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

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Thank you for listening.

Steven

Links to Steven Webb's podcast and how you can support his work.

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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 Steven 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 ah 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 paralysed 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 and understand others,

and understand my life and my journey.

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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 mom 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 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 know 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 is 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 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 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 is 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 cool 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'll recognise 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 to the animal. Now then, empathy. Why

is empathy different? Well, empathy then develops later. Empathy is feeling what the animal's feeling

or feeling what the other person's feeling. So if somebody, in the same instance, that person that's keeping the

monkey or chinchilla then

looks up and somebody comes along and says, right, well, you cannot keep in their 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 then 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 um 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 feeding about it. They're only caring about how they're feeding So when we open up our world

to skillful or wise empathy, and I say wise empathy because a couple of

podcasts back, I said 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 we take on that feeling and then for the next

week, we're then down and suffering so

That's unhealthy empathy. And we normally develop the unhealthy before we go to the healthy it's 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 and then we improve it it's like It's like software. I'm a real geek, so think about

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 and 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 um

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 um an elderly woman, perhaps with 3 000 cats A

slight exaggeration, but probably somewhere with 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 they're 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

um 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

um You know, how many times do men do things to people and you look at 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 four-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 like 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. Like I say, every Tuesday is going to be

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So the link is in the first line of the description. Take care Thank you.

And this is the new Stillness in the Storms podcast. I'm Steven Webb, your host. Take care. Have a wonderful

week and I will see you on a live meditation every day 2 p.m on my Facebook, Youtube and my

Twitter account Uk time. Bye. Namaste