BF2S Forums Empathy

Dilbert_X wrote:

Some people can visualise and empathise.

lowing wrote:

share in your pain as if he went through it with you

Thats not the only form of empathy.

In other words some people can imagine and guess. This is a far cry from experiencing.

I might be able to imagine what it is like to be the sole surviver of a plane crash, but the truth is, there is know way to know. Some people feel guilty, some feel lucky. How YOU or I would feel could only be determained after we have been through it. Before that happens, we really can not relate, or even "share" in the emotion of such an event. Mainly because we bring nothing to the table for "sharing".

Thats the best i got, if that does not convince ya that experience is the meat and potatoes of empathy and the reason for the distinction from sympathy there is nothing more I can say.

Last edited by lowing (2010-05-26 14:20:07)

Pug wrote:

But my experience is different?

If my reaction is anger, but someone else's is sadness...we can't be feeling the same thing even if we experience the same thing?

Or what if we both are angry, but I'm more angry?

Aka, I think you are drawing a line around something that is supposed to be loosely defined.

Point being, regardless if you are angry or scared, you have something to relate to and an emotion to bring to the table for "sharing" with someone of like experience.

Street cred if you will. A big difference to the person you are relating to I would guess.

Last edited by lowing (2010-05-26 14:24:04)

Jaekus wrote:

lowing wrote:

Jaekus wrote:

This is where you're obfuscating the discussion.

I'm not talking about what it's like to be at war, I'm talking about understanding how someone feels and sharing that feeling, whether they tell it through a story or you see it in their face and feel their pain/happiness/joy/confusion. Feeling their emotions. Not living their experiences.

Then you are not "sharing" shit. You have sacrificed nothing for the emotion that you say you "share", that makes you a poser and your empathies worthless. Your sympathies however might remain intact. What is it about not being able to understand the on going anguish of a person who has expereinced trauma don't you get? Trauma they still endure long after you are at home in bed with the wife, or at the playground with your kids? You don't empathize shit, you feel sorry for them, you can not know what iti s like to BE Them.

I didn't think you could dig that hole deeper but people are always surprising.

The problem here is the word EXPERIENCE. We're not talking about experience, we're talking about EMPATHY. Experiences can certainly help with having and expressing empathy, but it's not a prerequisite to sharing an emotion with another human being. This is what the definitions and the psychologists tell us.

Shared feeling is a shared feeling. Doesn't mean I have to feel that feeling for the next 3 weeks, does it? But by your definition you do, which is simply incorrect.

You're basically trying to lump it all into two categories. Emotions and empathy simply do not operate on this very simplistic view.

This really does feel a lot like trying to describe the colour green to someone who can't see.

But it is red. You are wrong. 2000 sources say so.

People don't necessarily have to suffer exactly the same tragedy to empathise with someone else.

I would guess someone who has lost their father could empathise with someone else who lost their mother.
Or someone could very well imagine what it is like to lose a parent.

See how simple that is?

You still don't get it. I don't know why I persist with someone so stubborn despite having numerous people tell him he's wrong. Usually the course is to think "gee, I'm getting told I'm incorrect here by many people, maybe I should reconsider my stance on this".

But no. Anyway...

I just got back from Mental Health First Aid Training. The presenter of the two day course started out talking about his role as statewide manager for a government sector in mental health and a lot of other projects he's involved in, he's just come back from an international mental health conference held in Ireland, etc etc.

Then he talked about his own experience with mental illness and mentions how he has a diagnosed mental illness, about spending 6 months involuntarily in hospital, and how he now cares and has been caring for his cousin whom also has a mental illness.

Then he talked about his department and the people who work in it, and defined them as either having had first hand experience with mental illness, have cared for someone with mental illness or have much understanding and are EMPATHETIC to people with mental illness and their carers.

Note here that he defined the empathic people as NOT having lived experience with mental illness, and this is from someone who has more credentials and credibility than everyone on this forum combined when it comes to mental illness.

Really though, the whole world can give you all the facts but you still wouldn't recognise it simply because you can't budge on anything.

A closed mind learns nothing.

Dear God can we lock this thread or something? The circular nature of it is making me dizzy

Jaekus wrote:

lowing wrote:

[You are right, the problem here is not experience, it is you bring nothing to the table to "share", you have nothing on which to build TRUE emotion or feeling. Notice I said TRUE, not the hat you put on when talking to a patient, but the honest truth of the emotion. anything less than honest emotion from real experiences is nothing more than acting the part.

For you perhaps. It's really not that simple, but you can continue to believe it is so if you wish.

I say this because when your session is over, you go partying or whatever and the patient is still left empty, you have changed hats while he is stuck wearing his. This is not honest emotion. IMO

And you know these things because of... how exactly? How do you know the benefit of simple conversation, really deep, honest and empowering conversation can have upon someone?

As one example, a guest at my work was suicidal last year. After much conversation about her intent to complete suicide and engaging her own empathy about how her own daughter would feel about her by getting her to think about how she feels about her best friend and then turning it around to understand how her daughter feels about her.  She then followed up with further conversation with my senior support support worker the following day, she left on the weekend. Before the conversation she was at real risk of suicide within a week, she had planned it out and had the means and had made a serious attempt a few months prior. She contacted us two weeks later to thank us, and said we had saved her life. To this day she's still around and managing the best she can.

