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Oct. 31, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:13
484 Empathy (a continuation of 483)
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Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It's the entirely civilized time to go to work of 8.38 in the morning.
Very nice. I've had a couple of morning meetings recently, so I haven't had a chance to get the kind of start on the day, late aristocratic start of the day that I like, but I figure since I have to fly to New York, On Sunday, I'm going to present at a conference.
On Tuesday, and I'm going to man the booth on Monday.
So I feel that it's not entirely crucial that I get to work by nine.
So I wanted to talk this morning about empathy.
And the reason that I want to talk about empathy was that I got a delightful and wise email from the gentleman who I attacked the bear that was attacking others that was in his demons.
And he wrote me a very nice email thanking me for some of the thoughts that I had put out regarding some of the stuff and didn't agree with me and everything.
He apparently is not from England.
He's from the Pacific Northwest.
Which I'm sure means Scotland.
So close, but not quite.
And he was a little bit baffled about why I said that He was short on empathy.
I think I may have even put it stronger than that.
Short on empathy, and he was baffled.
So this, you know, as a thank you to him for taking my previous podcast in the spirit with which it was intended, and, you know, magnificent email.
When you hear this, let me know.
I'd like to post it on the board, but I won't do it without you to say so.
So as a thank you for him, and to others as well, I'd like to have a tackle at a challenging topic, which is empathy and how to help others.
And I have a little bit of knowledge about this, simply because it has been one of the things that has cropped up from time to time, not so much recently, but certainly in the first year or two of my marriage, has cropped up, in that Christina is a wonderfully sensitive, kind, and nurturing soul, but she wasn't taught...
Too much or too well about how to help people.
She was taught how to, you know, the standard stuff that girly girls are taught in cultures that don't allow much scope for women, right?
She was taught, you know, to make people food and, you know, to take care of them when they're sick and put their feet up and so on.
She was taught all of that stuff.
She just wasn't taught anything really useful when it came to empathy.
And it's not the easiest thing in the world.
I think it's natural for children, but it's something that's kind of hammered out of us over a great deal of time and a great deal of effort has expended into hammering it out of us.
So we have had to spend a little bit of time on this in our marriage, and I think it's been helpful.
So I'd sort of like to pass along the few scraps of wisdom that we've managed to put together here and see if it's of use to you.
So, the impulse to help someone is a very, very complicated impulse.
And it's something that is well worth unpacking.
Because I believe that people are kind.
I believe this gentleman is kind in his soul and he wants to help.
It's just that there's a lot of stuff that we're not taught about how to help people and how to be helpful to people.
And I think this could be very useful within your marriages, within your relationships, and possibly even with your foo if you're still around them.
So... I'll sort of give you an example of something that didn't help in sort of my relationship with Christina, and then I'll sort of talk about ways in which I think that situation could be different.
And I'll talk about this guy with relation to his post as well, or his on the board.
But... I was extraordinarily upset.
I can't even remember what it is now, because once you get closure, you become an amnesiac, right?
Once you get closure with stuff, it's hard to remember what caused it.
But I do remember being very upset about something, I don't know, a couple of months ago.
Christina and I were going shopping, and I told her about this.
We were going to get groceries. I told her about this, and we did our groceries, and then we were coming back.
I was still upset, and she knew that I was upset.
I wasn't upset with her. I can't remember what it was now.
She made a joke about how I was still wearing sandals.
Actually, no, it was last month.
I was still wearing sandals, and it was a cold day in October or something.
I was really sort of in a bind, because...
I was upset, and she was making jokes, and I know that she was trying to cheer me up.
And this was just the scar tissue of how she was dealt with when she was a child, where she would be sad or down or upset about something, and people would just say, oh, don't worry, be happy.
Oh, clap, clap, clap.
It's okay, we're Greek. We let things go.
We have fun. We enjoy our life, blah, blah, blah.
This sort of insistent, fixed-grin cruise director, life is a constant party, The world that she grew up in, which all too many of us grew up in, wherein you simply weren't allowed to have negative feelings as a child.
