The empathic dozen: Top 12 empathy lessons

By Lou Agosta on June 26, 2025

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(0) The one-minute empathy training. Drive out aggression, hostility, bullying, prejudice of all kinds, dignity violations, hypocrisy, making excuses, finger pointing, cynicism, resignation, bad language, manipulation, injuries to self-esteem, competing to be the biggest victim, and politics in the pejorative sense of the term, and empathy naturally comes forth. Most people are naturally empathic and, if given half a chance, they will spontaneously and willingly speak and act empathically. The training can be spoken in one minute. However, actually implementing it is going to take some work. Start here:

(1) Are you willing? Perform a readiness assessment: The first step of a readiness assessment is one must be willing. If one has the willingness, then the hard work begins of listening, taking the Other’s perspective, giving up being right and righteous, giving up being aggrieved, making requests, asking for what one needs. As soon as one announces a commitment (for example): “I am going to expand empathy in my life,” then all the reasons that it is utterly impossible to do so show up. “What are you thinkin’ fella?” Not enough time. Not enough money. Not enough empathy!

(2) Establish and maintain firm boundaries between the self and Other in relating empathically, but practice being inclusive: Empathy is all about boundaries. Empathy is all about moving across the boundary between self and Other. The boundary is not a wall, but a semi-permeable membrane that allows communication of feelings, thoughts, intentions, and so on. As noted above, the poet Robert Frost asserts that good fences make good neighbors. But fences are not walls. Fences have gates in them. Over the gate is inscribed the word “empathy,” which invites visits across the boundary.

Some of the most empathic people that I know are also the strongest and most assertive regarding respect for boundaries. Being empathic does not mean being a push over. You wouldn’t want to mess with them. Where such people show up, empathy lives; and shame, cynicism, and bullying have no place. In what is one of the defining parables of Christian community (that of the Parable of the Good Samaritan), empathy is what enables the Samaritan to be open to a vicarious experience of what the survivor of the assault is experiencing; and then it is the Samaritan’s compassion and ethics that tell him what to do about it. The two are distinct. Empathy tells us what the Other experiencing; compassion (and our good moral upbringing) tell(s) us what to do about it. Yet empathy expands the boundary of who is one’s neighbor to be more-and-more inclusive, extending especially to those whose humanity has been put at risk by misfortune. Be inclusive.

(3) Empathy deescalates anger and rage: When people do not get the empathy to which they feel entitled, they start to suffocate emotionally. They thrash about emotionally. Then they get enraged. The response? De-escalate rage by explicitly acknowledging the break down—“It seems you really have not been treated well.” Clean up the misunderstanding, and restore the empathic relatedness. Empathy does many things well. One of the best is that empathy deescalates anger and rage.

Without empathy, people lose the feeling of being alive. They tend to “act out”—misbehave—in an attempt to regain the feeling of vitality that they have lost. Absent an empathic environment, people lose the feeling that life has meaning. When people lose the feelings of meaning, vitality, aliveness, dignity, their emotions become unbalanced. When the emotions become unbalanced, their behavior does so too and goes “off the rails.” Sometime pain and suffering seem better than emptiness and meaninglessness—but not by much. People then can behave in self-defeating ways in a misguided attempt to awaken a sense of aliveness and regain emotional balance.

This is a re-description of bullying, which requires a word of caution. One should never underestimate the power of empathy. Never, Yet affective empathy does not work with bullying in so far as being empathic leaves the person who provides the empathy vulnerable. The bully (and a small set of disturbed individuals with anti-social personality disorder) will take one’s vulnerability and use it the would-be empathizer. Instead the recommendation (as in (2) above) is to set limits, establish boundaries, speak truth to power (in so far as bullying is an abuse of power), and defend one’s integrity. What does work in the face of bullying is “top down,” cognitive empathy. Think like one’s opponent. Take a walk in the Other’s shoes in order to reestablish the possibility of conflict resolution, deescalation, and, if push comes to shove, mounting an effective defense. (On “thinking like one’s opponent in war and peace and business, see Zenko (2015) in the references below.)

