Vertical Empathy
- Kay Rung
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Why Understanding Someone Isn't Enough
A few weeks after the first cohort of Reimagine Communication ended, I asked one of the participants what had actually stayed with her. Not the exercises, not the theory — what had she carried out the door.
She thought about it longer than I expected. Then she said something like: it wasn't any single insight. It was noticing that she could suddenly talk about her own beliefs the way you'd talk about a house you're renovating. Some rooms were finished — things she'd fully moved into, that now just felt like her, automatic, no longer up for debate. Some rooms were half-built — ideas she was actively working on, still a bit exposed, studs showing. And then, she said, there was a wing of the house she couldn't see yet. Not locked. Just not built. The kind of thing that would look obvious to her in five years and, right now, simply wasn't there.
Nobody, she told me, had asked her to put it in those words while the program was still running. She'd arrived at it on her own, somewhere in the middle of an exercise. But once she had that shape for it, she said, she hadn't been the only one in the room who kept going.
The Trouble With Ordinary Empathy
This is worth pausing on, because it is easy to mistake for something small. It is not small. Most of what we call empathy is really just recognition — I see myself in you, so I feel for you. It is warm, it is necessary, and it is also, if we are honest, a little bit narcissistic. It only works when the other person's furniture looks enough like our own. The moment their beliefs, their pace, their priorities sit somewhere we don't recognize, that kind of empathy runs out of road. What's left, if we're not careful, is a much smaller and much more common creed: I accept you, as long as you think, believe, and act the way I do.
That creed feels like acceptance. It is actually its opposite — a velvet rope around a room that only ever admits people who already agree with the host.
The question we invited the participants to sit with wasn't an accident. It was exactly what we'd been aiming at the whole time: what does it take to make room for someone who is standing somewhere you've never stood?
Three Versions of Everyone
Developmental psychologists have spent decades circling this question, and their answer, roughly, is that growth is never a single leap. At any given moment, a person is carrying three different versions of themselves at once — the capacities that have already landed and now run on autopilot, the ones currently under construction, half-formed and easy to mistake for weakness, and the ones that haven't entered awareness at all yet, not because the person is unwilling, but because you cannot see a floor you haven't built the stairs to. This is true of the people we're trying to understand. It is just as true of us. The humbling part isn't realizing other people have blind spots. It's realizing we're standing in one right now.
The Map
We've found one map that makes this easier to work with than most — a simple, almost embarrassingly obvious grid that the philosopher Ken Wilber put forward decades ago. Draw two lines, one crossing the other. On one side sits the inside of a person — what it feels like to be them, from within. On the other, the outside — what an observer could film, measure, count. Do the same split for groups: the shared meaning a culture holds together, versus the systems and structures that shape it from outside. Four windows. I, It, We, Its. That's the whole model.
We don't spend much time admiring the grid itself. A map tacked to the wall never taught anyone to walk through a city. What we actually do with it is closer to what our first cohort discovered without being told to: you climb into someone else's window and try to look out through it, on purpose, until it stops feeling like a theory and starts feeling like weather. What does this decision look like from inside your feelings about it, rather than from the outside where I judge your behavior? What does it look like from inside the "we" you belong to, the one with its own unspoken rules I've never had to learn? The map isn't the destination. It's the trapdoor.
Vertical Empathy
Put those two things together — moving across someone's perspective, and moving along someone's timeline, from what's already landed for them to what's still invisible — and you get something sturdier than ordinary empathy. Call it vertical empathy, because it doesn't just reach sideways toward people who feel familiar. It reaches up and down, toward people who are earlier on a path you've already walked, or further along one you haven't started, or simply walking a completely different road you'd never have chosen. It is the difference between comforting someone who's sad the way you'd want to be comforted, and asking what comfort even means from where they're standing.
There's a gentler consequence to all this too. Once you can actually see someone's trajectory — what's already landed, what's half-built, what hasn't come into view yet — it gets harder to hold their failures against them the way you used to. And just as hard to hold your own. Most of what looks like falling short, in ourselves or in someone else, is really just a capacity still under construction. Being human is difficult work, on a good day. Watching that slow, unglamorous movement happen over time, in ourselves and in each other, doesn't make the struggle disappear. It makes the struggle make sense — which turns out to be its own quiet kind of warmth, toward the people around us and toward ourselves.
The Harder Half
But understanding someone is not the finish line. It's the halfway point, and it's the easier half. The harder half is what happens after you've climbed into someone's window, looked out, and come back to your own house still disagreeing with them, maybe more firmly than before. Vertical empathy has a failure mode nobody warns you about: a person so practiced at seeing from everywhere that they stop standing anywhere themselves. They understand everyone. They stand for nothing. And they call the exhaustion that follows open-mindedness.
The participants who found this hardest weren't the ones struggling to understand people who saw the world differently. They were the ones struggling with what came next: how to say, having understood, that this is still where I stand. This is the boundary I've built, the context I've created, the thing I'm not willing to trade away, and I can say that without needing you to be wrong. That sentence is short. Almost nobody can say it cleanly. Most of us only ever learned half the skill: "I understand you," with no boundary left standing behind it, or "here is my boundary," with no warmth left in the voice delivering it.
Reimagine Communication
Tell the truth and love the person you're telling it to. Said out loud, it sounds like a fortune cookie. Try to actually do it, in a real conversation, with someone whose choices genuinely trouble you, and it turns out to be one of the harder things a person can attempt. That, more than any single exercise in the room, is probably the real curriculum. Not learning to feel for everyone. Learning to stay whole while you do.
This is, we think, the actual point of a room full of strangers doing this work together, and it's why we ended up calling the program Reimagine Communication. Not to agree faster, and not to dissolve into each other. To make more room without losing your own shape. Because a world that only has space for people who already think, believe, and act like us was never going to be a world for all of us — and if the goal really is a world with room enough for everyone, the empathy has to be able to travel, and the person offering it has to still be standing when it comes back. It has to move in time. It has to move in perspective. And it has to leave room, still, for a boundary. Ours is starting to.
That was our first cohort. We're already looking forward to the next one — for anyone who's ready to find out what they can't see yet.
Curious about joining a future Reimagine Communication program? Get in touch or join the waitlist.
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