Whose shoes, exactly?

We are often told that putting ourselves in another person’s shoes is a virtue. And it certainly can be, when it means trying to consider what the experience might be like for another human being, rather than looking at a situation exclusively from our own side. But “put yourself in their shoes” can also be one of the most unhelpful pieces of advice in at least two ways.

First of all, it can easily become projection masquerading as empathy.

We naturally tend to imagine how we would feel in the situation at hand, and what would help us to move forward, and then readily present that as universal advice. The trouble is that what worked for us might be the very last thing another person needs. One man’s medicine is another man’s poison and all that. Genuine empathy requires a lot more than simply imagining ourselves in someone else’s circumstances. It also means trying to understand their unique experience, which will be largely based on their particular psychology, history, sensitivities, constitution etc. You know - curiosity about the factors that have shaped the soul in front us, not just the immediate reality.

Most people do not go that far. They view the situation through their own lens and because something has helped them in the past, decide that they know what would be best for the person in question. In other words, they project their own experience onto someone else and call it empathy, or even wisdom. That’s one of the reasons why advice that sounds reasonable on its face value can not only fail to help, but massively backfire.

Second - for highly empathic people, the instruction can reinforce the very imbalance they need to address.

If someone has spent much of their life prioritising other people’s experiences, needs and emotions, telling them to put themselves in somebody else’s shoes is hardly revolutionary advice. They may already be doing it constantly, sometimes at the expense of having any clear sense of their own needs.

This is especially common in people who grew up in environments where attuning themselves to other people’s needs was necessary for their survival. As a result their attention naturally goes outward and they become highly skilled at reading the room, aka other people, while remaining disconnected from their own bodies. For such a person, the task is not to become more empathic, but to develop a stronger relationship with their own internal experience: What do I feel? What do I need? What is acceptable to me? What do I actually want?

Not all empathic people have this developmental deficit of course. But it happens often enough for the blanket instruction to “put yourself in someone else’s shoes” to be profoundly misguided. For someone who has spent their entire life living in other people’s shoes, this advice is almost comical - it is like telling a fish to try living underwater.

So there you go - these seem to be two almost opposite ways in which “put yourself in someone else’s shoes” can become unhelpful: projection and self-abandonment.

What both of these distortions have in common is taking a shortcut. Projection skips the work of finding out who is actually in front of us, substituting our own experience for theirs. Self-abandonment skips the work of finding out who we are, substituting other people's needs for our own. In both cases, the harder, slower process gets bypassed - getting curious, asking and trying to understand. rather than assuming we already know.

Perhaps the more useful instruction isn't "put yourself in their shoes" but "get curious about their shoes and what is it actually like to walk in them” - not what would it be like for me, but what is it like for you? And for those who have spent a lifetime in other people's shoes, the same curiosity needs to turn inward - what is it actually like to walk in mine?