Empathy consists of at least three related skills. First, there is the skill of mirroring. This is the act of accurately catching the emotion of the person in front of you.

Mentalizing also helps us simultaneously sympathize with a person while also detaching to make judgments about them.

If mentalizing is me projecting my experiences onto you, caring involves getting out of my experiences and understanding that what you need may be very different from what I would need in that situation. This is hard. The world is full of people who are nice; there are many fewer who are effectively kind.

LITERATURE. Researchers have found that people who read are more empathetic. Plot- driven genre books—thrillers and detective stories—do not seem to increase empathy skills. But reading biographies or complex, character-driven novels and plays like Beloved or Macbeth, in which the reader gets enmeshed in the changing emotional life of the characters, does.

Empathic (from empathy) listening gets inside another person’s frame of reference. You look out through it, you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their paradigm, you understand how they feel. Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is a form of agreement, a form of judgment. And it is sometimes the more appropriate emotion and response. But people often feed on sympathy. It makes them dependent. The essence of empathic listening is not that you agree with someone; it’s that you fully, deeply, understand that person, emotionally as well as intellectually.