Areas › Anger › Growing empathy
There is more than one way into someone else's world. You can picture yourself in their place, picture them in it, or simply let their state affect you, and the three do not feel the same or lead to the same place.
Picturing yourself in their place tends to raise your own distress, which can leave you wanting relief more than wanting to help them. Picturing them in it keeps them at the centre. Letting your body pick up their state needs no picturing at all. When one route is closed, and under anger the imaginative ones usually are, the others are still open.
Qur’an and Sunnah
and lower your wing in humility towards them in kindness (Quran 17:24). The verse then asks you to remember being small and cared for, which is perspective taking handed over as a practice rather than a theory.
وَٱخۡفِضۡ لَهُمَا جَنَاحَ ٱلذُّلِّ مِنَ ٱلرَّحۡمَةِ وَقُل رَّبِّ ٱرۡحَمۡهُمَا كَمَا رَبَّيَانِي صَغِيرࣰ ا
and lower your wing in humility towards them in kindness and say, ‘Lord, have mercy on them, just as they cared for me when I was little.’
Qur’an 17:24read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In randomised writing experiments, people asked to write about an emotional event in the first, second or third person processed it differently depending on the voice they were given. That supports deliberate perspective switching as something a person can actually do rather than a vague instruction. It was a writing task in a study setting, so it shows the lever exists more than it shows how far it moves anything.
Seih YT, Chung CK, Pennebaker JW. (2011). Experimental manipulations of perspective taking and perspective switching in expressive writing.. Cognition & emotion doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Different routes into another person's experience pull you in different directions, so which one you take matters.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
You can drop the neuroscience and keep the instruction. Look at the person's face, and at their eyes in particular, and let what you see land on you.
If you are around people constantly and falling out with them constantly, a quiet weekend on your own may do more for your temper than any conversation will.
If it really is that you feel too much for people, the useful move is not more feeling. It is learning to say no while still meaning them well.