Chapter 2

Empathy—The Essential Relationship Ingredient

“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”
~ Henry David Thoreau

A word that weaves through most relationship skills programs is “empathy”, the ability—a developed skill, actually—to vicariously put yourself in another person’s shoes and try to see from their point of view, their world, their perspective.

People are more familiar with the word “sympathy”, which means to “feel for” someone, particularly if they’ve experienced a loss of some kind. However, “empathy” means something quite different. The Oxford Dictionary defines empathy as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” Another way to say it is empathy means to “feel with” or “feel into” as in “feel into the other person”, which has powerful impact both for the empathizer and the person being empathized with.

Empathy is a powerful state of mind, but it’s not something we try to pound into ourselves, it’s something we want to cultivate and let out —it’s our capacity to have compassion and concern for ourselves and others. Empathy is really an internal motivator to be a caring person who is genuinely concerned about the wellbeing of others, as well as one’s own wellbeing.

In this book, I present some of these key communication and relationship skills from my own perspective and experience in their use and value, and they all revolve around this primary skill of empathy.