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Areas › Anger › Growing empathy
The advice does not need a mechanism to be worth following. Look at the person while they are speaking instead of at your own next sentence. Let whatever rises in you rise. You are not after a conclusion about how they feel, you are after a little of the feeling itself, which is what actually changes the way you answer.
beside them two women keeping their flocks back, so he said, 'What is the matter with you two?' (Quran 28:23). Moses notices two people held back before he does anything at all, and the noticing is the whole of this practice.
القصص
وَلَمَّا وَرَدَ مَآءَ مَدۡيَنَ وَجَدَ عَلَيۡهِ أُمَّةࣰ مِّنَ ٱلنَّاسِ يَسۡقُونَ وَوَجَدَ مِن دُونِهِمُ ٱمۡرَأَتَيۡنِ تَذُودَانِۖ قَالَ مَا خَطۡبُكُمَاۖ قَالَتَا لَا نَسۡقِي حَتَّىٰ يُصۡدِرَ ٱلرِّعَآءُۖ وَأَبُونَا شَيۡخࣱ كَبِيرࣱ
When he arrived at Midian’s waters, he found a group of men watering [their flocks], and beside them two women keeping their flocks back, so he said, ‘What is the matter with you two?’ They said, ‘We cannot water [our flocks] until the shepherds take their sheep away: our father is a very old man.’
Qur’an 28:23read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A social neuroscience review separates catching another person's feeling from working out their point of view and from simply caring what becomes of them, and argues that people in helping roles need the regulated versions rather than raw contagion. That distinction is the useful part here. You want to be moved, and you also want to still be yourself while it happens.
Jean Decety; Karen E. Smith; Greg J. Norman; Jodi Halpern (2014). A social neuroscience perspective on clinical empathy. World Psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Being affected by someone is what softens your reply, and looking is how it starts.
Reading about anger will not make you gentler. Warmth is a skill with reps, like anything else, and it fades when nobody practises it.
Telling somebody one thing you are quietly embarrassed about will bring you closer than a month of pleasant conversation.
Find a photograph of someone caught unguarded, ashamed or frightened or relieved, and look at it for a while. Notice what happens in your chest and around your own eyes.