Tag: Empathy

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Empathy, by Phillip Hoyle

As a college student I learned a distinction between sympathy and empathy. The contrast arises from the two different Greek words. It also is influenced by psychoanalytic theory and practice. In most discussions empathy is considered to be more finely tuned than sympathy. As a minister I was called upon to do many tasks including hospital and care-home calls on members of the church. I did this work thoughtfully and, I believe, with sympathy, and on good days a measure of empathy! People liked my visits and humor. We laughed and prayed together.

In the church work I was motivated as much by duty as by sympathy and empathy. And I was appropriately trained to be helpful with patients and shut-ins. Apparently I provided sufficient care in my communications and mainly in the fact I showed up at all. Perhaps that is the way of it when one has too many people to serve.

The caring emotion for me occurred most clearly when I was in a hospital room with someone having a difficult time. I also noticed how my empathy was amplified when I liked the person, occasions in which other emotions and feelings added to what I was experiencing, for instance, the time an elder woman introduced me to her nephew when she and I were the only persons present made me wonder at the drugs the medics had given her for pain and the need to suppress a feeling of humor at the situation. (I was fine; she got better.)

I visited a good looking single young man who had a stubborn bone infection. I know that a sexual attraction increased my sense of his pathos. It alerted me to how others might prize him emotionally and their sense of fear surrounding his illness. My empathy extended to his family and friends. He eventually did recover after receiving loads of highly potent antibiotics.

Several times I visited an elder woman, very worldly and professional, with a bright personality and deep determination to recover from a major stroke. One day several weeks into treatment she appeared to have made a turn for the better. I was excited on her behalf and expressed how much better she looked. She tempered my enthusiasm, though, by saying, “Phillip, I finally felt up to putting on my makeup.” We laughed together. I said, “You are getting better.”

My empathy was sincere in all these cases yet certainly amplified by other emotions. And in all these visits I was present because I was a minister from their church.

One inactive church member, a real sot, was driving home from the VFW on an icy night and being rather drunk, crashed his car into the west entry to the church building. I didn’t see the car but did see the damage to the steps and more. The Sr. Minister, Jack, wasn’t sure what to do. I volunteered, “I’ll go to the hospital and see how he is.” I’d never met the man and really didn’t know much about alcohol or alcoholism. I went in simply as a visiting minister. “So they sent you,” he said eyes twinkling.

“Yeah. It’s my day to make the rounds,” I said to underplay the situation. I asked how he was doing. He said, “Fine,” and seemed totally sober at that point, perhaps from the trauma. I realized he might even feel ill at ease and said, “You just rest and recover.” I shook his hand, smiled saying, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, and don’t worry about the church stuff.” I may have visited him later, I have no recollection. I never saw him outside the hospital, certainly not in church. His collision with the front steps was no conversion.

Was I sympathetic or empathetic? I have no real idea. Years later as a massage therapist I felt empathy with most of my clients in their pains and diseases but not always in their gripes and in some of their expressed needs. I did smile often and sometimes cried. I mostly tried to deliver an effective massage and must have done that pretty well. Many of my clients came to me for over fourteen years. Perhaps I was sufficiently empathetic. And my real hope is that I was never just plain old pathetic in these contacts.

© 27 November 2017

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

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Empathy, by Lewis T

History is replete with examples of leaders who may have been brilliant empire builders but whose lack of empathy made them brutal tyrants whose legacy was one of despicable cruelty–Genghis Khan, who was responsible for the killing of 11 percent of the world’s population; Tamerlane the Great (aka Timur, who is believed to have beheaded 90,000 people and built more than 1000 towers out of the rotting skulls); Vlad the Impaler; Ivan the Terrible; Belgian King Leopold II; and Pol Pot of Cambodia—to name but a few.

Compared to those tyrannical lunatics, our President is, thankfully, a consummate underachiever. He does share one trait with the aforementioned, however: he is totally lacking in empathy.

Empathy is a more powerful emotion than sympathy. While expressions of sympathy signify the speaker’s awareness of someone else’s emotional pain, empathy suggests that the individual shares that pain. Lesser animals than humans clearly are capable of feeling a sense of loss when a mate or offspring dies. That feeling may linger for days, weeks, or even longer. But I have never known or heard such a creature to demonstrate empathy for the loss of another of its species.

Science and art are the manifestations of humans’ great intellect. The limits seem boundless. Generation after generation, we humans achieve greater and greater means of advancing civilization. Leonardo de Vinci, who was both a scientist and an artist (and a genius at both), has expressed what I consider the most moving example of how empathy is a connection between the human and the Divine. Having created Man and Woman and seen that they were both good, the God of the book of Genesis extends his index finger to a reclining Adam in what appears to be a blessing, a sign of empathy between the Loving and the Beloved.

