Dear @ShiaLaBeouf,
Today I read your interview. It made me sad, and I cried. I'm actually very sorry that I read your interview because it was too personal. I got a very good look inside your head - and as much as I know about you, you know nothing about me - and that doesn't seem fair.
Janet
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If I have empathy for someone I see on TV or read in a book or magazine, is that false? What good does it do for me to build empathy with someone that I'll never meet, and may not even be real? There's a difference between the feeling of empathy (I feel/imagine feeling what you are feeling) and a real connection between two people. What is a 'connection', anyway but a shared knowing and understanding of each other's feelings? If I know your feelings but you don't know mine, then I don't believe it's a real connection because it doesn't go two ways.
In the Shia LaBeouf interview, he expresses a range of feelings; anger, frustration, acceptance, and pain. Through his words (filtered through the interviewer's perspective) I think that I know what Shia is feeling. I am being given exactly what I think I want; the view inside someone else's head. His head. If he's playing a role or he's just being himself, either way the empathy I feel is real.
When I watch a movie, hear a great song or read a story, I get so much more (in most cases) than I ever would in real life. A narrator gives us the background and details. The camera eye follows people around a room, listening to everyone's conversations. It is this omniscience that gives me the false idea that I am connected to them. When I see an actor showing emotions; my mind wants to believe that they are a real person and it's their emotions I'm seeing. I see an actor play a role and go through a tragedy, and I fall into the belief that it's their tragedy.
I know this is just a one-way street. It's not a sharing of feelings; because he's not seeing me as I see him. If my best friend told me a story about how she was attacked by a bear, I would want to help her. I would want her to know that my heart beat with hers, and that I could be there for her if she needed me.
But if someone is on TV and is not a friend, and I see them go through something horrible (or something wonderful) how can I tell them I want to help them (share their joy with them)? They are far away and unreachable. They are not real (and I know they are not real). I crave connection and at the same time, I feel very disconnected and unsatisfied.
----
I feel that the best actors are the ones who are able to get their heads inside of the characters they play. They become the people we believe them to be, for the short while they play them. That makes it real - even if it's only for the time that the camera is on and pointed in their direction. There is something real going on; there is a real person in there, expressing real feelings.
Then when the show is done and the microphones are gone; these actors put those characters aside and become themselves again. The fictional character is gone but that doesn't stop me from wanting to keep that feeling alive. I hold on to the moment of belief so that I pretend that the famous actor is still actually the person we think they are. He's still the captain of the Starship Enterprise. [Or maybe he is.] She's still Mrs. Smith [Or maybe she is.]. It's not real; but it feels real and sometimes I want to keep it that way.
Janet
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Monday, November 24, 2014
Putting myself in your shoes - staying open
A friend the other day
asked me, "What does it mean to put yourself in someone else's shoes,
and what does that have to do with empathy? Does it help to put yourself inside someone else's head; and how could you really do that, since you don't know their thoughts?"
We went back and forth, trading ideas and trying to understand each other. In the end, we concluded that by "putting myself in someone else's shoes" I meant that I try to imagine what someone else's life is like. I do this for a specific reason, to leave myself open to building connections with people.
------
I (and I think most of us) categorize people automatically. I hear a voice and I think "Oh, that person is black" even if I've never met them.. I see someone dressed in a certain way and I think "Oh, that person is poor" even though I know nothing about them, their life or their situation. I believe that these thoughts are unstoppable; I have them because of experiences I've had, my life, the conversations I've heard and the things I've been taught. I call these "closed" thoughts - if I already know who you are and I already know you are different from me; what else is there for me to know? Why would I be curious about your life? Why would I bother to ask what makes you happy and sad? I already know everything about you from these labels and categories. You are fat. You are sick. You are (insert race/gender/class here).
Being "open" is about knowing I'm going to have these thoughts, but to not let these thoughts stick in my brain. Without them I have the space to make better choices. Sometimes being open is about letting these thoughts go. It's about being calm and relaxed, by using meditation or prayer. When I don't have time for that (which, in a house with kids and a fairly busy life happens more often than I'd like) then I try another way - distraction. Just like waving a shiny toy in front of a crying baby stops the tears; I look at you and imagine as many other possibilities for your life as I can to stop my mind's assumption train in it's tracks.
My point here (and yes, I have one) is that if I'm not closed, I'm open. If I can build a desire in myself to learn about you, I am open to building a connection with you. I'm opening myself up to find out who you really are.
------
Today, like some days, I'm watching the people around me and making up little stories about them.
