Empathy is the ability to envision an experience through a fellow human being’s perspective and mentally go through the emotions that you would believe that person is going through. It is what separates man from beast. It enables people to have sympathy for one another’s experiences and helps bring them closer together emotionally.
Being able to have empathy games for adults with another person will allow them to feel more relaxed. Imagine unburdening yourself and having someone listen to you without judgment. By simply making an effort to see the world from someone else’s eyes makes it so much easier to have a sense of how to emotionally care for them.
Engaging in empathy games for adults helps stimulate the ability to let emotions surface naturally. For people who struggle with empathy, it could be quite useful to be deliberately put in situations that require them to act and behave with empathy. The fact that these situations are acted out in a controlled environment will also allow participants to feel more relaxed and more inclined to learn from the experience. With exposure and repetition it will become more natural, and the next time they’re caught in a situation that requires a softer, empathic touch, it won’t feel alien to them and they’ll be able to better assist other people in emotional distress.
Something else to take particular notice of would be the biases that you feel. Not realizing what these are could inhibit your ability to listen properly, and that could lead to a lack of empathy. Even if you don’t particularly agree with the emotional state that another person goes through in certain situations, the key to empathy is the ability to set your biases aside and truly experience the world through the heart and mind of another.
Encouraging empathic behavior is also believed to trigger the creative side of your brain. By focusing your attention on another’s emotional well-being and trying to see the world through their eyes, you are forced to imagine an emotion, a feeling, or a set of thoughts. This is much the same as making up a story. You have to imagine what you would feel like if you were to go through the experiences that you are seeing another person go through, or understand and imagine it from a story they might be telling you.
To start getting more deeply in touch with your empathic side, try this for the next encounter you have with someone. Pick someone that you know and feel comfortable with. List three thought-provoking questions that you want to ask them and then find a natural way to blend it into the conversation. Pay special attention to how they react to these questions. While you’re listening, try to imagine yourself in their shoes. Use what you know about them and paint a mental picture of what life would be like through their eyes. That’s the first step towards empathy.