When people do not get the empathy to which they feel entitled, they get enraged. De-escalate rage by providing empathy and empathic relatedness.
Empathy
Reading Literary Fiction Expands Empathy – Making Empathy Present for the Reader
Time was when it was a bold statement of the obvious that reading a good book expands one’s empathy. It’s summer in the city of Chicago. People are going to the beach, the park, leaving town for the wilderness or… Read More ›
Review: Extreme Empathy [I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy by Cris Beam]
Beam is a would-be “bad girl,” who has written a very good book. In a world of constrained, limited empathy, the empathic person is a non-conformist. Beam is one of those, too, and succeeds in sustaining a nuanced skepticism about the alternating hype and over-valuation of empathy over against those who summarily dismiss it. Most ambivalently, she calls out the corporate infatuation with empathy. I paraphrase the corporate approach: Take a walk in the other person’s shoes in order to sell them another pair.
Review: Listening Well: The Art of Empathic Understanding by William R. Miller
In case you are unaware of William Miller’s background, he is the innovator behind Motivational Interviewing. Listening well – the practice, not just the title of the book – is at the heart of this approach. In turn, the practice… Read More ›
Top four (4) empathy breakdowns – and how to overcome them
Empathy breaks down into emotional contagion. Empathy breaks down in conformity and the closing off of possibilities for flourishing. Empathy breaks down in projection. Empathy breaks down in devaluing and cynical language, in which our humanity literally gets lost in translation. These are not the only ways that empathy fails, but they are the Big Four. How to overcome them?
Top 30 Empathy Lessons for Life, the book
This book contains some thirty (30) empathy lessons for life. A key empathy lesson that explicitly addresses empathy training: remove the resistance to empathy—obstacles such as cynicism, shame, guilt, aggression, narcissism, devaluing language, and so on—and empathy spontaneously shows up, comes… Read More ›
Top Ten (10) Empathy Lessons Trending in the New Year 2018
Here are Empathy Lessons for the New Year ahead. You know what would really interest me? To hear from you (dear reader) what is your empathy lesson? Whether inspired by this list or your own experience over the winter holiday… Read More ›