“Empathy is oxygen for the soul” is a metaphor. But a telling one. When people do not get empathy—and a short list of related things such as dignity, common courtesy, respect, fairness, humanity—they feel that they are suffocating—emotionally. People act out in self-defeating ways in order to get back a sense of emotional stability, wholeness and well-being—and, of course, acting out in self-defeating ways is self-defeating. (For further on empathy as oxygen for the soul see Kohut (1977).) One requires expanded empathy. Pause for breath, take a deep one, hold it in briefly while counting to four, exhale, listen, speak from possibility.

(4) Avoid the risk of the banality of empathy by thinking before speaking and taking action. This phrase, “the banality of empathy,” is a reference to Namwali Serpall’s (2019) “spin” on Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt’s lovely phrase “one trains one’s imagination to go visiting [the Other]” is an exact description of empathic understanding, though not empathic receptivity of the Other’s feelings/emotions. One does not blindly adopt the Other’s point of view—one takes off one’s own shoes before trying on the Other’s. “Enlarged thinking” takes the points of view of many Others, and is what enables people to judge by means of feelings as well as concepts. This is not loss of one’s self in projection and merger, but rather a thoughtful shifting of perspective and appreciation of what shows up as one does so. It is a false splitting to force a choice between feeling and thinking—both are required to have a complete experience of the Other.

A recurring theme in Arendt’s thinking is that evil and is a consequence of thoughtlessness. If one empathizes thoughtlessly, if one applies empathy without thinking, the banality of empathy, then the result may be unpredictable. One is not going to like the result. One is at risk of empathy misfiring as projection, emotional contagion, conformity, and so on. Just so. Do not be a sloppy thinker. A rigorous and critical empathy is required to guard against these risks, and a rigorous and critical empathy thinks before speaking and taking action.

One can always make a splash by throwing a rotten tomato, and dumping on empathy has become something of a growth industry. However, these devaluing treatments of the acknowledged strengths and limitations of empathy are directed at a strawman, a caricature of empathy, fake empathy, not the rigorous and critical empathy engaged here. For a complete detailed answer to many of these sensationalist pot boilers, see Chapter Three: Empathy and its discontents of my Radical Empathy in the Context of Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2025 (and you should have the college, university or local library order a copy (as it is an academic book and they have budget for these types of works)).

(5) Empathy is a method of data gathering about the other person: Simply stated, empathic receptivity is a technique of data collection about the experiences of other people. This is not mental telepathy. Human beings are receptive to one another, open to one another experientially, but with some conditions and qualifications. You have to listen to the other person and talk with him or her. You have to interact with the person. The one individual gets a sample of the experience of the other individual. The one individual gets a trace of the other individual’s experience (like in data sampling) without merging with the Other.

Through its four phases, empathy is a method of gathering data about the experience of the person as the other individual experiences what the individual is experiencing. This data (starting with (1) vicarious experience) is processed by (2) empathic understanding of possibilities and (3) empathic interpretation of perspectives in order to give back to the other person his or her own experience by means of (4) empathic responsiveness in language or gesture in such a way that the other person recognizes the experience as the person’s own.

The neurological basis of this empathic receptivity may be mirror neurons or another associative network of neurons that function to support an affective (emotional) resonance that higher mammals share with one another. Even if mirror neurons were to turn out to be a myth, the disclosive truth would still be that human beings are all related. We resonate together and must exert effort not to do so.

This approach to empathy (empathy as a method of data gathering) goes a long way towards solving the problems of compassion fatigue and burnout among nurses, teachers, doctors, care-takers, first responders, clergy, and so on. As noted, in empathy, if one is listening to another person and that person is suffering, then, strange as it may sound, one should suffer—but not too much. One suffers only a little bit, one suffers vicariously. The empathizer is open to the suffering of the other person but only as a sample of the suffering, a trace affect. This is a vicarious experience, not a shared experience, which would provide the full, overwhelming weight of the suffering.

