Author Archives
Dedicated and committed that empathy becomes less of a rumor and more of an expanded reality in the community...
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As an exercise, consider that the other person is one’s empathy trainer. The other individual calls forth one’s empathy. If the Other behaves in a challenging way, the challenge is to one’s empathy. If the other person is in an… Read More ›
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Empathy sells; empathy’s limitations sell even better
But if empathy still sells, its limitations sell even better. The latest trend is to denounce empathy as a weakness and a danger to western civilization. What’s with that? How to answer the anti-empathy critics aidrectly and powerfully. Find out here.
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Hard empathy is different than “Empathy is Hard”
The distinction between Hard Empathy and Soft Empathy needs to be better known. Soft empathy does not work with bullies, psychopaths, and the criminally insane; which are difficult individuals where Hard Empathy can make a difference. The innovation proposed here is to think of empathy, like so many things these days, as existing on a spectrum between empathy as “empathic listening” and empathy as “tough love.” A rigorous and critical empathy includes both options, which map to the difference between “soft empathy” and “hard empathy,” and a sliding scale of possibilities in-between.
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Suicidal Empathy is Back in the News: Here is some “Tough Love” For Advocates of the Idea
Suicidal empathy is back in the news and deserves to be put in its proper place. Empathy exists on a spectrum between empathic kindness and “tough love”. This post contains some of each—but mostly tough love—for the anti-empathy skeptics. The… Read More ›
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Top Trends in Empathy for 2026
The trend of bringing large language models to empathy and empathic relatedness is a game changer. The question is not whether the generative AI can be empathic, but the extent to which the designers are able to distinguish responsiveness from “stroking one’s ego,” sycophancy (servile flattery), and the extent to which prospective clients decide to engage (both open questions at this date (Q1 2026)).
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Automating Empathy – Issues and Answers
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.
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Empathy and tragedy – connecting the dots to a new definition of tragic drama
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….
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A concise talk on trauma and radical empathy
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.
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Noted in passing: Anna Ornstein (1927-2025)
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.
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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.
Empathy Lessons 