In this episode of The Hello Frequency, I’m joined by Hannah Hafoka, an early childhood teacher living in Ohio and originally from Alaska, for a candid, thought-provoking conversation about empathy, emotions, care, and how we learn to understand one another. 

Hannah begins with a question she has been asking herself: Do I have empathy?

For a long time, she understood empathy as feeling what another person feels. But what happens when you recognise someone’s pain without necessarily feeling it yourself? Can choosing a caring response still be empathy? And does care have to look or feel a particular way to be genuine?

Drawing on her experiences working with young children, Hannah reflects on staying calm when a child is distressed, resisting the impulse to assume what someone needs, and treating children as whole people with their own autonomy. We talk about the difference between responding from our own needs and asking a much harder question: what does this person actually need from me in this moment? 

From there, our conversation moves through the lenses we carry, the assumptions our minds make, and the difficult work of recognising what we have learned and deciding what we might want to unlearn. Hannah speaks honestly about questioning her upbringing, taking responsibility for the person she wants to become, and learning that understanding where something comes from does not remove our responsibility for what we do with it.

We also explore the limits of understanding another person. Information may help us broaden our perspectives, but knowing about somebody’s experience is not the same as living it. Perhaps empathy does not require stepping into someone else’s shoes at all. Perhaps part of it is recognising that we never completely can. 

This is a conversation full of questions rather than tidy answers: about emotions, teaching, assumptions, responsibility, growth, and what it might mean to make room for ways of feeling that do not always look the way we expect. 

And perhaps that is part of the practice too: questioning what we think we know, becoming a little more conscious of the lenses through which we see, and allowing ourselves and one another to be complex. 

What if you understand that someone is hurting but do not physically or emotionally feel what they are feeling? What if you deliberately choose the words, expressions or actions you think another person needs? Does choosing care make it less genuine?