If one is experiencing compassion fatigue, then one may have made one of the most common empathy mix ups of confusing “empathy” with “compassion.” The language provides a clue. The complaint is not “empathy fatigue.” The complaint is “compassion fatigue.” The recommendation is to turn down one’s compassion and tune up one’s empathy.

Now, as noted repeatedly, the world needs both more compassion and expanded empathy; but what is perhaps needed the most is a working balance between the two. One needs to increase the granularity (filtering) of one’s openness to the other person. Instead of empathically sampling one in five emotional upsets vicariously, one may try sampling one in ten, until one regains one’s own emotional equilibrium. Yes, one suffers, vicariously, but if suffering emotionally flattens one as one is giving empathy, one is doing it incorrectly. One is over-empathizing and over-identifying. One needs to regulate—in this case, “tune down”—one’s receptivity to the other person. This is easier said than done, of course, which is why empathy lessons are needed. Taking the matter of “tuning up or down” up a level, it deserves a technique of its own. Thus, the next item.

(6) Empathy is a tuner or dial, not an “on-off” switch: Engaging with the issues and sufferings with which people are struggling can leave the would-be empathizer (“empath”) vulnerable to burnout and “compassion fatigue.” As noted, the risk of compassion fatigue is a clue that empathy is distinct from compassion, and if one is suffering from compassion fatigue, then one’s would-be practice of empathy is off the rails, in breakdown. Maybe one is being too compassionate instead of practicing empathy. In empathy, the listener gets a vicarious experience of the Other’s issue or problem, including their suffering, so the listener suffers vicariously, but without being flooded and overwhelmed by the Other’s experience.

Empathy is like a dial or dimmer—tune it up or tune it down. If one is overwhelmed by suffering as one listens to the other person’s struggles and predicaments, one is doing it—practicing empathy—incorrectly, clumsily, and one needs skills training in empathy. The whole point of a vicarious experience—and training one’s vicarious experiences as distinct from merger or over-identification—is to get a sample or trace of the Other’s experience without being inundated by it. One needs to increase the granularity of one’s empathic receptivity to reduce the emotional or experiential “load.”

Empathy is also like a filter—decrease the granularity and get more of the Other’s experience or increase the granularity (i.e., close the pores) and get less. The power in distinguishing empathic receptivity from empathic understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness, is precisely so one can divide and conquer in the practice and performance of empathy lessons. Each has a characteristic breakdown, and each can be improved with practice and attention to the relevant dials that influence the process of relating.^[i]

The recommendation? Listen, pause for breath to a count of four, acknowledge the pain and suffering, interpret the resistance, and continue applying conflict resolution principles—identify and express grievances, invite self-expression, elicit requests, offer suggestions, make demands, formulate interpretations, propose compromises, brain-storm alternative possibilities, commit to action items, apply the soothing salve of empathy to the narcissistic injuries of the participants, and iterate—until resolution.

(7) Decline the choice between empathy and compassion. Decline the artificial choice between expanding empathy and fighting and reducing the empire of prejudice, imperialism, the pathologies of capitalism, and violence. Some have tried to force a choice between compassion and empathy. This is a choice that must be refused. The world needs both more compassion and expanded empathy. In summary, it is not a choice between expanding empathy and ending/reducing empire, and an engagement with both is needed. Survivors of all of these boundary violations ask for empathy. When survivors are asked, “What do you want—what would make it better? What would soothe the trauma?” then rarely do they say punish the perpetrator (though occasionally they do). Mostly they ask for acknowledgement, to be heard and believed, to hear the truth about what happened, for apology, accountability, restitution, rehabilitation, prevention of further wrong (see Herman 2023).^[ii] Rarely do survivors make forgiveness a goal, especially not if forgiveness would require further interaction with the perpetrator (though self-forgiveness should not be dismissed). It bears repeating: survivors ask for empathy, not an end to empire, though, once again, both expanded empathy and an end to empire are needed.

