The Process Of Cognitive Empathy

A guide...

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I speak a lot about both emotional and cognitive empathy. I am certain that you have noticed that I don’t put a great deal of stock into emotional empathy, but for those just joining us, I will give a brief recap.

Emotional empathy is not what people think that it is. People believe that emotional empathy is feeling what another person is feeling based on their circumstances. It isn’t. It is far from this in fact, and to demonstrate this we are going to explore a scenario that I have dealt with many times.

My sister committed suicide. This doesn’t come up often in my life, but when it does, especially around strangers though it can be with people who know me as well, the response to this information is that of the immediate need to offer me comfort.

Why is that? People would immediately respond because they are feeling empathy for me. This is true, and also the crux of my argument. Feeling some particular way about my sister’s suicide has nothing at all to do with feeling what I feel. That is, quite simply, BS. The person is not feeling what I feel at all, because I don’t feel bad about her death. It is what it is.

Whatever feelings that person is having towards her sudden self-inflicted death is entirely what they are feeling. If emotional empathy actually worked the way it is assumed that it works, they would feel what I feel, which is nothing. They are projecting their thoughts on the matter and applying them to me, and then are comforting me as a surrogate of themselves.

I have watched this my entire life and it makes me laugh when I hear people sing the praises of their so-called empathy. They insist it is what makes humans, humans, and psychopaths lacking it removes them from the human category. They have no idea what it actually is, nor how silly arguments like that are. What is emotional empathy? It is a cheat code that truly has little value. As I said, it isn’t informing you of anything. It is simply firing based on a series of assumptions you are making about the person that you are interacting with.

I have often said that emotional empathy is worthless without cognitive empathy, and this is true. What I neglected to tell you, however, is how to develop that part of yourself. That is what I intend to attempt to do through this post.

Let’s take the very same scenario of my sister’s suicide. I wonder how many of you are struggling with that empathetic firing every single time you read those words. You have been taught your whole life what that word “suicide” should mean to a family member. It’s a terrible life-altering painful crushing thing that can destroy a family. The only response should be condolences and sympathetic, empathetic kindness.

Incorrect. This might be true in the vast majority of cases, and in those cases let your emotional empathy run wild, but first, you need to know if that is the case at all, to begin with. How would you do this? The easy response is cognitive empathy, but without an idea of how to gain that, I might as well be telling you to use florbow and be done with it.

Before you encounter the situation where you hear about a sibling’s suicide, you need to pay attention to the world around you. Cast away your beliefs about how that should affect a person, and start to ingest the data of the different responses, and why those may be present.

In my case, most people would not know that I am psychopathic, and I wouldn’t expect them to. However, to gauge how I might respond to that suicide you would first have to understand what relationship I had with my sister. What a lot of people do when they hear the news is to think about their own siblings and how those relationships are. If they are very close, the thought of losing one of them would be devastating.

What if they aren’t close at all? I get it, you usually have the love and bonding bit with your siblings, so their loss would still bring pain. What about a sibling that is mentally ill and their entire family had to deal with the never-ending cycle of that mental illness? What if the person was a drug addict, and the only relationship that they had with them was constant late-night calls either from the police department, the hospital, or the sibling because they need money?

Neurotypicals still have limits, and they will lose their ability to feel connected to a sibling that has been nothing but a familial drain. Their death may, in fact, be a relief to that person. Applying what you think a relationship between siblings is, and then feeling bad for that person’s loss has no merit. They don’t feel that way, so your response is not empathetic. It actually could be rather emotionally damaging. They don’t feel bad about the loss, but your response, and everyone else’s response based on that same flawed empathy system, might make them wonder if they are a bad person.

Likely they aren’t. Likely they came to their feelings about that person through a lot of trials, and experiences that scarred them enough that removal of that person is all they care about. Let’s think about another scenario.

Death of parents. Nearly everyone will have to deal with this in their lifetime as most often parents die before their children. However, the circumstance of those deaths may well change that person's response to it. You should know what the different scenarios may be, and how a person might respond to them. A parent dying prior to the child ever knowing them is wildly different than a sudden death from cancer when the child is a teenager. A person might mourn who they believe their parent to be in the first scenario, but don’t have any real context aside from the stories that they hear.

In the second, the child is not only losing a parent in a vital time of their lives, they are losing all that they are to them, but also everything that they may have been. A teenage girl mourning the loss of her daddy walking her down the aisle at her wedding is very different from a child that never knew their father, so the image of them being at their wedding is more like imagining a ghost version of them. They still mourn the loss, but the situations are not the same.

What about a parent devolving into dementia over a long period of time? The child that is the caregiver is likely to mourn differently than their siblings that visited rarely. Those that weren’t present for that period mourn the parent that they knew, while the caregiver did that long ago, and is now dealing with the sudden absence of responsibility, and also the relief from a heavy burden. An empathetic response that isn’t taking these things into account isn’t empathetic, it’s just assumption.

What about the death of a child? Was it illness? What is murder? Was it an accident? All of these things bring different emotional aspects to the table. The parent of the person above, the mentally ill one that was a constant source of pain for the entire family is not going to mourn, or feel the same things as someone that lost their child to murder.

It is normal to respond with the internal feelings that these situations bring about, but context matters, and you will never understand that context unless you have a good understanding of the world around you. You have to expose yourself to different ways of thinking, and find patterns that give you invaluable information. With that information, you can begin to construct an understanding of how a person might actually be feeling in the moment that you are finding them in.

“My son died”, is an impactful statement. It would introduce many internal thoughts and feelings for that person, but so much more could be going on. What if their son was executed for terrible crimes, so the person is mourning the loss of their child, but also dealing with the gravity and aftermath of their deeds while they were alive? Would you offer that person the same response that you would to the person that lost their son in a car accident?

Most people don’t consider the context of what a person is feeling because they are assuming that their world experience somewhat mirrors their own. In some cases this is true. Your emotional empathy correctly informs you of what response is warranted, but often, and I do mean often, it is just an empty platitude because you have no idea what that person is truly dealing with.

In all the situations above, while you are learning to expand your understanding of different situations and how people react to them given their own circumstances, the best response you can ever have is:

“How are you doing?”

It assumes nothing. It is not offering sympathy for the death of someone that they had more animous towards than love, and it is not dismissive of the love they might have felt for someone that lit up their world. Let them tell you where they are at, and then, meet them where they are. Leave aside the assumptions, and hear what they have to say. Do not dismiss what they say because it doesn’t fit your worldview either. Too often people tell others how they are going to feel because how the person says that they are feeling is unacceptable to the know-it-all.

When you know where a person is, then your emotional empathy might provide you some direction, or, maybe, you will find yourself learning about something totally foreign to you, and it will add to your knowledge base. The world is complex, and emotional empathy will only get you so far. You have to be a perpetual student if you want to understand those around you.

No longer do humans occupy small tribes where everyone knows one another. Many now live in enormous conglomerates called cities, and have no idea who their neighbors are. The more disconnected humans become, the less useful your emotional empathy will be. In the future, I will be writing a post about how the emotional centers of your brain can get you into trouble because they may tell you a lie about a situation and create doubt in your mind that you are actually in danger. Or they will lie to you and tell you that something is your fault, when in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Cognitive empathy works in these situations as well.

The more you practice, the more aware you will become.