I see two white ladies in their thirties both wearing blue sweaters, ordering their drinks at the local coffee bar. They are talking and seem to know each other. One has very baggy pants and clothing, with short hair and a slightly larger than average jowl line. The other is wearing a more revealing outfit, from this angle I can see the curve of her buttocks as they fill out her jeans. I think "Oh, they are friends, and one of them is the 'neat' one in the relationship, and the other one is the 'sloppy' one."
I hear myself, I catch myself having these thoughts and I try to use distraction to stop it. I start to imagine; maybe, maybe they are sisters on their way to a family event. Or, maybe they didn't come here together, but instead just ran into each other on their way to enjoy a spicy steamed milk and coffee drink, Maybe like me this is an ordinary day of an ordinary week for them, and this is just one step on their morning path.
I'm getting into a groove now, and I push my envelope just a little further outside of what I would consider 'normal'. I pretend something really good; maybe one of them just won the lottery! In that case, they are meeting because this is her lawyer, and she wants to talk about how to spend her winnings. Or, I pretend something sad; maybe one of them is here to tell the other about her mother, who just told them she has cancer. Maybe maybe maybe.
The point behind my exercise is I try to come up with several stories, each one a little more unexpected than the next. Each one a little further away from my first assumption about who they are and what they are doing.
By putting myself in someone else's shoes I'm imagining that their lives could be similar to my own, or I'm imagining that they could be vastly different. It's a way of letting go of categories. It's a way of allowing myself to see all the possibilities in life, and to grow my own curiosity about other people.
Janet
We went back and forth, trading ideas and trying to understand each other. In the end, we concluded that by "putting myself in someone else's shoes" I meant that I try to imagine what someone else's life is like. I do this for a specific reason, to leave myself open to building connections with people.
------
I (and I think most of us) categorize people automatically. I hear a voice and I think "Oh, that person is black" even if I've never met them.. I see someone dressed in a certain way and I think "Oh, that person is poor" even though I know nothing about them, their life or their situation. I believe that these thoughts are unstoppable; I have them because of experiences I've had, my life, the conversations I've heard and the things I've been taught. I call these "closed" thoughts - if I already know who you are and I already know you are different from me; what else is there for me to know? Why would I be curious about your life? Why would I bother to ask what makes you happy and sad? I already know everything about you from these labels and categories. You are fat. You are sick. You are (insert race/gender/class here).
Being "open" is about knowing I'm going to have these thoughts, but to not let these thoughts stick in my brain. Without them I have the space to make better choices. Sometimes being open is about letting these thoughts go. It's about being calm and relaxed, by using meditation or prayer. When I don't have time for that (which, in a house with kids and a fairly busy life happens more often than I'd like) then I try another way - distraction. Just like waving a shiny toy in front of a crying baby stops the tears; I look at you and imagine as many other possibilities for your life as I can to stop my mind's assumption train in it's tracks.
My point here (and yes, I have one) is that if I'm not closed, I'm open. If I can build a desire in myself to learn about you, I am open to building a connection with you. I'm opening myself up to find out who you really are.
------
Today, like some days, I'm watching the people around me and making up little stories about them.
I see two white ladies in their thirties both wearing blue sweaters, ordering their drinks at the local coffee bar. They are talking and seem to know each other. One has very baggy pants and clothing, with short hair and a slightly larger than average jowl line. The other is wearing a more revealing outfit, from this angle I can see the curve of her buttocks as they fill out her jeans. I think "Oh, they are friends, and one of them is the 'neat' one in the relationship, and the other one is the 'sloppy' one."
I hear myself, I catch myself having these thoughts and I try to use distraction to stop it. I start to imagine; maybe, maybe they are sisters on their way to a family event. Or, maybe they didn't come here together, but instead just ran into each other on their way to enjoy a spicy steamed milk and coffee drink, Maybe like me this is an ordinary day of an ordinary week for them, and this is just one step on their morning path.
I'm getting into a groove now, and I push my envelope just a little further outside of what I would consider 'normal'. I pretend something really good; maybe one of them just won the lottery! In that case, they are meeting because this is her lawyer, and she wants to talk about how to spend her winnings. Or, I pretend something sad; maybe one of them is here to tell the other about her mother, who just told them she has cancer. Maybe maybe maybe.
The point behind my exercise is I try to come up with several stories, each one a little more unexpected than the next. Each one a little further away from my first assumption about who they are and what they are doing.
By putting myself in someone else's shoes I'm imagining that their lives could be similar to my own, or I'm imagining that they could be vastly different. It's a way of letting go of categories. It's a way of allowing myself to see all the possibilities in life, and to grow my own curiosity about other people.
Janet
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Let's hear a story [part III]; Can empathy help me get along with my Mother-in-Law?