And the reason, of course, that this happens when we're children is because our parents have treated us badly, and they don't want to really understand at any real level that they have treated us badly.
When we have feelings of sadness or anger or upset, it provokes in them great anxiety because they kind of know that it's their doing.
Not that we have these feelings because things can happen outside the control of the family that cause these kinds of feelings, but they know that They have not given us the tools to handle our emotions and rather, in fact, they have worked quite aggressively and often passive-aggressively to prevent us from feeling our emotions and from working with our emotions in a productive and positive way.
Because they themselves were crushed by their parents and so their negative emotions cause anxiety.
Because people take negative emotions seriously.
So when I was upset, Christina, because when people were around Christina when she was growing up and they would be upset, they would get aggressive.
And so when I was upset, even though I wasn't upset with her and was very clear about that, it provoked anxiety in her.
Now, she couldn't express that anxiety very clearly because it still remained largely unconscious, but it did provoke quite a bit of anxiety in her, and so she wanted to kind of cajole me out of it as a way of managing her own anxiety rather than just asking me sort of how I felt and listening and so on, being curious about what my emotional experience was, which would allow me to Feel it, express it, learn the lesson that's involved, and move on.
Feelings are like... They're shout-outs from wisdom, right?
Feelings... Not reactions to feelings, not acting out feelings where you go punch a guy because you're upset because your boss yelled at you.
I don't mean any of that. That's a defense mechanism, as we've talked about before.
At least a dozen and a half people have seen it on YouTube.
I don't know why that one's massively unpopular compared to the other ones.
But... So when you actually experience a feeling, it's wisdom, right?
It's a rise up of wisdom.
It's a signal. It's a smoke signal.
It's carrier pigeons. It's drumbeats in the jungle trying to get you to learn something.
And so when you're repressing feelings, it's repressing wisdom.
It's repressing knowledge.
And it really is repressing the future.
Feelings are not so much about the past as they are about the future.
So you can't feel about the past.
It's dead and gone. But if you've been in a car crash and you get nervous when you drive, it's because you're nervous about having another car crash, not because you're nervous about the last car crash.
So you sort of sail on blind into the future.
Looking into the past without feeling things is like driving only looking in the rearview mirror.
So that's not the way to do it.
So Christina wanted to kind of cajole me out of being upset and she didn't like the fact that I was upset about something and so she tried to make light of it, to make a joke of it, and that's a way of managing the anxiety of the self.
And I'm not going to guess what our fine bear-related friend was experiencing when he felt the urge to post about our two friends on the board, but The key thing to sort of understand is that when other people are feeling distress, and I'm not going to guess whether or not this is sort of inbuilt or just something we've learned.
I strongly suspect that it's something we've learned or been taught or had inflicted upon us, but I am for sure going to resist that wide-open, yawning, tangent mouth, which I will not crawl inside.
But... When other people are feeling upset about something, it provokes anxiety in us.
I would say most times because people who are upset in our past when we were children took it out on us.
But what are sort of called negative feelings cause anxiety within us and it's important to sort of understand that most times when we want to sort of reach out and quote help people who are feeling down or bad or angry or upset or whatever, It's because we want to manage our own anxiety that is provoked by that feeling.
We don't actually have empathy for the people that we are supposedly reaching out to help.
What we are in fact doing is we are managing the anxiety that they provoke by being upset.
And of course this is a really grim truth about family that family is mostly just a huge ecosystem of cross-referential emotional control and management of others rather than any form of self-expression and honesty.
It's too much of a powder keg of abuse and bad history for it to ever be something that can be expressed openly and in a healthy manner.
So I can certainly understand why this gentleman Was confused about when I criticized him for lacking in empathy.
I can certainly understand that.
And because of that, I sort of wanted to spend a little bit more time unpacking ways in which it might be more valuable to approach the question of helping others and of being empathetic.
And so the way that I... Let me just sort of start it and let me sort of pretend that I was listening to the show on Sunday.
