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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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.
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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
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Radical empathy is now a podcast
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.
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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
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
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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.
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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.
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Rhetorical empathy in the context of ontology
Empathy is an authentic way of being with the other individual after all the inauthentic ways of being have been overcome or at least set aside and quarantined. A reversal takes place, and the empathic way of being is the foundation for the psychological mechanisms. Projection, projective identification, and transient identification are valid and important, but not fundamental. What is fundamental is empathic relatedness, being present with the other person.
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Henry James’ Depiction of Unreliable Parental Empathy in “What Maisie Knew”
James’ incomparable empathy with Maisie and his penetrating and astute comprehension of human relations writ large applies empathy in the extended sense to who people are as possibilities, walking in the other’s shoes (after, of course, first taking off one’s own to avoid projection), translating communications between adults and children (and adults and adults) as well as affect-matching and mis-matching (empathy in the narrow sense).
