What is the difference between caring and empathy? They are not the same thing, and one of them is quietly about you.
Understanding gave me more inner peace than anything else. I understood others, and I ended up understanding myself. Caring can be you putting your needs onto somebody, or onto an animal, and calling it love. Empathy is feeling what they are actually feeling. I used to get furious at people keeping a bird in a cage until I looked at what was really going on for everybody in that room, bird included.
One thing to try: Next time you help somebody, ask whose need you are meeting. Theirs, or yours.
In this episode
(1:26) What I actually do for people
(4:16) A baby does not fit your pattern
(5:27) Compassion came out of understanding
(6:17) The animal in the cage, and the ego in a cage
(7:53) Caring can be projection, and often is
(9:12) Wise empathy against unhealthy empathy
(11:48) Where most of us finally learn it
(13:03) Men and empathy. I put myself in that box
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
What is the difference between caring and empathy?
They are not the same thing, and one of them is quietly about you. Understanding that has given me more peace than almost anything else, because it stopped me judging people.
The heart of it
Caring is your feelings towards somebody. Empathy is their feelings, felt by you.
Both are good, and one comes first. You cannot skip to the second.
You do not judge a four year old for being poor at algebra. Apply the same rule to adults.
Watch a small child with a snail in a box. Everybody says how caring they are, and they are. What they are caring about is how the snail makes them feel. They are not weighing up the snail's opinion of the box.
That is caring, and it is where all of us start.
The version that used to make me furious is somebody keeping an animal in a cage it has no business being in. A monkey, say, taken home as a baby, lovely for a few years, and then it grows a personality and pushes back, so into the cage it goes.
I was angry at the person. Then I looked at what was actually happening.
They love that animal. Genuinely. But listen to the language when somebody threatens to take it away. You are not taking that away from me. I would be devastated. Every word of that is about them.
Empathy is the same person saying, I will be gutted, and you are right, it should go to a sanctuary. They have put the animal's experience ahead of their own feelings.
There is an unhealthy version too, and most of us go through it first. That is taking somebody's feelings on so completely that you are still carrying them a week later. Healthy empathy feels it and does not become it.
We tend to learn the poor version of everything first and then patch it, rather like software.
One small thing to try
Next time you are certain somebody does not care, check which of the two you are actually looking for.
They may care a great deal and have no empathy available, which is a different fault and a much more forgivable one.
Then turn it on yourself. Ask, in one situation today, what the other person was feeling rather than what you felt about them.
Questions people ask
Is caring not good enough?
It is good and it is where empathy grows from. Nobody develops the second without the first. The trouble only starts when caring gets called selfless and nobody notices whose comfort is being protected.
Why do some people never seem to get there?
Because empathy is learned through exposure and experience, and not everybody's life has provided either. Judging somebody for a skill they never had a chance to build is as daft as being cross with a child about algebra.
Do men struggle with this?
In my experience yes, and I include myself. Plenty of men are certain they are empathetic and are actually caring hard about their own feelings, which looks identical from inside and nothing like it from outside.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
empathy · compassion · ego
Read the transcript
One of the things that gave me more inner peace than anything else
was understanding.
How can understanding give me more inner peace?
Well, it meant I understood others, and in return, it meant I
understood myself.
So I judged people less and I judged myself less, and that understanding
led to more compassion.
And one of the things that really blew my mind was understanding
the difference between caring and empathy.
And, yes, we know they're both different, but on today's podcast,
I'm going to talk about the differences, and I'm going to give
you that ability to see the differences so you can have more
compassion and caring and understanding for others.
I'm Stephen Webb, and this is Stillness in the Storms.
You might think Stillness in the Storms, I thought it was living
deeper lives.
Hey, I'm losing the plot.
That's why.
No, not really.
I'm changing it back to Stillness in the Storms because that
matches what I do more.
It feels more comfortable, it feels more natural.
It's more congruent with what I want to do.
It's my podcast, and the decision is final.
Okay, so Stillness in the Storms.
What does that mean?