I'm sort of Joe Blow. I'm listening to the show on Sunday and I hear people talking about their difficulties meeting women and I have a marriage that I'm happy with and I have kids and a wife I love and this and that and the other.
Well... What is probably going to happen for me, and again, I'm not trying to bash on this gentleman, I'm just sort of trying to say what I picture could happen for me.
The great danger in good fortune is to take it personally.
The great danger in good fortune is to take it personally.
You just happen to meet the right person.
I just happened to go play volleyball in that league and happened to meet Christina who happened to play volleyball.
And if I had not gone to play volleyball, or she hadn't, we never would have met, and my life would have been massively different.
So that's good fortune.
Now, of course, I'd done a huge amount of work on myself and gone to therapy so that when I met the right woman, I could have a productive relationship.
But there's no guarantee that going to therapy is going to get you in orbit with the right woman, right?
I mean, there's no guarantee. You could be the best guy in the world and just never meet the right woman, and that just sucks to be you bad luck, right?
So I have a huge amount of...
You pick up a lottery ticket and it turns out to be a winner.
That's not the same as good financial planning.
So, one of the grave things that happens with us is we mistake that for a personal virtue, right?
So, it's the same thing with being good-looking, right?
We've had a woman who posted on the board a heartbreaking story about she's a pretty teacher in Texas, and some hyper-religious parents have come in and said, you know, you're a bad teacher because you're too pretty and her son can't concentrate.
Because, you know, you should dress more like a matron.
I think they may have even offered her a burqa.
But the problem, of course, is that she's considered to be too pretty to teach teenage boys, and maybe that Van Halen song is true.
And so, of course, this is a very, very bad thing that's occurring to her because she's pretty, right?
And she's got to not take it personally. It's not her fault that she's pretty, and it's not her virtue that she's pretty either, right?
So the great temptation for good-looking people, as it is for people who've inherited wealth, And as it is also sometimes for people who've earned wealth, is to imagine that they're better people because of it, right?
So when you have good fortune, and believe me, friends, being born in the West, if you're here in the West, is good fortune, right?
There's no reason why you're...
I mean, I'm using silly religious metaphors just for the sake of shortness of speech, but...
There's no reason why your soul had to sort of float down in North America to inhabit a newborn rather than Kazakhstan or Somalia or Rwanda or any of the other 99% of hellholes in the world.
So we're lucky.
We're just damn lucky.
I didn't do a goddamn thing to earn being born in the West.
I didn't do a thing to earn some of the language skills that I have.
I mean, I've certainly worked to refine them, but of course I've only worked to refine them because I had them to begin with, right?
It's the same reason I haven't worked very hard to become an opera singer because I don't have the physical equipment for it, so I'm just not going to do it.
So hard work, sure, of course, it counts and it's a good thing, but people will only generally tend to work hard at what they're already good at, right?
So the hard work is defined by your innate and latent talents and so on.
So, being good looking and having a good figure, like having a good form in your body, sure, absolutely, yeah, maybe you work out, maybe you eat right, but there's lots of people who work out and eat right who don't end up with an attractive figure or whatever, right? And...
I was walking down the street.
I went for a walk the other day at lunch, yesterday at lunch, and I saw this guy with...
I'm still shallow enough occasionally to look at guys and go, hey, that's a nice head of hair, relative to my own cue ball approach.
This guy was, I don't know, he had to be 350 pounds lurching down along the street.
There's a big thick head of hair.
And I remember many years ago reading about something, you know, like, oh, if you really want to have a nice head of hair, the important thing is to stay healthy, and this and that and the other.
And, you know, it's all largely nonsense, right?
I mean, this guy has ridiculously bad health and a big full head of hair.
I mean, it's just genetics, right?
So it's just very important not to take things personally in life.
I'm not saying it's always the easiest thing in the world.
But wisdom really comes from, and empathy, as I'll argue in a moment, comes from not taking things personally in your life.
Good fortune or bad fortune is simply the blind twists of random fate and have nothing to do with your nature and your virtue.
Your virtue is the choices you make to be good, and the choices you make...