(8) Empathy is the new love: Empathy is love by other means; and love is empathy by other means. Even a distinction with as much history, tradition, and gravitas as “love,” undergoes developments and transformations. For example, you know how in high fashion gray is the new black? Well, empathy is the new love. It is what people really want—to feel heard—to be heard—to be “gotten” as the possibility they authentically know themselves to be.

People want to be gotten for who they authentically are. They want empathy. What about the old love? According to folk wisdom, love is “blind” (in this case, that would be the “old love”); and, furthermore, love is compared (by Socrates, Plato, and many others) to a state of madness. So far, the old love resembles the symptoms of tertiary, neuro-syphilis. Of course, empathy is famous for its diverse breakdowns too—as emotional contagion, conformity, projection, and mistranslation. However, when these break downs of empathy are engaged, worked through, and transformed, then the results are precisely breakthroughs in empathy, enabling satisfying relationships and the building of community. When love is “worked through,” the result is the routinization of desire, “washin’ dishes and dirty diapers,” as documented in the song “Makin’ Whoopee,” in which “Whoopee” expresses the how romantic idealization gets de-idealized in the hard work of sustaining family life.

This is not to privilege empathy or “dump on love,” since both love and empathy are essential to community, but to assess each one in its respective strengths are limitations. Empathy is what people fundamentally desire—to be gotten for who they authentically are. When one person’s desire aims at the other person’s desire, then desire begets desire. The desire of the Other’s desire is precisely the empathic moment.

(9) Empathy is multi-dimensional: Empathy is the process of grasping first-hand what the other person is experiencing because one experiences it too. This often seems to be an instantaneous process in which one just “gets it”—knows first person and first-hand what is happening with the other person. But other times the process shows up as a more extended, time-dilated one of a sustained listening, through which the other person’s life and experiences come gradually into view as empathic receptivity—a kind of vicarious experience of the person.

The person is flourishing or stuck, in possibility or upset, and one realizes that one is relating, not only to the static state in which the person finds herself, but also to the aspirations, ideals, hopes, fears—in short, to the possibilities that the person is confronting and projecting as plans and ambitions going forward into the future.

Empathic understanding is understanding of possibilities. These possibilities are not something hidden from the person; on the contrary, the person knows intimately about them; the possibilities determine who the person is presently being in living into the future; but sometimes there are indeed hidden and undeclared possibilities to which the person is deeply committed and of which the person is only marginally aware.

For example, think of the friend who had been married (and divorced) three times. He was attempting to shock me with his lack of commitment in relationships, and was surprised to hear me respond: “Well, you are really committed to marriage.” The possibility of marriage gets unpacked in an empathic interpretation such that the marriages seemed to him to be a duck, but the now former spouses thought they were a rabbit, resulting, as one says, in irreconcilable perceptions if not “irreconcilable differences.” In context, my response about his commitment seems to have been an empathic enough one that validated his experience of the value of marriage, while acknowledging his struggle, upset, and frustration. It opened up whole new possibilities for him going forward in relating to his former spouses, to the institution of marriage, and, mostly, to himself.

Thus, empathy is a roundtrip from the vicarious experience of empathic receptivity; to the grasping of possibilities in empathic understanding; to the making explicit of diverse possibilities in empathic interpretation; to empathic responsiveness, delivering over to the other person his experience in such a way that he recognizes it as his own experience.

(10) Each phase of empathy has characteristic breakdowns: Break throughs in empathy arise from working through the breakdowns of empathy. Empathic receptivity breaks down into emotional contagion, suggestibility, and being over-stimulated by the inbound communication of the other person’s strong feelings. If one stops in the analysis of empathy with the mere communication of feelings, then empathy collapses into emotional contagion.

If one takes emotional contagion—basically the communication of emotions, feelings, affects, and experiences—as input to further empathic processing, then emotional contagion (communicability of affect) makes a contribution to empathic understanding.

