4. What Is Empathy? How Can I Hear What People Are Really Saying?
Short Answer
Empathy is the ability to understand and connect with another person’s inner experience. For me, empathy is the ability to “humanly fall in love” with what another person is trying to express.
This “falling in love” comes through our willingness to look beyond the words themselves and connect with the feelings, needs, fears, hopes, and longings that may be alive within the other person. Rather than listening only to what a person is saying, empathy seeks to understand the human experience from which their words arise.
Empathy is not primarily about understanding someone’s thoughts. It is about understanding the life that is moving within them.
Empathy is not about giving advice, solving problems, agreeing with someone, or making their pain disappear. It is about offering genuine presence and understanding. When people feel truly heard, they often relax, gain clarity, reconnect with themselves, and become more open to dialogue.
Many conflicts become easier to navigate when we learn to hear what people are really saying beneath their judgments, anger, blame, demands, or silence.
More Personal Answer
How Can I See Human Beings for Who They Really Are?
Before learning Nonviolent Communication (NVC), I thought empathy mainly meant: being kind, understanding people, caring, or trying to help.
Over the years, my understanding of empathy has changed profoundly. Today, I no longer experience empathy as a technique or something to “do.” I experience empathy more as a certain quality of presence. A way of being with another human being.
For me, empathy is the intention to meet another person as they experience themselves from the inside. To gently enter their world – which is much harder than it may seem.
To deeply understand:
- what they are experiencing (feelings),
- what lies at the core of what they long for and what matters deeply to them (needs),
- and how life is expressing itself through them in this moment.
Magic 1: Effortlessness
Empathy Is About Hearing and Seeing, Not Fixing
How Do We Truly Listen?
Listening is, by definition, doing nothing. It is about receiving, not giving.
One of the biggest shifts in my relationship with empathy was discovering that empathy is not about helping people feel better.
I know many people who learn empathy, yet do not fully trust its power, so they consciously or unconsciously add a layer of trying to solve or improve the situation: coaching, guiding, leading, teaching, or advising.
Part of me understands this deeply. Doing “nothing” can feel terrifying.
When another human being suffers, my habitual tendencies often want to: save them, fix, reassure, explain, motivate, or lead them toward solutions.
But over the years, I’ve slowly been learning something radically different:
The immense power of empathy can move mountains simply by being with another human being.
Empathy is effortless. And effortlessness has a power that no amount of doing can match.
Here is an image that beautifully illustrates this for me:
Imagine building a sandcastle on the beach.
Then you decide: “I want to make it disappear.”. So you take a tool and begin hitting and flattening the sand. You work hard to destroy the castle. And yet, even after all this effort, it is still visible that something once stood there. The sand carries the marks.
Now imagine something different:
A wave comes and gently washes over the castle. Then another wave comes. And suddenly, the sand is completely smooth again: flat, clean, shining. And it is completely effortless. As if no castle had ever been there.
No force. And yet, infinitely more powerful.
This is how I experience empathy compared to trying to fix or solve people.
Empathy is effortless. It is the willingness to offer my presence, like a wave, to another human being and simply meet reality as it is.
And again and again, I am amazed by how incredibly powerful this is.
Empathy is a quiet kind of power. It asks for very little doing, and yet it can move mountains.
It can heal and reach places that no coaching, leading, or fixing can reach.
This gentle empathic meeting often transforms human beings far more deeply than all our attempts to help, or improve them.
And it transforms—not according to where I think they should change or improve, but by allowing healing to happen where healing itself longs to happen.
This healing carries an intelligence far greater than anything my own mind could produce.
Magic 2: Movement
When Something Is Welcomed, It Begins to Move
One of the deepest things I’ve learned through empathy is this: when something is genuinely welcomed, it begins to move.
For example, someone may say: “I am so frustrated.”
And I simply follow them by saying: “Are you feeling frustration?”
The person says: “Yes.”
This may sound extremely simple. But something profound has already happened.
What is alive in them has been: expressed, named, seen, welcomed, and met. Authenticity has been touched. Authenticity (reality) has been touched.
I know that, in that very moment, the feeling has already begun to move. The person is no longer feeling frustrated. They may suddenly say, “Now I feel sad…”
This fascinates me deeply. Because feelings—or, more accurately, emotions, which are literally motions, movements—cannot stay exactly the same for very long, perhaps only a few seconds, though the mind can continuously recreate them through thoughts and stories.
A frustration may turn into sadness, then into fear, then into tenderness, then into relief, and then into inspiration… It is a constant movement.
In empathic listening, my only “job” is to meet what is alive now. What is life expressing now?
I do not need to create any movement. I simply need to meet what is already there, and then movement happens.
Life is not static, but a movement, a vibration.
The Light Bulb
Marshall Rosenberg once used the image of a light bulb to describe empathic listening.
If you want a light bulb to shine, what do you do?
You turn the switch on.
But are you the one creating the light?
No. You simply create the connection. Then something flows through the system: electricity.
