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Dedicated and committed that empathy becomes less of a rumor and more of an expanded reality in the community...

  • Automating Empathy – Issues and Answers

    Empathy Can't Be Automated - poster ad (c) Adler University

    I saw an advertisement today: “Empathy can’t be automated” 

    Made me think: What is the evidence pro and con?

    The obvious question is “Well, can you?”

    The debate is joined. This turns out to be a trick question. The intuition on my part is that one cannot automate empathy, but perhaps one can simulate it, and then the simulation turns out to be something quite like the “automating empathy” of the title.

  • Empathy and tragedy – connecting the dots to a new definition of tragic drama

    Suicide of Ajax in the Greek tragedy of the same name

    Radical empathy is attained when standard empathy honors the commitment to empathize in the face of empathic distress – the reaction on the part of audiences to circumstances in which tragic protagonists become entangled.This is empathy the “hard way,” and it is rare. However, no other way exists of attaining radical empathy than through empathy pure-and-simple….

  • A concise talk on trauma and radical empathy

    Printmaker: Cornelis Cortnaar ontwerp van: Titiaan (vermeld op object), verlener van privilege: onbekend (vermeld op object) Plaats vervaardiging: Rome Datering: 1566

    Caruth (1996) concisely defines trauma in terms of an experience that is registered but not experienced, a truth or reality that is not available to the survivor as a standard experience. The person (for example) was factually, objectively present when the head on collision occurred, but, even if the person has memories, and would acknowledge the event, paradoxically, the person does not presently experience it as something the person experienced in a way that a person standardly experienced the past event. The survivor experiences dissociated, repetitive nightmares, flashbacks, and depersonalization. 

  • Noted in passing: Anna Ornstein (1927-2025)

    Dr. Ornstein in 2018, speaking to high school students in Massachusetts.Credit...Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images

    To enhance the parents’ therapeutic potentials does not mean to give recommendations as to how to interrupt or actively discourage the child’s disturbing behavior. Particularly destructive are recommendations which ask for changed parental behavior without an appreciation for the parents’ difficulty to comply; such recommendations are “grafted” onto the parents’ pathology.

  • The empathic dozen: Top 12 empathy lessons

    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.

  • Suicidal Empathy: Listen to the podcast

    You know how modern agriculture can grow enough food to feed everyone on the planet thanks to the “Green Revolution” and high yield seeds, but people are still starving, because of the use of food by politicians and politics in the pejorative sense to perpetrate hostility, aggression, and bad actions? Likewise with empathy

  • Radical empathy is now a podcast

    Art: QWERTY oil on board by Alex Zonis

    This episode on Radical Empathy – what it is and why it is important – is the first in a series inquiring into radical empathy, what it is or whether it is just a rumor; how radical empathy differs from standard empathy; how radical empathy and everyday, standard empathy overlap and the dynamics of their interactions; how radical empathy makes a difference in situations when standard empathy breaks down and fails; and how the listener can expand his or her empathic skills, getting power over empathy and apply empathy in one’s lie, relationships, career, family, in the individual and in community.

  • Therapy’s not gonna fix this, and it just might help you get unglued from your doom scrolling and into action: empathic defects, unelected puppet masters, and the uncontrolled burn

    The scream: photo: Peter Trimmings: Wikimedia: Creative Commons

    That little voice inside that is quietly telling you “You do not make a difference” is not your friend. It must be the first target of transformation – High probability that voice is a hostile introject based on whatever it is that you had to survive

  • Cruelty in politics and unelected puppet masters

    Whereas some leaders try to balance power with compassion, the current leadership often portrays empathy as a flaw. Strength, in his view, is about domination—whether over political rivals, foreign adversaries, or marginalized groups.

  • Top Ten Empathy Trends 2025

    Radical empathy is the number one trend. The world is a more dangerous, broken place than it was a year ago. The challenge to empathy is that the dangers and breakdowns in the world have expanded dramatically over the long past year such. Standard empathy is no longer sufficient. Radical empathy is required.