To expand your knowledge so that you can open up choices where you don't normally have them.
If you grew up in a very angry household, you may either have rage or compliance as your methodology for dealing with disputes, but you grow your wisdom and deal with your emotional history so that you can have a different future.
You work to uncover knowledge so that you have additional choices so you can be a good person.
And that you're responsible for.
And that, my friends, is nothing that's fun for a lot of that time.
Dealing with that stuff is just not a hell of a lot of fun.
So I would say that it's entirely possible that this gentleman has had an enormous degree of good fortune that he happened to meet a woman and that that woman happened to initiate their conversation or their transition from, he's told me that they were friends for a while, from friends to romantic partners and marriage and so on.
So he happened to find a woman who found value in him and who initiated their movement to a romantic couple, which really is the foundation of his marital happiness.
He didn't earn that.
Certainly he was young enough, as far as I understand it, he was young enough when this occurred.
That he had not gone through the great storm and stress of becoming a virtuous person while, as we all do have our base in a very corrupt culture and family structures, becoming a virtuous person is not something that can happen when you're 20 or 25.
This is something you really have to...
Work with quite hard as you get older.
Maybe it's possible, if you've been raised right, but I find that people fall into one of two categories when they're younger, to cast the net very wide.
The first category of people who have been messed up, and whether they know it or don't know it, they're in the same category.
But the second category is the people who sort of think that they've come from great families and have no empathy for those who did not come from great families, which means that the people who think they've come from great families didn't really because they weren't taught how lucky they were.
I don't imagine that you sit there looking at the starving people in Rwanda or Somalia or whatever the latest hunger spot is.
I don't think you look at them and say, gee, I just can't understand why they don't get a job.
They're just lazy.
That would be vanity of the first order and an extraordinary lack of empathy.
And so this gentleman met the right woman, assuming that it is, I'm just going to make the assumption about his marriage, right?
He met the right woman, she made the moves, and he just kind of coasted into a good marriage.
And I'm not saying that his marriage has done no work or anything like that, but he obviously has a good enough marriage that it's worth doing work on, right?
This is another thing that people forget when they talk about other people's marriages and relationships.
So... The thing that I would suggest occurs is that this guy probably is just a little bit vain about his marriage and his life.
And that vanity comes across first as excessive self-deprecation.
Excessive self-deprecation is the flip side of vanity.
We've talked about that sentimentality is the flip side or the superstructure built on brutality.
Excessive Modesty is how you know there's vanity.
That's really, really clear.
Excessive put-downs is how you know that there's quite a good deal of vanity in the personality.
Basically, it's an I'm so confident I can put myself down kind of thing.
But it really is a kind of vanity.
Now, what kind of vanity does this guy have?
Well, the only thing I can do is look at the actual post that he put out and say that he has vanity about he is taking personally, or has taken as a personal virtue, the good fortune of his marriage.
And there may be other things in his life.
He says he grew up poor and this and that, but there's a certain kind of I'm better because I have a good marriage, right?
And that is...
I mean, it's fine to have that opinion, right?
I mean, I have a good marriage and...
Isn't that funny?
I was about to say great marriage, but then I thought that sounded like a one-upmanship, so I didn't.
But... Yeah, and I, you know, Christina and I have worked very hard on our marriage and so on, but we've also only worked very hard on our marriage because when we work very hard on our marriage, we really get places that are great, right?
So that's also...
But, I mean, it could have gone another way.
It's possible, right? If Christina hadn't responded to certain things or I hadn't responded to certain things, it could have gone a different way.
So there's no...
I mean, there's never any sort of guarantees.
I mean, you do know a good deal about a person, but you can't map their future, and that would be chillingly close to the big D word.
But... So I would say that there's a certain kind of self-satisfied, mildly pompous, little bit sort of smug approach that this guy has to his good fortune.
And taking fortune, taking the twists of fate personally is, you know, we all know the people who think they're all that because they're pretty or they have a kind of smugness about them because they've inherited a chunk of wealth or whatever.
And that is a sort of false self grandiosity that mistakes good fortune for virtue.
