Many of us are super-stressed – Covid-19 has turned up the dial on our emotions. Our mental health is as much at risk as our physical, faced with death on our doorstep, fear and anxiety about the future. People are worried about jobs, food supplies and paying the bills. Old dysfunctional patterns in relationships are at risk of becoming even more extreme: the spike in divorces in Wuhan confirms this. So, how can we keep our human relationships in good enough shape and can empathy be a tool to help navigate this eerie new normal?
Confined in small spaces, without the usual diversions to let off steam we are hyper vulnerable to annoying each other. Our behaviour will span from loving to angry, with petty arguments and sulky silences. We have a propensity to regress in the company of our dearest and to show the least attractive sides of our personalities, often being kinder and more generous to friends and strangers.
So what can empathy contribute? it is a state of mind in which we genuinely want to hear what is going on in the mind of the other and understand how they think and feel. This does not mean that we agree with them and it is not sympathy. But it is a particular kind of listening that is open, in which we genuinely want to hear what the other person has to say. This might sound easy but most of the time when we communicate, we talk over the other person, seldom listen and try to work out how to undemine their argument before they have even finished. We are more interested in winning and being right than genuinely listening to what the other person says.
