The following activities are designed to help you practice empathy. Choose two of the following six options.  Always use your best judgment to ensure the comfort and safety of all parties. Write a ¾ to one-page single spaced response to each option in which you reflect on the process and its effects.

Microconnections: Facilitate ten microconnections each day for two days. Give a compliment, verbally acknowledge someone, or otherwise offer an uplifting contribution to another person’s life experience.  Identify and demonstrate small ways in which you can create feelings of self-esteem in others, particularly those who are overtly marginalized.

  • First coined by Harvard University psychiatrist Chester Pierce in 1970, the term “microagression” refers to commonplace verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative prejudicial slights and insults.  Microagressions can be deblitating, particularly after accumulation. Building off Professor Pierce’s research, in 2018, Dr. Deborah Sims began using the term “microconnection” to refer to commonplace verbal, behavioral, or environmental conveniences and interactions that communicate friendly, uplifting, or positive inclusive acts and remarks.

Local Diversity.  Have a conversation with someone who can provide a different point of view from your own on an experience central to all of humanity.  To begin, consider what experiences have most shaped you: your childhood (how you were raised, how you grew up), your education, your romantic pursuits, your family traditions.  Then approach an individual who is different from you in at least one major identity category (race, class, gender, sexuality), and ask him or her to tell you about experiences in the context of a specific theme. [Tell me about dating, sex, and romance from your point of view.]

Change the Conversation. Influence the feelings, ideas, and values associated with a situation by posting comments online.  Locate a conflict online and assess the conversation.  Post three comments, either consecutively or within threads of conversation, which alter and improve the emotional tenor of the conversation.  Remove tension, comfort a victim, use logic to ameliorate irrationality, use emotion to ameliorate meanness, and locate opportunities to centralize humane treatment of others.

Walk in Their Shoes.  Identify a recent conflict in your personal life.  In person or in writing, describe the conflict from the perspective of the other person.  Attempt to explain their point of view, their feelings, their “side.”  After your conversation or sharing your written work with this person, follow up by asking if your understanding of their views is accurate.  If at all possible, ask the other person to do the same activity in return.

Account for Competing Values.  Explain your point of view on a topic by packaging your ideas in terms of your opposition’s values.  Research shows that not only do we surround ourselves with others with similar views to our own (echo chambers), but we also tend to try to convince others across the aisle politically with our own moral emphases rather than theirs. Research a specific community that holds an opposing position from your own on an important issue in order to develop an understanding of their key values.  Communicate your ideas to that group using framing and arguments that speak to their values rather than your own.

Validate and Care for the Suffering of Another.  Identify a person who has suffered a trauma and indicate to him or her that you would like to offer some words of support.  In a safe and comfortable place, validate this person’s suffering; for example, you might say: “I see what you have been through.  That experience must have been very difficult for you.”  Build on this conversation in order to provide this person with a witness to his or her trauma.  You may also complete this activity online.

  • Feeling seen is a key part of healing from trauma.  While it would be ideal to prevent suffering, trauma is often amplified by the silence, shame, denial, or dismissal that occurs in its aftermath.  Consider the story of Susan Burton: Sexually abused as a child and gang raped as a teen, she sought help but was told to keep quiet.  After an off-duty LAPD officer ran over and killed her 5-year-old son, she plunged into addiction and ended up cycling in and out of jail.  In her memoir Becoming Mrs. Burton she explains how she was able to rehabilitate, eventually founding “A New Way of Life,” a life re-entry program for women who are former inmates, and co-founding another human rights organization, “All of Us or None.”  Now a Los Angles activist, she explains the way that validation of her trauma enabled her to heal.  While in prison at 46 years old, Burton told her Civil Education teacher that she could not sleep due to the memories of her sexual abuse.  The teacher encouraged her to focus on her own recovery rather than their course content.  Burton reflects, “It was the first time somebody had legitimately said, honey, this shouldn’t have happened. Something went really wrong. And being able to have that verified by someone outside of yourself, it gave me the ability to actually begin to seek further, to get further validation with the individuals who the experiences had happened through” (“Fresh Air,” NPR, April 2017).  As Burton reflects, sometimes it is important to say, “It happened.”  Provide this validation for someone through this activity.

While this example relates to a specific kind of trauma, the activity speaks to any disruptive life experience.  Also, the purpose is to be of service to another, so you need to carefully navigate how you can best achieve that goal. In other words, validation may come in the form of listening rather than words, or offering help without asking for details.