It means I help you to have that little.
When things are going a little wrong or a big wrong.
So you're struggling and you're overthinking, and you haven't
got time to sit down and take time out.
I help you to overcome those days, overcome those times.
And considering I'm paralyzed just below my neck, I've hit rock
bottom, I've been bankrupt.
I've had so many problems in my life.
And I don't tell you to be a sob story.
I tell you because that's the reality.
And I'm a pretty positive, happy person.
I love my life.
I love nearly all aspects of my life.
But I didn't get there overnight.
I got there through learning to deal with and understand life,
understand others, and understand my life and my journey.
So a couple of other things.
Housekeeping things.
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Let's all spend a moment just thinking about that right now.
You're listening to the world's biggest podcast, Stillness
in the Storms, with your host, Stephen Webb.
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So you're going to get a new podcast every Tuesday, provided you
give me a review.
Right.
Okay, let's get on with today's podcast and we're talking
about caring and empathy.
Let's talk about caring first.
What's caring?
Well, if you think of a child, when it's born, it doesn't care.
It doesn't care about the mum and it doesn't care about the parents,
how tired they are.
It doesn't care about anything other than its own comfort, its own
whether or not it's hungry, whether or not it gets its food,
and whether or not it gets enough sleep.
It doesn't mind whether the mum's tired, exhausted.
It won't fall into your pattern of what you want the baby
to do.
It'll do what it wants to do in order to try to fulfill its needs.
And then after maybe a few years, when they're really young,
they start to look at animals and very often children, they'll
go and collect beetles or they'll collect worms or something
and put them in a tub and they might even like mice and animals.
And they.
And we look at them and go, oh, they're really caring.
And they do care about the animals because the animals make
them feel good.
They're their pets.
That's what caring is.
You need something else to look after.
And the actual meaning.
I did look up the meaning displaying kindness and concern for
others.
So caring is your feelings for somebody else.
So you're projecting.
Nothing wrong with that.
It's a good thing.
We have to develop caring.
We have to develop those feelings of caring before we can
develop empathy.
Empathy's different.
It's not like a next stage of caring.
And I want to really iterate the differences because I said at
the beginning of the podcast, a lot of my compassion and peacefulness
now come through understanding others.
And I used to get so mad when I would see somebody keeping an animal
in a cage that should not be kept in a cage, and am I still annoyed
by that?
Yes, but I'm not annoyed by the person so much.
I'm more annoyed by human ignorances.
And let me explain why.
Somebody goes and gets, say a monkey or a chimpanzee and they take
it home and they put it in a cage and they let it out and it's
friendly and it's wonderful for a few years and then the chimpanzee
grows.
An ego grows like a personality and it wants to fight
back a little bit.
So what does it do?
It ends up being a bit annoying.
Now then this person then puts it in a cage and keeps it in a cage.
Now then we might look at that on the outside and get really annoyed
by this person and say, you know, that's unfair.
How dare that she do that to that animal.
How dare they not let that animal free or give it to a better
home or whatever.
Why don't they give it to a sanctuary?
Well, it's because that person really cares deeply about the animal.
But it's not so much they care about the animal, it's they care
about their feelings towards the animal.
So if somebody come along and turn around and said to them, we're
going to take away the animal because it's called keeping it in
the cage, they'll say, no, no, you're not taking that away from
me.
Hence the language.
You're not taking them away from me.
And I will be gutted if you take it away.
I will be hurt.
I will be devastated.
So it's not about the animal, it's about them.
And you recognize that with children and kittens and the animals
they collect, they're not caring about whether that snail has
a wonderful freedom of the garden.
They care about whether they can keep it in the house, whether
they can.
They're caring about their feelings for the animal.
So to say they don't care is incorrect.
They do care, but they care about their feelings.
And that caring is.
You're projecting your needs onto the animal.
Now then, empathy.
Why is empathy different?
Well, empathy then develops later.
Empathy is feeling what the animal is feeling or feeling what
the other person's feeling.