That is the great temptation.
Or, you know, this also happens, right?
I mean, think of if you've had a sort of difficult family life, as a lot of people have, then think about whether you feel that that reflects on you somehow.
I mean, this is what children do.
Children take everything personally, right?
When mommy and daddy are fighting, they take it personally that they need to be a better kid, that they need to fix it, right?
Because, I mean, that's just what children are, you know, in that sense, children are just very narcissistic.
There's nothing wrong with it. It's a phase they need to go through, and they'd go through it a hell of a lot more quickly if the parents weren't themselves narcissistic, but...
This sort of taking everything personally is a very childlike, sort of, it's an immature, not relative to the culture as a whole, but relative to a sort of objective standard of mental health.
It's an immature approach to fortune, right?
So we can do this in a positive sense that we say...
I am better because I had a new bike every year and my parents were pretty well off and they were together and I got to go camping and I went on trips around the world and so on.
And I certainly have known a number of people who were like this.
I got a car when I was 16 and that makes me all that and all this stuff.
So there's the false positive of mistaking fortune for virtue.
And then there's the false negative of mistaking fortune for humiliation or for corruption.
Because the fact that you were born into a bad family, not your fault.
It's not your fault at all.
And I bet that you did everything that you could to survive and keep your soul intact, as all children try to do.
And you did your very, very best with a very lonely and very challenging, difficult, corrupt, and evil environment.
And that's really something to be proud of.
But a lot of us, myself included, throughout some chunks of my life, have carried the weight of family corruption as if it were...
I don't know, like a rap sheet that I'd come up with or something.
And that's just an important thing to work on, to work on undoing.
Because it is not...
You're not a better person because you were born tall, right?
For guys in particular.
I don't know. It's tough for women. Tall women have my sympathy because there's still this prejudice that women got to go out with a taller guy.
But if you're born tall and you're born lean and you got a nice head of hair and good chisel features or whatever...
Then that's a danger.
That's why I talk about looks and good fortune being a danger.
Nothing wrong with the good fortune, enjoy it, but, you know, for heaven's sake, don't think that it's got anything to do with your virtue.
I mean, it's just accidental. And so we know this deep down in our heart, and our true self really wants to get out of this Hall of Mirrors mad illusion that we're better because we're lucky.
Because that's a cold, lonely, and pompous place to be.
It's not a happy place to be.
And so what happens is then, when we come across people who have less fortune than we've had, then we tend to sort of follow a particular pattern.
I mean, it's not always the same, but there's usually some combination of this kind of stuff going on.
So, if I got a happy marriage and I come across you who is lonely and searching and wanting a great marriage, then I'm likely going to say to you that, first of all, I'm going to establish that I have a great marriage.
Right? So, this has happened a number of times.
I remember I had a boss, and after I bought my house, right, I sort of said, he was asking me about my house, and I was saying, oh, it's this, that, and the other.
And literally, before I had two sentences out, he started telling me about his house, which had like, you know, six bedrooms and, you know, two acres and all this kind of stuff, right?
And so he simply couldn't listen to my story about my house.
He had to tell me all about his house to sort of, you know, that he had a better house.
And, you know, I bet you if you'd asked him to say, well, I'm sharing, right?
But it's kind of rude, right?
To sort of ask someone about their thing and then tell them about your so much better thing within two seconds.
So that sort of establishing your own superiority, right?
So you wish to distance yourself from these people who are struggling, right?
Because you don't want to recognize that you're just blind lucky.
Because if you get that you're blind lucky, you lose the false positive self-esteem, the greedy, empty drink that the false self quaffs on.
You lose that fantasy virtue of your own, which is painful.
Because then you have to go back over your life and figure out how many people you've humiliated to whatever degree you have based on putting out this false, well, I'm superior, but let me reach down and help you poor people.
And I'm not accidentally superior, right?
So recognizing that we're all in this kind of hurly-burly, and some people get lucky and some people don't, once we get that, we're all struggling to improve, we're all struggling to find our lighted way in a darkened world, and some of us trip over gold and some of us trip over pits, that...