My gut feeling is that our current POTUS may never have felt thus blessed by his father. His older brother, Freddy, “who died at the age of 43 in 1981 of alcoholism, was apparently unable to conform to a family dominated by a driven, perfectionist patriarch and an aggressive younger brother”, Donald. [Citation: Jason Horwitz, New York Times, Jan. 2, 2016]. Instead, Donald learned that pleasing father meant being tough, never touching alcohol, and always—ALWAYS—coming out on top.

For our President, a person’s worth is determined by their wealth, fame, and influence. There is no place for empathy, the payoff for which cannot be measured in those terms. Showing empathy will not improve your golf score or get you seated at the best table at the Gramercy Tavern but it can do wonders for your human relationships and—who knows—it might even get you into Heaven.

© 27 Nov 2017

About the Author

I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn’t getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth. Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband’s home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way.

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Empathy, by Louis Brown

Empathy, Sympathy and Psychological Projection.

Empathy [em-puh-thee] noun

1. the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

2. the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself:

By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self.

Sympathy

1. the harmony of or agreement in feeling, as between persons or on the part of one person with respect to another.

2. the harmony of feeling naturally existing between persons of like tastes or opinion or of congenial dispositions.

3. the fact or power of sharing the feelings of another, especially in sorrow or trouble; fellow feeling, compassion, or commiseration.

Projection: Psychology.

1. The tendency to ascribe to another person feelings, thoughts, or attitudes present in oneself, or to regard external reality as embodying such feelings, thoughts, etc., in some way.

2. Psychoanalysis. Such an ascription relieving the ego of a sense of guilt or other intolerable feeling.

Let us build a new Liberal majority Party

Through “empathy” we can identify other oppressed groups that we identify with for the purpose of building a broader coalition for the mutual benefit of all the oppressed groups. And remember, if you put all the oppressed groups together, you have a majority.

(1) Blacks have a grievance:

(a) Trayvon Martin’s assassin, George Zimmerman, goes free and shows no remorse. The oppression is overt. The murder took place 2-27-2012.

(b) The massacre of 9 church goers in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina. On June 6, 2015, there were nine black victims, church attendees. The perpetrator was Dylan Roof.

(c) The lack of real life-saving intervention in the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. Aug. 21, 2005-Aug. 31, 2005 White supremacy became obvious.

(2) Peaceniks:

(a) The George McGovern presidential campaign of 1972 showed most dramatically that a large percentage of the American public is dissatisfied with our right-wing foreign policy.

(b) Currently there are only two U. S. Senators who see the importance of future non-intervention policies. They are Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah, both are Republicans. The paucity of peace-oriented, non-interventionist representatives should be corrected. Mike Lee’s laudable isolationist policies are kept pretty much a secret.

(3) Gay men and Lesbians: us. We are mainly concerned with state legislatures passing irrational laws that discriminate against sexual minorities and are designed to intimidate us. We are concerned also with discrimination in employment and housing, for starters.

(4) Hispanics claim that lack of appropriate levels of assistance for the reconstruction of the infrastructure of Puerto Rico gives another example of white supremacy.

(5) The physically disabled claim cogently they are frequently subjected to discriminatory practices and are marginalized. See Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

(6) Women libbers claim on the work site abuse mostly by male supervisors. Also that women have been given the right to an abortion but male chauvinist conservative legislatures are taking this right away, mainly with dirty tricks. Their particular enemy is male chauvinism.

Women’s March on Washington took place on January 21, 2017, and much of their rhetoric and political positions were in opposition to the recently inaugurated Donald Trump.

(7) Muslims, Jews, Atheists all claim cogently to be oppressed minorities.

George McGovern from American historian

3. George Stanley McGovern was an American historian, author, U.S. Representative, U.S. Senator, and the Democratic Party presidential nominee in the 1972 presidential election. Wikipedia Quotes

4. I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

5. The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one’s country deep enough to call her to a higher plain.

6. The longer the title [of any given public official], the less important the job.

© 27 November 2017

About the Author

I was born in 1944, I lived most of my life in New York City, Queens County. I still commute there. I worked for many years as a Caseworker for New York City Human Resources Administration, dealing with mentally impaired clients, then as a social work Supervisor dealing with homeless PWA’s. I have an apartment in Wheat Ridge, CO. I retired in 2002. I have a few interesting stories to tell. My boyfriend Kevin lives in New York City. I graduated Queens College, CUNY, in 1967.
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Empathy, by Gillian

Hmm … tricky. But so wonderful. Empathy eliminates hate, resentment, envy, in fact most negative emotions you can name. It replaces them with peace for the soul. But it’s not easy.

