[baxtr]

> However, if you want to take things to the next step and have better relations with people around you, do care about their feelings and use techniques to have them feel better - but out of empathy and not out of responsibility or guilt.

This might be a very stupid question… Aren’t responsibility and guilt and empathy somehow very intertwined? At least you’re probably empathetic if you feel guilt or responsibility, right?

[pmichaud]

It's not a stupid question.

One thing to say here is that empathy is basically putting yourself in another person's shoes. Often when you do that you also find room in your heart to forgive them, ie. when you see the way their behavior makes sense from the inside, most of the time there's less blame and more "that makes sense, if I look at it that way."

And I guess you're right that by having a policy of caring about people's feelings and acting on that care, you're "taking responsibility" in a broad sense. But there is a difference between acting out of obligation or coersion vs acting out intrinsic care or even out of even-handed consequentialist reasoning (ie. "what communication will cause the outcome I want?").

There's a lot to say about what that difference is, but--just in terms of outcome--"empathizing" out of obligation almost never works. It's because that obligation is kind of lurking within our motivations and comes through in various ways that disrupt the process of actually, really, understanding what's going on with the other person. Plus it disrupts communicating that understanding in a way that comes through to them.

If there's unspoken blame and contempt in the interaction, it'll almost always come through and make the communication fraught.

[burnished]

Have you ever righted a fallen bicycle? It wasn't your responsibility, you probably didn't feel bad or guilty, maybe you just wanted things to be right/nice. I think that might be the emotional tenor under discussion. Being in an emotional state where you take action because you have some investment in the outcome and not because you are trying to soothe a negative emotion.

[BeetleB]

They are somewhat orthogonal. You can have guilt with or without empathy. You definitely can have empathy without guilt.

If I give charity to a beggar, it is not because I feel guilty. I just want the help out the guy and I hope his condition improves. If I don't give charity to him, I don't feel guilty.

Guilt and responsibility often arise from cultural constructs, and indeed they partly exist to compel people who are not having empathy to act. Often it's a case of "You are a bad person for not giving money to that beggar" and so I give money to avoid being a "bad" person. NVC eschews the notion of "good" person and "bad" person, and encourages you to remove it from your internal dialogue. Give the guy money because you want to, not because of how others may perceive it.