So if somebody, in the same instance, that person that's keeping
their monkey or chinchilla then looks up and somebody comes
along and says, right, well, you cannot keep in that cage any
longer.
That's cruel.
They'll turn around and go, yeah, I love that animal and I'm
going to be gutted not to see it.
But yeah, you're right, take it away to the sanctuary.
Because they put the feelings of the monkey ahead of their feelings.
And that's the main difference.
So, so they're now thinking about the perspective of the monkey.
They're seeing it from a different perspective.
It's.
It's the same as when children keep animals in like that.
I said about a snail in a box and they'll keep it in the house.
They're not thinking about that snail and the life of the snail
and how the snail's feeling about it.
They're only caring about how they're feeling.
So when we open up our world to skillful or wise empathy, and
I say wise empathy because a couple of podcasts back, I.
So the difference between healthy and unhealthy empathy, healthy
empathy is, you know, I, I feel your feelings, but I'm not going
to take your feelings on or at least run with them for too long.
I'm not going to hold them too long and I'm not going to let them
burden my life because they're your feelings and I can feel them,
but I don't need to become them.
Unhealthy empathy is becoming those feelings.
So you meet up with a friend and they're really down and they're
suffering at the moment, and then we take on that feeling and
then for the next week, we're then down and suffering.
That's unhealthy empathy.
And we normally develop the unhealthy before we go to the healthy.
It's like everything, everything we learn, we tend to learn
the bad way of doing it first, and then we get the good way of doing
it, then we improve it.
It's like software.
I'm a real geek, so think about it.
It's like software.
The first release, it's wonderful and it's new and it's brilliant
and we all, like, enjoy it and then we see the problems with it
and then we need a new release just to upgrade it a little bit to
iron out the problems, the bugs it introduces.
So, yeah, I hope that enlightens you just a little bit
about the difference between caring and empathy.
So when someone says, you know, my child's really caring or
I'm really caring, think about their actions.
Are they really putting the animal or the parents feelings first?
Then to say to a child, you know, you don't care about your parents
all that.
Well, they do, they do care.
Because if the mum was ill and, or if they were missing or something
like that, they would worry and they'd be upset.
But have they got the empathy to be able to feel what the mum's
feeling when the Mum's tired or run down.
Very rarely, very rarely does children develop that at a very young
age.
It's normally when you have your own children, especially females.
When we have our own children, we have to develop that empathy for
the children.
It's a way that we can understand how a child's feeling.
Why are they crying?
Not just they're crying, big difference.
So we look at that monkey in the cage and go, how would that monkey
feel in the cage?
And then we would very often sacrifice our pain or we would allow
our pain to give that monkey some room in a sanctuary.
And you can see it with an elderly woman, perhaps with 3,000
cats.
A slight exaggeration, but probably somewhere over 3,000 cats.
They're not thinking about how the cats live and whether they're
happy, but how she feels about them and how much she loves them
being in her life to make her feel good.
Now, the men, on the other hand.
Don't start me on men.
Men and empathy and the masculine side.
Oh, you men are hard work, hard work.
And I put myself in that category as well.
It's men and empathy just doesn't.
Of course, men develop empathy to some degree, but it's less often.
And even if they believe they are empathetic, they really aren't.
You know, how many times do men do things to people and you look
at it and go, really?
Did you not know that was going to hurt them?
Did you not see how that was going to affect the children, how
that was going to affect the relationship and the other person?
No.
They put their feelings first.
So like I said, understanding others and the situation they're
in really opened my heart to them and it meant I judged them less.
If you're not, if you haven't developed the skills, then how.
You're not going to judge them, are you?
You don't judge a 4 year old because they're not great at algebra
because they haven't developed the skill.
So why do we judge an adult that hasn't developed a skill, even
if we think they should have done?
And yes, when you get to 40, 50, you should have developed empathy,
but if you haven't had that life and experience to develop it,
not a lot you can do about it.
There really isn't.
You know, we learn through exposure, we learn through experiences.
So thank you for joining me for this podcast.
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I'm Stephen Webb, your host.
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