A vicarious experience of emotion differs from emotional contagion in that one knows that the other person is the source of the emotion. That makes all the difference. I feel anxious or sad or high spirits, because I am with another person who is having such an experience, and I “pick it up” from him. I can then process the vicarious experience, unpacking it for what is so and what is possible in the relationship. This returns empathy to the positive path of empathic understanding, making possible a breakthrough in “getting” what the other person is experiencing. Then the one person can contribute to the other person regulating and mastering the experience.

Or instead of empathic understanding grasping possibility for flourishing and relatedness, empathic understanding can break down in conformity. Humans live and flourish in possibilities; and empathic understanding breaks down as “no possibility,” “stuckness,” and the suffering of “no exit” (one definition of hell in a famous play of the same name by Sartre). One follows the crowd; one does what “one does”; one validates feelings and attitudes according to what “they say”; and, with apologies to Thoreau, lives the life of “quiet desperation” of the “modern mass of men.”

Almost inevitably, when someone is stuck, experiencing shame, guilt, upset, emotional disequilibrium, and so on, the person is fooling himself—has a blind spot—about what is possible. This does not mean that it is easy to be in the person’s situation or for the person to see what is missing. Far from it. But we live in possibilities that we allow to define our constraints and limitations—for example, see the above-cited friend who was married and divorced three times. At the risk of being simple-minded, dear friend, have you considered the alternative—cohabitation? Though this might not be a “silver bullet,” it points to a breakthrough in empathic understanding. If one acknowledges that the things that get in the way of our relatedness are the very rules we make up about our relationships and what is possible within them, then we get freedom to relate to the rules and possibilities precisely as possibilities, not absolute “shoulds.” We stop “shoulding” on ourselves.

For example, if cohabitation is considered unacceptable due to personal or community standards, then let’s have a conversation for possibility about that (and so on). This brings us to the next break down—the break down in empathic interpretation.

This is the aspect of empathy that corresponds most exactly to the folk definition of empathy—taking a walk in the other person’s shoes. But in the breakdown of empathic interpretation, one takes that walk with one’s own foot size. This is also called “projection.” One has to take off one’s own shoes before trying on the Other’s. Now that can sometimes tell you something useful, because human beings have many things in common; but most times—and especially with most of the tough cases—empathy is going to run off the path. Imaginatively elaborating the metaphor, the other person is literally flat footed, whereas I have a high arch on my foot; the other person is an amputee, a “blade runner” with a high-tech prosthesis—a different kind of “feet.” I am a “duck” and have webbed, duck feet; the other person is a “rabbit” and has furry, rabbit feet.

The recommendation? Own your projections. Take back the attributions of your own inner conflicts onto other people. One gets one’s power back along with one’s projections. Stop making up meaning about what is going on with the other person; or, since one probably cannot stop, at least distinguish the meaning—split it off, quarantine it, take distance from it, so that its influence is limited. Absent a sustained conversation with the other person, be humble that you have any idea what is going on with the other person.

Having worked through vicarious experiences, possibilities for overcoming conformity and stuckness, and taken back one’s projections, one is ready to attempt to communicate to the other person one’s sense of their experience. One is going to try to say to the other what one gets from what they told you, giving back to the other one’s sense of their experience. And what happens? Sometimes it works; but other times something gets “lost in translation.”

The breakdown of empathic response occurs within language as one fails to express oneself satisfactorily. I believed that I empathized perfectly with the other person’s struggle and effort, but (in this example) I failed completely to communicate to the other person what I got from listening to her. My empathy remains a tree in the forest that falls without anyone being there. My empathy remains silent, inarticulate, uncommunicative. I get credit for a nice empathic try (assuming that I really have tried); but the relatedness between the persons is not an empathic one. If the other person is willing, then go back to the start and iterate. Learn from one’s mistakes. Try again.

The fact that one failed does not mean that the commitment to empathy is any less strong; just that one did not succeed this time; and one needs to keep trying. It takes practice. Empathy lessons are useful. The exchange in questions was one of them. Learn from one’s mistakes.