Perhaps some people are just naturally given easier access to it than others, but I believe we can all improve our capacity for empathy no matter the starting point.

Empathy requires the ability to see through another’s eyes, to feel what they feel and to stand in their shoes. For me, that requires some commonality with that person. In general I find a more intuitive empathy with a woman, for instance, than with a man. I frequently am able to find that empathy with men but it requires more work; more of a thought process to get me there. I easily empathize with the poor and dispossessed. I know, as many of us do, that my good life has come to me purely by chance. We look at the sad people on the street corner and say, there but for the grace of God go I. Most people can feel empathy with a child; we have all been one. All of us in this room, by our age, find easy empathy with grief. We have all felt it. Surely the entire LGBT community feels a kind of collective empathy, it’s one of the reasons we like to be together. We don’t have to explain ourselves to each other.

There is a great deal of talk of sexual harassment/abuse in the last couple of weeks. I immediately empathize with the woman, but have a struggle with the man. I can honestly say that I have never ever grabbed at or fondled any man or woman in any way inappropriately. Nor have I ever had any urge to do so. But if I think as honestly as I truly can about the lesser varieties of what we now term sexual harassment, I begin to see it through the man’s eyes. Men of our generation have lived in confusing times. I honestly think that most, certainly many, who acted incorrectly, really believed that women wanted what men wanted. We had to put up some token objection because our mothers said we should, but we didn’t really mean it; that old no really means yes syndrome. All too frequently, our protests did perhaps lack conviction. We were in a quandary. If we came on too strong with an ego-deflating rejection then the man, almost inevitably in a position of power over us, might take revenge. We would lose our job, or fail to get that deserved promotion or starring role. Or the man held some respected position in the community: priest, schoolteacher, doctor, lawyer, who would believe us if we spoke out? So we kept quiet. Other women were bribed into silence, leaving others open to the same abuse. Not that I blame the women who got bought off. Oh no, empathy with them comes easy. Which would you choose? Door #1, behind which lies nothing but screaming tabloid headlines and endless character assassinations, or door #2 which opens onto an easy life with everything that twenty million dollars can buy? No contest. And so, sadly, in different ways, we women were complicit in our own demise while men, lacking much evidence to the contrary, convinced themselves that we really did want what they wanted.

Don’t get me wrong, I am talking here of the relatively benign offenses causing perhaps more discomfort and embarrassment than true trauma. Anything remotely approaching physical violence, rape, or pedophilia lies way way beyond the scope of my empathy. Which leads inevitable to that incredibly revolting excuse for a human being, Judge Moore of Alabama, who lies somewhere in the outer reaches of darkness millions of light years away from that little flash of illumination coming from any feelings of empathy from me. He is triply out of reach to me because not only is his behavior reprehensible, but he continues to deny it, and then wraps it all up in the cloak of religion and The Bible. I make no attempt to see what he sees; it would be of nightmare ugliness.

Those who support him are every bit as bad; possibly worse. The Alabama State Auditor, for example, sees nothing wrong with Moore making sexual advances to a fourteen year-old.

“There’s just nothing immoral or illegal here…,” Ziegler stated. “… Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.”

Hello-o out there! Did he miss the memo about The Immaculate Conception and The Virgin Birth?? Honestly, all you can do is shake your head in amazement. To raise one spark of empathy for these people I would need to think about it all for a very long time, and I have no stomach for that.

Every week when I start writing, I swear to myself that I will stay away from any mention of Trump, but somehow Agent Orange manages to insert himself. I have no empathy for Trump because I am not a sociopath, so cannot begin to stand in his shoes. But because he is, I truly believe, a sick man, I do not hate him either. Though when he so smugly promises us that ”big beautiful tax cut” for Xmas while in truth planning to raise our taxes and destroy our healthcare, I think just maybe I could.

Alas, empathy, like so many things, is a double-edged sword. The Orange Ogre (did I say I did not hate him??) stood in the shoes of a section of the country’s voters and saw what they saw. He felt their anger, resentment, and fear, and built it up to the fever pitch of “lock her up”. It was his very empathy with them, which he used with great cunning, which won him the election. (Though not without a little help from Putin and a shove over the line by the Electoral College.)

