If I were you and you were me, what would you see?
What would you experience if you were me writing this?
You can’t possibly know what I am going through. You can’t because I am me. I have lived as me my entire life. Being me entails having my personality, my perspective, my experiences and how people experience me and me them.
So, how can you possibly walk in my shoes if my entire life experience led me to seeing things the way I do and producing the reactions I have.
You can’t “get” someone. You can relate to them from your own life experience, but “getting it,” shouldn’t be the goal.
Here’s my sales pitch for peace:
Empathy is the bridge to forgiveness.
To be empathetic is the willingness to see the other person’s perspective. When you are hurt, scared, angry, sad, escalated in some way, the choice to empathize and relate to people seems impossible.
Why would we choose to distance or judge someone? Judgment, justice, disgust, fear, anger, all of the above.
I guess the real question is, why should we empathize with people who we deem to be “bad” or “wrong?”
For your own peace.
Empathy and forgiveness leads to a peace for the one who practices it. If you want peace, in your relationships, at work, watching the news, dealing with difficult customers, then you need to allow yourself to relate to the person you are dealing with.
Typical argument against empathy:
“But what if the person is a sociopath and doesn’t care about people, why should I relate to them?”
Answer: One of the criteria for anti-social personality disorder aka sociopath is lack of empathy. So, if you choose to categorize people into a box that is “unrelatable,” then you just did what they do.
If you want to be right, enact justice, judge and distance from someone, remember they are people too.
The way humans are designed-they have parents, and those parents had parents, and so on. All the ancestry that came before us led to the “us” here today and leading to the “them” that is standing before you now. Both nature and nurture play into who we are today and why we chose what we chose. Not to mention, the choices available to as at the location and time in history we were born.
Judge if you dare
So, if you want to judge and enact judgment on people because of your god-like view of what should be, remember: people only know what they know and don’t know what they don’t. People learn by way of association and do what they do based on what was experienced, internalized, and believed to be true.
People do the best they can with what they’ve got. People don’t do your best or a general best, but their own best. Even one who murders, chose to do so based on what they thought was the best choice. There isn’t a person who has walked this earth who hasn’t done the best they could with what they’ve got. Also, with the exception of Jesus, there isn’t a person who hasn’t done something they later revisit and think things could have been done differently today.
If you can allow yourself to see that you’ve once misjudged, acted out of anger, chose based on limited information, then you can understand that someone else may be doing the same thing. Sure, they may have chosen differently than you would have, but their available choices, their normalized decisions, observed behaviors from family and friends, and many many other factors in their experience have led to them choosing to act as they did.
You get angry and you yell.
Someone else gets angry and they drink.
Another person gets angry and fights.
All are angry and neither can judge the other from their limited perspective.
Finding yourself relating to others, and allowing yourself to be in their shoes, is much more than, “getting it.” Empathy will provide the ideal life of peace you want. If you want the peace that is.
If you want to judge, then so be it, but you’re doing exactly what they are doing. The exact same thing you are judging is the same thing you can’t forgive or accept about yourself.
From Where I Stand 