualize what we’re going through by reflecting what they hear us saying and how they sense we feel. A good listener can serve as a multidimensional mirror for us, showing us parts of ourselves that are out of view or out of focus. One of you role play being the parent; the other be the friend talking with the parent about this scenario. Write an abbreviated list of the feelings the parent had and why in the first column below.

Now do the same thing for the daughter. Reverse the role play so that whoever was the parent last time is now the friend; the friend in the last role play is now the daughter. Discuss how you could have responded more empathically to your parents and still had the good time you were looking forward to with your best friend. List the feelings the daughter had and why in the other column.

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Here is one possible set of feelings for the parent:

After hearing her message on the answering machine you feel warm and happy and have a strong feeling of anticipation. When she’s not home by three o’clock Friday afternoon, or by four o’clock or five o’clock, you feel increasingly anxious, stressed, and nauseated. When she arrives, you feel tremendously grateful and relieved, but when you realize she has a friend with her, you feel hurt and a little disappointed. This grows worse when she leaves immediately. By the time she gets home at 3 a.m. the next morning, you feel downright angry and used because you know she’ll sleep in . . . which she does. When you finally get to see her at dinner, you feel eager and grateful to hear what she has to say, but part of you is still fuming.

Although you’ve been looking forward to seeing the play ever since you bought the tickets, now you wish you didn’t have to go so you could spend more time with your daughter. You have a hard time paying attention because you worry that you’re losing contact with her. When you leave for church in the morning you feel crestfallen, knowing that she’ll probably be gone when you return. On reading the note, you feel proud of how grown-up she is and how thoughtful it was to write a nice note, but then you feel angry about how she seemed to avoid you, and then you become anxious thinking about her on the long drive back to school.

Discuss your observations in comparison with this possible rendition. Notice how your empathy for the different points of view grows. Now tell the daughter’s story from her point of view from when she leaves the phone message.

Scenario Two: Complex Feelings

Instructions

Filling in the blanks as this scenario unfolds will help you recognize the complex emotions Randall and Joe felt. Working independently this time, list some of the ways that Randall might have felt and why. There are many possibilities, so provide at least two in each of the response patterns below. Use extra paper or the back of the handout if necessary.

Randall was a junior in high school in September of 2001 and was deeply upset by the World Trade Center bombings, as were all his classmates and their families.

He felt _______________, because ________________________________. He also felt ________________, because ________________________________.

[Example: He felt furious because Americans shouldn’t ever be attacked on their own soil! He also felt scared because he never thought that this could happen.]

In order to deal with some of the anger and helplessness they felt, he and his friend Joe put together a plan to graduate first semester in their senior year and join the Marines. They worked out at the gym a lot together, hung out with the local recruiter, and carefully studied the materials they were given about life in the Corps. Now Randall felt ______________________ because _________________________________________________. Joe, who had always been recognized as a natural leader, felt _____________________ because __________________________________________________.

Randall’s birthday wasn’t until August, so he would not be old enough to join the Marines without his parents’ permission at the semester break, and they weren’t about to let him go. When it came to this, he felt ___________________, because __________________________________.

Joe was old enough, and his mother was unable to influence him to stay in school and go to college, so he left according to their plan and had everyone’s attention, receiving much admiration from his classmates during the last several weeks before it was time to go. This left Randall feeling pretty ________________ because ____________________________________. Joe, on the other hand, was feeling quite ______________ because _______________________________________________________. He left for basic training the day after New Year’s.

Joe’s younger sister Linda started calling Randall frequently after Joe left, and they often talked for hours. It wasn’t long before they started dating. About a month before Randall’s birthday they learned that Joe had gone into combat; in his first firefight he had killed someone who was later identified to be a civilian.

Using a descriptive pattern similar to the model that follows, describe Randall’s developing understanding of the world and how it must have felt as he moved through these stages of his life.

At first he felt _____________________ because _________________________________________. Then he felt __________________, __________________, and _____________________, because _______________________________________________. Now he feels _________________ because ___________________ _________________________________________________.

Similarly, describe Joe’s developing understanding of the world and how it must have felt as he moved through these stages of his life.

Even though this seems like a formula (which it is), you can still tell a pretty good story if you fill in the blanks creatively from an empathetic point of view.

Share your reflections on this process with the group.