With the Trump voters, my empathy goes about half the distance to the goal. (Excuse the expression but we are in the midst of football season!) I can see the world through their eyes. I can feel their fear and anger and disillusion over a future of ongoing white male supremacy which they once felt was promised and which now seems to have been taken away. But I cannot accompany them into the divisiveness, bigotry, and hatred which accompanies their fears.

Since last year’s election our country seems to be enveloped in a stinking dark miasma of Trumpian vitriol. Yet I, ever the political pessimist, do feel some hope. And it comes to me via empathy. We call it Resistance, but what engenders that but empathy? Sure, we all have our own personal fears which propel us to resist the horrors of the Trump agenda, but the vast majority of American people demonstrate great empathy. We feel the terror of refugees denied sanctuary, the despair of deportees and their destroyed families, the terrible fears felt by the families of the nine million children who will lose the healthcare provided under the C.H.I.P. program unless Congress acts before year-end. We see through the eyes of those abandoned in the devastation that is Puerto Rico, and the 60,000 Haitians who learn they must abandon their lives in this country and return to Haiti.

We empathize. We get it. We resist. If Robert Mueller doesn’t save us, maybe our own empathy will. The bright light of empathetic resistance will dispel the threatening clouds of darkness. Maybe. Maybe that is our best hope. Maybe that is our last best hope. But then, I’m a political pessimist.

© November 2017

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

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Empathy, by Phillip Hoyle

As a college student I learned a distinction between sympathy and empathy. The contrast arises from the two different Greek words. It also is influenced by psychoanalytic theory and practice. In most discussions empathy is considered to be more finely tuned than sympathy. As a minister I was called upon to do many tasks including hospital and care-home calls on members of the church. I did this work thoughtfully and, I believe, with sympathy, and on good days a measure of empathy! People liked my visits and humor. We laughed and prayed together.

In the church work I was motivated as much by duty as by sympathy and empathy. And I was appropriately trained to be helpful with patients and shut-ins. Apparently I provided sufficient care in my communications and mainly in the fact I showed up at all. Perhaps that is the way of it when one has too many people to serve.

The caring emotion for me occurred most clearly when I was in a hospital room with someone having a difficult time. I also noticed how my empathy was amplified when I liked the person, occasions in which other emotions and feelings added to what I was experiencing, for instance, the time an elder woman introduced me to her nephew when she and I were the only persons present made me wonder at the drugs the medics had given her for pain and the need to suppress a feeling of humor at the situation. (I was fine; she got better.)

I visited a good looking single young man who had a stubborn bone infection. I know that a sexual attraction increased my sense of his pathos. It alerted me to how others might prize him emotionally and their sense of fear surrounding his illness. My empathy extended to his family and friends. He eventually did recover after receiving loads of highly potent antibiotics.

Several times I visited an elder woman, very worldly and professional, with a bright personality and deep determination to recover from a major stroke. One day several weeks into treatment she appeared to have made a turn for the better. I was excited on her behalf and expressed how much better she looked. She tempered my enthusiasm, though, by saying, “Phillip, I finally felt up to putting on my makeup.” We laughed together. I said, “You are getting better.”

My empathy was sincere in all these cases yet certainly amplified by other emotions. And in all these visits I was present because I was a minister from their church.

One inactive church member, a real sot, was driving home from the VFW on an icy night and being rather drunk, crashed his car into the west entry to the church building. I didn’t see the car but did see the damage to the steps and more. The Sr. Minister, Jack, wasn’t sure what to do. I volunteered, “I’ll go to the hospital and see how he is.” I’d never met the man and really didn’t know much about alcohol or alcoholism. I went in simply as a visiting minister. “So they sent you,” he said eyes twinkling.

“Yeah. It’s my day to make the rounds,” I said to underplay the situation. I asked how he was doing. He said, “Fine,” and seemed totally sober at that point, perhaps from the trauma. I realized he might even feel ill at ease and said, “You just rest and recover.” I shook his hand, smiled saying, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, and don’t worry about the church stuff.” I may have visited him later, I have no recollection. I never saw him outside the hospital, certainly not in church. His collision with the front steps was no conversion.

Was I sympathetic or empathetic? I have no real idea. As a massage therapist I felt empathy with most of my clients in their pains and diseases but not always in their gripes and in some of their expressed needs. I did smile often and sometimes cried. I mostly tried to deliver an effective massage and must have done that pretty well. Many of my clients came to me for over fourteen years. Perhaps I was sufficiently empathetic. And my real hope is that I was never just plain old pathetic in these contacts.

© 27 Nov 2017

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com