Welcome back - and now I bring you the riveting conclusion! This has been a three-part discussion between us (Growing Empathy, or GE) and our friend MiLP (Mother-in-Law Problem). As always, please share your reactions in the comments section below, or on twitter or facebook.
As a reminder, MiL is short for her Mother-in-Law, and DIMT is short for "Dude I'm Married To", otherwise known as her husband.
[GE] I assume that after this conversation you still want to build empathy with your MiL. If not, feel free to ignore the rest of this letter. :)
[MiLP] It's not so much that I want to build empathy with her, it's more that I want to get myself out of the way, so that I'm not preventing my spouse from having a relationship with her that isn't about me and this problem. And I figure empathy is a way to do it.
[GE] I believe that building empathy means trying to see someone else's perspective. One way to do that, as I've read, is to engage the other person with a curiosity about who they are as people and why they do the things that they do. If you cannot talk directly to MiL and ask her the questions you want to ask; can you talk to DIMT? Would he be willing to help you to understand her perspective? Perhaps talking about the things she's done in her life, the ways she's interacted with people in the past, can help you to see things through her eyes. [MiLP] I can't talk directly to my MiL right now. She's hundreds of miles away, we never talk on the phone, and she's in the middle of a huge move-- it isn't the time. But DIMT and I talked about it, enacting a conversation in which I'm his new girlfriend and he's telling her what his parents are like.
That was an interesting, and eye-opening, bit of role-playing. DIMT's initial description of his mother made me say, "She sounds kind of awful." All his initial descriptors emphasized the negative: she's bossy, insecure, difficult to deal with, intolerant, she never really listens, etc. (Yes, apart from me, DIMT does have his own issues with his mother.)
Still in character, I replied, "So what you're telling me is that she's horrible and I'll hate her."
DIMT: She's not horrible.
Me: Okay, but that's not what you're telling me.
After that, DIMT started talking about some of the things he actually likes about his mother, her sense of humor, her interest in science, etc. It made both of us realize that my problem with the whole antisemitism thing really did influence how he feels about her. Not entirely-- she is a difficult woman, very much in the mold of Lady Catherine de Bourgh-- and it makes DIMT not want to connect with her. But I certainly have poured a fair amount of poison into the well, alas.
That's okay. Now that we know it happened, we can fix it.
[GE] Something else I've done in the past when I'm having trouble understanding someone else's perspective is to actually pretend that I am them. My friend says something to me, and I don't understand how they are feeling. So I repeat what they just said to myself, in my head, imagining that I just said it.
Please indulge me for a moment, and let's take what you said above as an example of this. You said, "My MiL's response to this was to tease me, telling me that the restaurant was singling me out, that they were deliberately snubbing me, etc. " Let's say you and I were out at dinner. My tofu lettuce wraps were late, and your pork lettuce wraps came out very quickly. You said to me, "Oh, the restaurant is singling you out, they are deliberately snubbing you." The key is to imagine yourself saying this and asking yourself, why would you say those things? How would you say those things, what would you be feeling?
Would you be able to understand her perspective?
[MiLP] No, not via this method. DIMT and I tried this today, with two examples-- the restaurant one, and one of her actually anti-semitic comments. And it just didn't work. I mean, with the restaurant one, I get that she was trying to make a joke because she was uncomfortable because my food was late. She said as much at the time. And I would probably have empathy for that with somebody else-- the whole family was clearly really uncomfortable about death, about the fact that my dad had just died, and I get that. But the whole anti-semitism thing made it impossible for me to give her that kind of break in this regard.
Trying this with one of her actual anti-semitic comments was actually hilarious. DIMT and I couldn't stop laughing, which was not necessarily a good thing, since we were in a fast-moving car.
It went like this:
DIMT: So give me an example of what my mom actually said. Play her.
Me: Okay, so we were sitting on the porch, I was reading or on my computer or something, and she was doing a crossword or something, and she made a passing comment about her nose. (Some background. My mother-in-law is obsessed with her nose. It's a genetically dominant trait, DIMT has it, his siblings have it, his uncles have it, his cousins. When my niece was visiting, she was mistaken for our daughter, because she and DIMT look so similar-- they have the same nose. It's a perfectly nice nose, a bit broad, maybe, but not something you'd notice if my MiL wasn't totally obsessed about it, seriously. She talks about it a lot as an unfortunate trait, and tends to invent histories whose fault it is. As you are soon to read.)
Me: So the thing she says about her nose is this: That the only explanation she has for it is that it must be a holdover from some Russian genetics that got mixed into the purely Swedish genetic stock. That's where she thinks the nose came from.