Often understanding emerges out of misunderstanding. What I say is clumsy and creates a misunderstanding (in a given context). But when the misunderstanding is clarified and cleaned up, then empathy occurs. Thus, break throughs in empathy emerge out of breakdowns. So whenever a breakdown in empathy shows up, do not be discouraged; rather be glad, for a break through is near.

(11) Train and develop empathy by overcoming the obstacles to empathy: People want to know: Can empathy be taught? People complain and authentically struggle: I just don’t get it—or have it. In spite of the substantial affirmative evidence that empathy can be taught, is being taught (e.g., see NYU Langone Health: http://www.empathyproject.com (2014/2024)), the debate continues. The short answer is: Yes, empathy can be taught.

What happens is that people are taught to suppress their empathy. People are taught to conform, follow instructions, and do as they are told. We are taught in first grade to sit in our seats and raise our hands to be called on and speak. And there is nothing wrong with that. It is good and useful at the time. No one is saying, “Leap up and run around yelling” (unless it is summer vacation!). But compliance and conformity are trending; and arguably the pendulum has swung too far from the empathy required for communities to work effectively for everyone, not just the elite and privileged at the top of the food chain.

Now do not misunderstand this: people are born empathic, but they are also born needing to learn manners, respect for boundaries, and toilet training. Put the mess in the designated place or the community suffers from diseases. People also need to learn how to read and do math and communicate in writing. But there is a genuine sense in which learning to conform and follow all the rules does not expand our empathy or our community. It does not help the cause of expanded empathy that rule-making and the drumbeat of compliance are growing by leaps and bounds.

If people can be taught to contract their empathy, they can be taught to expand it. That means that the gains in expanding community that are owed to compliance and conformity, for the most part, stay as they are—empathy expands. How so?

Teaching empathy consists in overcoming the obstacles to empathy that people have acquired. When the barriers are overcome, then empathy spontaneously develops, grows, comes forth, and expands. That is the training minus all the hard work.

The hard work? Remove the blocks to empathy such as dignity violations, devaluing language, gossip, shame, guilt, egocentrism, over-identification, lack of integrity, inauthenticity, hypocrisy, making excuses, finger pointing, jealousy, envy, put downs, being righteous, stress, burnout, compassion fatigue, cynicism, denial, competing to be the biggest victim, injuries to self-esteem, and narcissistic merger—and empathy spontaneously expands, develops, and blossoms. (I hasten to add, in general, there is nothing wrong with narcissistic merger; it is just not empathy.)

Formal, in-school education is generally designed to instill conformity, especially in the earlier grades, into what is hoped to be a productive, compliant corporate and industrial workforce, not instill empathy.

That is changing. Thanks to powerful programs such as Mary Gordon’s empathy initiative, “The Roots of Empathy,” but it is still too soon to predict the outcome.^[i] Now I am in favor of education and learning reading, math, and writing. I am in favor of history and the humanities and the Physical Sciences too. However, the Arts and the Humanities—the disciplines that are arguably those committed to expanding empathy—are “on the ropes” due to chronic budget cuts. It is hard to connect the dots, which is what is required by the administrators, between studying literature or philosophy and high paying jobs in the global digital economy. The idea that education is an end in itself, teaching the graduate to learn to learn, and enabling the graduate to adapt to a volatile employment market, in which it is hard to predict what jobs are hot, is an enduringly valid idea, but not one with much traction. The Humanities are precisely the disciplines that include empathy lessons in narrative, literature, history, performance, and self-expression in diverse media.

Studying the Humanities and literature, art and music, rhetoric and languages, opens up areas of the brain that map directly to empathy and powerfully activate empathy. Read a novel. Write a story. Go to the art museum. Participate in theatre. These too are empathy lessons, fieldwork, and training in empathic receptivity. ^[iv]

Reduce or eliminate the need for having the right answer all the time. Dialing down narcissism, egocentrism, entitlement (in the narrow sense), and dialing up questioning, motivating relatedness, encouraging self-expression, inspiring inquiry and contribution, developing character, and, well, expanding empathy.

