Empathy is not agreement, but understanding others deeply is transformative in ways that lead to gratitude.
You can empathize with someone even when you disagree with their beliefs or their actions.
Truman Capote’s book, In Cold Blood, is perhaps one of the most powerful illustrations of empathy without agreement. Capote set out to write about a terrible crime, the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas. He spent 4 years researching the book. In the beginning, he describes in excruciating detail the horror the family experienced, the senselessness of the cruelty and violence, how it must have felt to be a victim of this crime. Clearly, Capote empathizes with the terrible injustice and violence done, and he brings the reader along with him.
Then, surprisingly, Capote turns his empathetic attention to the murderers. He dwells at length on the early childhood of Perry Smith, one of the murderers, whose upbringing was filled with abuse and neglect. Because he was never cared for, he never seemed to grow up understanding the nature of love or belonging or even basic norms of respect. Not surprisingly, he was in and out of prison his whole adult life.
Capote never condoned what Smith did, but it appears from the book that perhaps the only person who ever understood and had empathy for Smith was Capote himself. It is widely speculated that Capote fell in love with Perry. Capote, whose own childhood was filled with trauma, was invited to witness Smith’s death, but ultimately could not bring himself to attend. Capote set out to write “In Cold Blood” as a work of new journalism, establishing and popularizing true crime as a genre. He never wrote a book again.
Empathy is not agreement. However, empathy can transform hate into love, senseless violence into understanding, and terror into art. For that I’m grateful. Try empathizing with someone today, really seeing who they are and why, see what you transform, and discover if you are grateful too.
This post is part of my Gratitude Project 2025: The Magic of Empathy — a 30-day exploration of empathy and gratitude. Visit the hub to follow along or catch up on past reflections.
For more on empathy, see my empathy hub: Empathy at Work: How Good Leaders Unlock Motivation and Performance.
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