There's far more fortune in many ways than there is will in the world.
Once we kind of understand that, then we can really start to have real empathy for each other.
And that means, though, that we have to give up the idea that we're good because we're lucky or we're bad because we're lucky.
That's not having empathy for yourself, then.
Sorry, that we're bad because we're unlucky.
So, the first thing that people do is they have this kind of thing where they become superior.
So, they have to establish that they're willing to talk about this with you, but the first thing you have to understand is it's not their problem.
So, that's how they immediately destroy the empathy that is potentially coming out from these people.
And we all, you know, when we're facing difficulties, as we all do, we just want to be heard.
We just want people to understand.
We don't want to be talked down to, and we sure as heck don't want to get the next thing.
The next thing is the obvious advice.
The obvious advice is the next thing.
It's something that's almost so automatic that it's almost impossible for us to see it.
It's just something that happens so regularly and so consistently that it's hard for us to see how common this is.
The obvious advice is something that we just normally get.
So if I'm a manager and my project manager comes to me and says the project is late, I'll say, well, I certainly never had problems to that degree, but maybe what you can do is try and get the project in on time.
That's not being very empathetic.
That's not assuming that the person is competent and that if the answer was easy, that that person would have thought of it.
That's sort of an important thing to understand.
If you're trying to give somebody advice, if you're trying to help someone, really help someone, then you have to assume, if you want to help them, that they're intelligent.
Because if they're not intelligent, if they're like an IQ 70, put my shoes on my hands and walk around backwards kind of person, then there's really no chance in hell That you will ever be able to provide them any kind of real help.
That's never going to happen.
Because they simply won't be intelligent enough to understand what it is that you're trying to offer them.
That's never going to happen that you're ever going to be able to offer them any kind of real help if they're not intelligent at all.
So when you try to offer somebody help, you have to assume that they're intelligent.
And that they want to solve the problem.
They've been trying to solve the problem.
Because, you know, if they're just a yes-but personality, people who come up with all this stuff to do with, well, I want to do it, but I can't do it because of X, Y, and Z, and they're just playing a game with you, like, so it gets you to get frustrated because they won't accept any advice, then you don't deal with them, right?
You don't deal with them, or if you do, you don't deal with them at the level of the problems that they claim to have.
have, you deal with them at a deeper and psychological level.
But when you try to help someone, obviously you assume that they are intelligent.
questions.
You really have to assume that they're intelligent.
And then you have to...
Let me just stay on this road.
Then you have to deal with them as if they're intelligent, which means that you can't just give them the easy answer.
You can't just sort of say, as this person did, well, the important thing is not to try so hard.
And obviously, just to not be too insulting, you have to not give people answers that you didn't yourself take.
So obviously, this guy didn't try at all.
So when he's saying, don't try too hard, with this guy, his wife came along and You know, grabbed him and made him her boyfriend and then they got married and so on.
Then clearly, this is a person who is not in the category of somebody who tried just the right amount, right?
Because he didn't really try at all, right?
I mean, it's not a thing to understand about that.
So, the obvious advice category is also something that people get pretty messed up about, pretty confused about, and I think that is also a real shame when it comes to...
To getting people to really empathize with each other.
The solution is, if you want to help someone, you have to respect them.
You have to respect that they're intelligent.
You have to respect that they know what they're doing.
You also have to respect that they are intelligent enough to come up with the easy answers themselves.
If you really want to help them, right?
If you don't want it to be just some sort of mad vanity cavalcade, then you have to approach it, I think, from that standpoint.
And that will give you some really great, I think, and compassionate insights and moments wherein you really are helping people, which is a great and wonderful thing to do.
But it all comes back to that old chestnut that we've talked about on this show before, which is curiosity.
Which is curiosity. If you want to help somebody, then what you really have to do is to be curious about their life and curious about what their choices are and what their preferences are.
There's simply no other way to really help people other than that.
There's just no other way to do it.