Yes, empathy can be taught, but it does not look like informational education. It looks like shifting the person’s relatedness to self and Others, developing the capacity for empathy, accessing the grain of empathy that has survived the education to conformity. Anything that gets a person in touch with her or his humanness counts as training in empathy.

(12) There is enough empathy to go around, even though it does not seem that way on most days—why is that? You know how agriculture can grow enough food to feed everyone on the planet but people are still starving, because of the use of food by politics in the negative sense to perpetrate hostility and bad actions? Enough empathy is available to go around; but it is badly distributed. People are living and working in empathy deserts. Organizational politics, stress and burnout, attempts to control and dominate, egocentrism and narcissism, out-and-out aggression and greed, all result in empathy getting hoarded locally, creating “empathy deserts” even amid an adequate supply. Therefore, this approach does not call for “more” empathy, but rather for “expanded” empathy. The difference is subtle. Saying “We need more empathy here!” implies the person is unempathic—and that is an insult, a dignity violation. In extreme cases, a person may in fact lack empathy in a formal, technical sense—the serial killer, the psychopath, and persons suffering from some particular mental illnesses (or even a case of flu). However, such persons are an exception or an exceptional situation that will pass. Well, it is the same thing with empathy. This results in the one-minute empathy training as indicated at the start of this post. Back to the top.

For further top empathy tips and techniques see the Chapter, “Conclusion: Top 40 Empathy Lessons” in Empathy Lessons, 2nd Edition, Chicago: Two Pears Press, 2024.

End Notes

^[i] This point is missed in the otherwise engaging and spirited public debate featured in the New York Times, still relevant after all these years, in which Jamil Zaki identifies empathy with compassion, and—how shall I put it delicately?—a conversation of deaf persons occurs between celebrity academics about the importance of listening. See Jamil Zaki, (2016), Does empathy help or hinder moral action? The New York Times, Dec. 29, 2016: http://tinyurl.com/gwmfpxp [checked on 06/26/2025]. Great minds think alike? It should be noted that, when not trying to “cap the rap” in the Times, Zaki (and Ciskara) (2015) provide a penetrating and incisive analysis of the value of “trying harder” to be empathic in the context of the kinds of empathic breakdowns under discussion in this work. My take? If one works at it, “tries harder,” one discovers that empathy expands.

^[ii] Judith L. Herman, MD. (2023). Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice. New York: Basic Books.

^[iii] Gordon, Mary. (2005). The Roots of Empathy: Changing the World Child by Child. New York/Toronto: The Experiment (Thomas Allen Publishers).

^[iv] Madeline Levine. (2012). Teach Your Children Well: Why Values and Coping Skills Matter More than Grades, Trophies, or ‘Fat Envelopes’. New York: Harper Perennial. I acknowledge Paul Holinger, MD, for calling my attention to this one.

References

Lou Agosta. (2025). Chapter Three: Empathy and its discontents. In Radical Empathy in the Context of Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. This is a pricey academic book, but readable, so have the college, university or local library order a copy. They have budget for this kind of work.

Lou Agosta. (2024). Empathy Lessons, 2nd Edition. Chicago: Two Pears Press.

Judith L. Herman, MD. (2023). Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice. New York: Basic Books.

Heinz Kohut. (1977), The Restoration of the Self, International Universities Press.

Namwali Serpall. (2019). The banality of empathy. The New York Review: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/03/02/the-banality-of-empathy/ [checked on June 26, 2025]

NYU Langone Health. (2014/2024). http://www.empathyproject.com

Zaki, Jamil and Mina Ciskara. (2015). Addressing empathic failures, Current Directions in Psych-ological Science, December 2015, Vol. 24, No. 6: 471–476. DOI: 10.1177/0963721415599978.

Zaki, Jamil. (2016). Does empathy help or hinder moral action, The New York Times, December 29, 2016: http://tinyurl.com/gwmfpxp [checked on 01/06/20

Zenko, Micah. (2015). Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy. New York: Basic Books.