Marshall used to say: “I do not heal people.” Rather, I seek empathic connection. My focus is on connecting, in the present moment, with what is already alive inside the person, while recognizing that it is constantly moving.
And then something mysterious happens. Healing begins to move. And it moves in ways I could never have predicted or controlled.
Just like switching on a light, my focus is on creating the connection in the present moment, and all the rest is taken care of by a power greater than myself.
What is this healing power?
I sometimes call it life, nature, the body’s intelligence, divine energy, or simply something I do not know how to name.
Empathy Is Vulnerable
One of the reasons empathy sometimes feels difficult for me is that it requires entering the vulnerability of not knowing.
When I intend to listen empathically, I often genuinely do not know where the conversation is going, what the person truly longs for, what may help, or what will happen next.
And this can feel scary, awkward, or deeply uncomfortable.
Empathy invites me into discovery instead of control. Into being with another human being moment by moment, following them—blindfolded—into the jungle of their heart.
The Most Healing Listening I Ever Received
In 2008, I went through a period in which I wanted to die.
A trainer named Marianne Göthlin listened to me for five days in a row—about two hours each day.
She did almost nothing. She simply listened.
I was constantly worried that she was bored with me or that listening to me was tiring for her. I checked this over and over again, and each time she said, “No, I’m enjoying myself.”
She was not bored. She was not trying to fix me. She did not advise me. She did not try to convince me that life was beautiful.
She simply stayed with me.
After several days, something extraordinary happened. Something shifted deeply inside me.
Not because someone solved my problems or fixed my life, but because the way she saw me and met me allowed me to see and meet myself in ways I had never experienced before.
And this became a power within me that has never left me.
The Art of Hearing Through Judgments and Blame
Most of us learned from our surroundings to express pain by telling other people what they did wrong or what is wrong with them.
This often comes through language such as: blame, criticism, judgments, demands, or accusations.
For example: “Again, you didn’t cook! You don’t do anything for us. You only think about yourself!”
When I hear a sentence like this, I notice I have four possible ways to hear it. I can:
- blame back:
“I’m selfish? Look at yourself!”
- blame myself:
“Indeed, I am too selfish.”
- connect empathically with myself:
“Ouch… I so wish to be seen for the reason I didn’t cook today – that I’m really not well today, and I wanted to focus on resting so I could be present with the kids in the evening.”
- or connect empathically with the other person:
“Are you frustrated and feel alone in carrying the responsibilities of the house?”
Over time, I’ve become increasingly fascinated by this last possibility. Instead of focusing only on the words themselves, I try to listen for: “What is happening in this person’s heart right now? What is their pain, and what are they longing for?”
Behind: “You only think about yourself!”, I might realize that the person is experiencing: loneliness, longing for support, sadness, desire for attention, or a longing to matter.
Empathy is a shift of focus. As Marshall used to say: “Never listen to what people think. Listen to what is alive in them—to their feelings and needs. You will live longer if you do so…”
Guessing Rather Than Analyzing
The power of a question mark
One of the focus points I most love in the practice of empathy is focusing on guessing feelings and needs. For example:
“Are you feeling hurt?”
“Do you long for more closeness?”
“Are you overwhelmed?”
“Are you longing for collaboration?”
“Do you wish for care?”
“Are you searching for mutual understanding?”
Importantly, I do not experience these guesses as analysis. The question mark is essential. The question mark says: “I don’t know. Please correct me. You are the expert and the master of your own experience. I am simply following you into the jungle of your heart. You are the true leader here.”
This creates humility and spaciousness.
And interestingly, I notice that guessing feelings and needs often brings people inward – into their body and emotional experience – while many open questions (such as “When did it start?” or “What prevents you from being more open?”) tend to pull people more into explanation, analysis, defending and thinking.
Spaciousness
One thing I’ve become highly sensitive to is something I call spaciousness.
I notice that with some people, I naturally share very deeply. And with others, I barely share anything.
Over time, I began noticing the difference. Some people—or some moments—feel “full” to me while listening: as if the person is working hard, trying to help me, trying to fix me, trying to lead me, trying to improve me, already knowing where I should go, or simply being preoccupied with something within themselves and therefore less available to me.
And when I sense this “fullness,” it often seems as though there is no space left to discover me and my experience.
Then something in me naturally closes.
But when someone has spaciousness—when they simply enjoy listening to me—something in me naturally opens.
Almost like the phenomenon of wind: air moving from high pressure to low pressure. So it is inside me too: when there is lower pressure (spaciousness), my inner experience naturally wants to move from the inside outward.
This quality of spaciousness feels magical to me.
Empathy Is to Love
Today, if I had to summarize empathy in one sentence, I might say:
Empathy is loving people where they are, rather than where I think it would be better for them to be.
Empathy is falling in love with their message. Even when they judge, blame, complain, or demand, it is the capacity to see the vulnerable human being behind it.
Empathy is the willingness to be touched, stay present, listen, and trust life.
And paradoxically, I notice that when human beings are deeply heard, they often become incredibly intelligent. They find their own answers. Their own movement. Their own healing.