“The Six “Caring Words” that Block Intimacy”
“a common type of misguided empathy is too quickly saying, “I know just how you feel.” And off you go with a story of your own.
The desire to “totally relate” to what another person is going through arises from good intentions. But it denies the depth and complexity of that person’s situation and can turn the attention back to yourself. (“I know just how you feel because I remember how scared I was before my gall bladder surgery”).
I’ve observed the problem of the listener eclipsing the other’s experience very frequently and it leaves the person who is trying to tell her story feeling abandoned. We want others to honor the specificity of our story, not simply to identify it with his or her own…
Staying deeply curious about the other person’s experience without identifying it with your own story is a crucial and undervalued part of listening. Honoring difference instead of reducing it to sameness, allows for a much deeper connection.”
I really like this lesson. I definitely have been a “I know just how you feel” person and I have also been interrupted by people who want to tell me that they “know just how I feel” and so this ran very true for me. Thinking about it, when I say “I know just how you feel”, that tends to sort of end the interaction on an awkward and incomplete note.
And this thing about deep curiosity is something I had definitely been thinking about — I feel like that’s where I have tried to move. It is so helpful to ask questions, to let people unfold all the stuff that is happening in their problem, and to probe at things with an external perspective. Usually, people have some kind of answer for themselves, it just needs to be coaxed out. And sometimes the answer is just getting to talk honestly about it.
Related: The Mystery Show and Starlee Kine have great examples
