creating cultures of empathy
and feeding wolves
I read about empathy cafes in September, and delayed writing about them because other newsletter content was planned for October.
A Scientific American (paywall) article talks about how an empathy cafe the author attended was set up to “spark dialogue between police and community members.”
As ever, I think that empathy cafes or IRL meetings are adaptable to and relevant for library workers. Especially given that emphasis on empathy.
My book, A trauma informed approach to library services is based around the concept and how expanding our empathy through the trauma informed framework promises positive rewards for library workers and their communities.
If you didn’t know it, empathy is in decline for decades. Another library worker and I spoke about this after a presentation I gave on using the trauma informed framework as a lens for marketing and communication. She said that our country seems polarized between those with empathy and those lacking it.
If we don’t have much empathy, we can learn it, educators say. But, as Elizabeth Svoboda wrote “…fully grasping someone else’s experience is a heavy cognitive lift.” So, just because you know how to do it, doesn’t mean that you will, especially if you have other priorities, like productivity or efficiency.
Interestingly, research shows that most people opt out of the “cognitive effort empathy requires,” especially when they’re dealing with strangers. Empathy with aliens (not extraterrestrials) challenges us.
Library workers aren’t most people. Dealing with strangers is our bread and butter. But the research shows that most people can turn on the empathy when they believe there’s a baseline of shared life experiences, like what we feel with fam or our co-workers.
There’s a great deal of emotional labor involved in library work. For those unaccustomed to emotional labor, asking them to generate empathy seems like too costly an ask. Too costly a practice.
Svoboda compares this to the divide between wealthy people and those living at poverty level. She wrote that “…people in rarefied income brackets often have little motivation to understand the struggles…”
She describes a series of empathy chats that show promise of bringing the most polarized of us to hug one another after active listening and speaking and research that nudging people toward empathy by creating communities in which empathy is a baseline expectation.
The skillset is “…habitual, focused listening...” the type that many library workers do each day with their communities and sometimes their co-workers. Library workers embed empathy within social relationships. Maybe, as a profession, we have the jump on others who lack this core belief or practice within their workflow.
But reinforcing those practices and modeling them within library organizations is important. I remember working with a person who modeled bullying and I witnessed evidence of their direct reports bullying others. It was ugly. When you’re surrounded by bullies, that makes it okay to be one too. And, the opposite is true, if you’re surrounded by kindness and empathy.
Another tidbit from that article: A 2023 study shows that people who identify as politically liberal have stronger empathetic brain activation than conservatives.
My question is: Which wolf will you feed? Which wolf does your organization feed?
I’ve attended some of the online empathy cafes. But maybe you don’t need to. I think we’re professionally set up because much of what we do is about leaving people better off than we found them, feeling heard and understood. That makes them feel safer, lessens their trauma response, and disrupts any barriers to emotional and language processing.