Note to the trainer: Explain that empathy is not only feeling another person’s pain, but also understanding that person’s world from their point of view.
Method: Interactive presentation.
Materials: Whiteboard and coloured spectacle frames (optional).
1. Defining empathy: The trainer establishes the concept of empathy in the following words:
“Empathy does not simply mean being polite. It means being able to see what another person is feeling through their eyes and to enter the same emotional frequency without losing our own sense of self. A person who empathises observes the situation clearly from the outside and creates a supportive space by saying, ‘I can see that you are finding this very difficult right now.’ Empathy is like a muscle; it becomes stronger the more it is used and practised.”
2. “Looking through Another Person’s Glasses” discussion: To help participants enter the world of the children in their care in the institution, ask them to imagine setting aside their personal judgements and “adult glasses” and putting on “empathy glasses” that take account of the child’s past trauma and present situation.
“Dear colleagues, when we speak about empathy, we all say, ‘Yes, I already empathise.’ However, while working with children in practice, we unconsciously fall into a major trap: we look at the child through our own parental or adult glasses and completely miss the child’s own glasses. Let us now examine the difference between these two pairs of glasses and the invisible traps we fall into in institutional care:
As adults, we have a highly developed logical brain, many years of life experience and an established worldview. When an event occurs, we pass it through our own logical filter.
Equivalent in practice: When a nine-year-old child creates an uproar and cries in the sitting room because a friend has taken the child’s colouring pencil without permission, if we are wearing “adult glasses” we may think: ‘It is only a colouring pencil. We can give the child another one and that will be the end of it. Why cry so much over this? What a difficult child.’ This is the adult perspective. It reads the event only through the pencil’s “material value” and through “logic”.
For a moment, we completely silence our own judgements and the adult voice saying, ‘Why make such a big thing of this?’ We consider the child’s developmental stage, disadvantaged background and struggle to find a place in the institution.
Equivalent in practice: Let us now look at the child’s major reaction to the same pencil through “empathy glasses”. This child is under protection, has a damaged sense of belonging and has very few safe spaces that are truly their own. The colouring pencil is not merely a stationery item; it is an enormous symbol of ‘what belongs to me, what is under my control and what represents my boundaries’. When the friend takes the pencil without permission, the child does not feel that only the pencil is being lost; the child feels as though safety, boundaries and rights are being lost. This is the deeper reality shown by the child’s perspective.