If you do want to help somebody, which I think is a noble and wonderful thing to do, Then you need to be curious and get involved.
You need to be curious and get involved.
With their life and their choices and their questions.
And there's nothing that says that you have to do it.
It's just that if you don't want to do that, then I would say that the least you could do is not get involved in a sort of self-aggrandizing, I'm okay, I have pity on your feeble struggles, do something obvious like don't try so hard, which of course also is an impossible commandment.
You know, if somebody's struggling to lift a log off themselves, telling them not to try so hard, I mean, who even knows what that means, right?
I mean, that really can't be examined or understood in any way that would make any sense.
So that's sort of the...
The approach that I would take about that, that it probably would be very, very important to try and have real empathy for people and to really try and be curious about where they're coming from, to ask them questions, and for God's sake, hold off on giving people advice until you've really got a measure of their personality and really have understood Their issues, right?
I mean, you never know. You never know what is causing people to have trouble in their emotional relationships, right?
It could be that they're mean and cruel and bad.
It could be that they're trying too hard.
Although, the real question then is not, oh, don't try so hard.
The real question then, if you do think that that's the issue, the real question then is to say, well, do you think that...
Do you feel like stress when you're trying to get to know a woman?
Do you feel like tense? And...
If that person, so do you work with a hypothesis.
If you sort of want to help them and you've got a measure of their intelligence and you think they're smart people and this and that and the other, then you sort of say, well, you put your forward to theory.
If you think they're trying too hard, you say, well, do you feel stressed when you sort of try to meet a woman or meet a man or whatever?
And if they say, no, I feel perfectly relaxed at that point, it's something else that happens.
And you say, okay, well, that's not it.
So you sort of work scientifically.
You have a theory, and you ask them questions.
And you don't ask them leading questions and don't just give them pat advice.
You ask them questions.
I mean, this is the basic therapeutic method.
It's the basic Socratic method. It's the basic scientific method.
You have a theory, and you look for proof.
And I think that by the time you get to know someone and try to help them in a productive and sort of proactive manner, then you're already in a situation where you've learned enough about them that you're not just sort of Projecting your own issues onto them.
That's sort of why I ask for people to give me more information before I do a dream analysis so that I've got at least something to work on.
Otherwise, I don't know what I'm projecting.
I've got to have some idea of how this dream relates to their life because it's not my dream.
It's not your dream. It's their dream. So, it's important to ask questions about people if you really want to help them and to respect them that they're obvious answers they've already thought of, especially if they're not like three years old.
And from there, what you can do is...
You can start to gather information and start to have a theory once you learn their history, their childhood, their dating history, their relationship history, and you have a sense of their emotional habits and needs and so on, their approaches to things and what occurs for them emotionally.
Once you have all of that, Then, you can start to put some theories forward, or you can start asking questions.
You can have theories, ask questions to confirm or not confirm those theories, and that's called really helping somebody, right?
Because obviously they can't see it, and obviously an instant answer is just kind of insulting to their intelligence, and again...
It's a false self kind of leg up, right?
You step on somebody's face to get a little bit of height.
And so when you give people instant answers, you're not only saying you're dumb, but you're saying, I'm much smarter and I can see so much more clearly.
After having listened to you for 10 minutes, I can diagnose your ailment and give you advice because I'm just that smart.
And... So yeah, asking the questions, you know, if you really want to help someone, it's an involved process, right?
You know, just sort of do it off the cuff, right?
You just sort of get involved.
And certainly after you've done this for, I don't know, like 25 years, like I have, then maybe you can do it a little bit more rapidly.
But fundamentally, you kind of have to go through that whole process, I would say, and do it for a couple of decades.
Then maybe you can take some shortcuts.
But that's what I mean by empathy.
And I put this out as a juicy, hopefully useful present to the fine gentleman who sent me an email yesterday thanking me for the previous podcast but confused about what I meant by a lack of empathy.
And I hope that this podcast has helped at least talk about some ways of approaching empathy that I found very powerful in my life.
And I hope that this clears it up for you and let me know if there's anything else that I can do for you.
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