DIMT (repeating my original response): MiL, I know a lot of people of Russian descent; I'm of Russian descent; none of our noses look like yours.
Me: Okay, so much for that theory! (Then we spent a few minutes cracking jokes.)
DIMT: No, you have to say exactly what she said. That's the point of this exercise.
Me (trying again): Well, maybe you have the wrong kind nose, the wrong kind of ancestry.
DIMT: Okay, so how did you feel when you said that?
Me: I didn't feel much of anything. A little affronted, I guess.
DIMT: That was probably it. She hates being argued with (she really does), and just wanted to shut you down as quickly as possible.
Me: By saying something anti-semitic? That's sandblasting a soup cracker, a bit!
The only thing we got out of it was that my MiL has no filter. Now, there are people in this world whom I love and adore who have no filter, and it doesn't matter-- I still love and adore them. My MiL is not among them, and I don't think she ever will be. She's not an interesting or engaging enough person to make the lack of filter loveable.
That said, I think I'm done with this exchange. What I really wanted to get out of it, I've gotten-- I have a clear perception of how I've created distance between DIMT and his mom, which will hopefully give me enough foresight to avoid doing it more in the future. I don't think that means that DIMT and his mother will be skipping off into the sunset together-- she is a really difficult person and I don't know that they will ever be close. He just can't really talk to her about the really important stuff in his life, because she can't listen. That's sad. The least I can do for DIMT is not add to the distance. And I think that's where I am.
Thank you for your help! Couldn't have gotten here without you!
- Mother-in-Law Problem
[MiLP] No, not via this method. DIMT and I tried this today, with two examples-- the restaurant one, and one of her actually anti-semitic comments. And it just didn't work. I mean, with the restaurant one, I get that she was trying to make a joke because she was uncomfortable because my food was late. She said as much at the time. And I would probably have empathy for that with somebody else-- the whole family was clearly really uncomfortable about death, about the fact that my dad had just died, and I get that. But the whole anti-semitism thing made it impossible for me to give her that kind of break in this regard.
Trying this with one of her actual anti-semitic comments was actually hilarious. DIMT and I couldn't stop laughing, which was not necessarily a good thing, since we were in a fast-moving car.
It went like this:
DIMT: So give me an example of what my mom actually said. Play her.
Me: Okay, so we were sitting on the porch, I was reading or on my computer or something, and she was doing a crossword or something, and she made a passing comment about her nose. (Some background. My mother-in-law is obsessed with her nose. It's a genetically dominant trait, DIMT has it, his siblings have it, his uncles have it, his cousins. When my niece was visiting, she was mistaken for our daughter, because she and DIMT look so similar-- they have the same nose. It's a perfectly nice nose, a bit broad, maybe, but not something you'd notice if my MiL wasn't totally obsessed about it, seriously. She talks about it a lot as an unfortunate trait, and tends to invent histories whose fault it is. As you are soon to read.)
Me: So the thing she says about her nose is this: That the only explanation she has for it is that it must be a holdover from some Russian genetics that got mixed into the purely Swedish genetic stock. That's where she thinks the nose came from.
DIMT (repeating my original response): MiL, I know a lot of people of Russian descent; I'm of Russian descent; none of our noses look like yours.
Me: Okay, so much for that theory! (Then we spent a few minutes cracking jokes.)
DIMT: No, you have to say exactly what she said. That's the point of this exercise.
Me (trying again): Well, maybe you have the wrong kind nose, the wrong kind of ancestry.
DIMT: Okay, so how did you feel when you said that?
Me: I didn't feel much of anything. A little affronted, I guess.
DIMT: That was probably it. She hates being argued with (she really does), and just wanted to shut you down as quickly as possible.
Me: By saying something anti-semitic? That's sandblasting a soup cracker, a bit!
The only thing we got out of it was that my MiL has no filter. Now, there are people in this world whom I love and adore who have no filter, and it doesn't matter-- I still love and adore them. My MiL is not among them, and I don't think she ever will be. She's not an interesting or engaging enough person to make the lack of filter loveable.
That said, I think I'm done with this exchange. What I really wanted to get out of it, I've gotten-- I have a clear perception of how I've created distance between DIMT and his mom, which will hopefully give me enough foresight to avoid doing it more in the future. I don't think that means that DIMT and his mother will be skipping off into the sunset together-- she is a really difficult person and I don't know that they will ever be close. He just can't really talk to her about the really important stuff in his life, because she can't listen. That's sad. The least I can do for DIMT is not add to the distance. And I think that's where I am.
Thank you for your help! Couldn't have gotten here without you!
- Mother-in-Law Problem
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