Point I'm making here is that the so called "cheap talk" when I haven't lived her experiences can actually be very effective, because I understood her feelings and emotions, communicated back my understanding to her (in short, I empathised) and helped her get herself back on track.

anyway I appreciate your approach on this, better than your usual approach. I know not to get used to it though.

This is my usual approach, it's your stubbornness to recognise anyone else as having a valid point and a few snide comments here and there that makes people react so. If you're going to "leave the bark on" in conversations you got to expect some back.

1. How do I know this? Do I have to be a shrink to know the difference between speaking from experience and guessing? How is it you don't know?

2. I have talked a friend away from thoughts of suicide as well, and I was just a friend. That does not mean I empathized with what drove him to the brink, although I pretended to know exactly how he felt the truth is I didn't. I simply I know how permenant sucide is to a temporary problem. Telling your patient the rammifcations of their decision and how it will affect others is not taking part in their turmoil. Any self profeesed claim that When you are taking part in their turmoil without taking part in their tumoil you are acting. You have nothing at risk, and are not vulerable and you can decide you do not want to play anymore whenever it suits you. CHances are you were thinking to yourself " wtf, is this chick crazy or what?" as you go through the motions of concern until her hour is up and you move on to the next patient and whatever their problems are. You are putting on an act. You might say you empathize, for the sake of progress with the patient, but when it comes right down to it, you have no idea what it is like to be them, unless you were them at some point. You do not seem to think that you can speak from the heart without  empathizing,

3. What you did was not cheap talk, you helped her, but you did nor empathize with her, you couldn't, unless you have been so distraught that you have tried to end your life at some point.

4. No your usual approach is to chime in guns blazings with little contribution. Just like ruis.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

ruisleipa wrote:

Dear God can we lock this thread or something? The circular nature of it is making me dizzy http://i19.tinypic.com/7wu21pj.gif

The best way to do that is to let it die.

and yet here you all are reading it and posting in it.

ruisleipa wrote:

...and you respond to our posts, and so the circle begins again...

THen don't post anything and risk a response. and for those that choose to, it is none of your concern

lowing wrote:

ruisleipa wrote:

...and you respond to our posts, and so the circle begins again...

THen don't post anything and risk a response. and for those that choose to, it is none of your concern

My input or lack thereof is likely to have little impact on your closed circle, ruis, unless you decide not to reply.

Jaekus wrote:

Look, I'm basing what I'm saying upon personal experience and talking with professionals who, among many other facets of human function, have studied empathy as a part of their professional qualifications.

Nothing you say will change my mind on this, due to the above reasons. It appears you're not going to budge either. Agree to disagree. I'm pretty much done with this thread, so we'll leave it at that, shall we?

Sounds good, as long as we agree on the fact that whatever you are providing in empathy to your patient is not real and nothing more than a staged act of concern until their hour is up.

lowing wrote:

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Jaekus wrote:

Note here that he defined the empathic people as NOT having lived experience with mental illness, and this is from someone who has more credentials and credibility than everyone on this forum combined when it comes to mental illness.

Sympathy, on the other hand, is when one person feels the feelings of the sufferer as if he or she were the sufferer. -Jane Bolton, Psy.D., M.F.T

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-zesty-self/200909/stop-giving-me-empathy-it-makes-me-feel-bad

Sounds an awful lot like something this thread has endlessly but understandably defined as empathy.

now how about that. Well I guess we will never figure it out if Jaekus's "professionals" can't.

If you read more than just that one sentence you get a whole different picture ... that is if bothered clicking the link ...

Jane Bolton wrote:

Sympathy, on the other hand, is when one person feels the feelings of the sufferer as if he or she were the sufferer.

Sympathy is an automatic, involuntary response to another's emotional state. Babies are born with the ability to sympathize. Hospital nursery staffs know well the phenomenon in which one baby starts to cry and within moments all the babies are bawling.

In adulthood, if someone feels the sadness of another which then arouses their own unacceptable sadness, they may try to stop the sadness of the other so they won't have to feel the pain. This indicates not only lack of empathy for the self and other, but a lack of a healthy boundary as a separate, but relating, person.

Sympathy is thus shared suffering. Sympathy often seeks to console, while empathy seeks to understand. In sympathy, one's own past is brought in as in "I remember when ________(some past experience, i.e. "when MY father died") I was incapacitated for months!"

The person sympathizing may, over time, feel burdened or burned out. To look at the other side of the sympathy equation, the one being sympathized with may feel as if they are causing pain to the sympathizer, and feel guilty.

and ...

Jane Bolton wrote:

Empathy requires much more of an advanced integration of thought and feeling. In empathy, no past is spoken about. The only thing present is the other person's experience, feelings, and story. As Kelly Bryson says in Don't Be Nice, Be Real: Balancing Passion For Self With Compassion For Others, "Relating to another's experience is about you. Empathizing is about them."

When one person understands the other's plight and at the same time maintains a healthy emotional distance, that's empathy. Active thinking is required to calm one's own possible emotional reactivity. The automatic impulse to judge and criticize must be put aside.

Empathy is concerned with a much higher order of human relationship and understanding: engaged detachment. In empathy, we "borrow" another's feelings to observe, feel, and understand them, but not to take them onto ourselves. By being a participant-observer, we come to understand how the other person feels. An empathetic observer enters into the equation to be with the other's experience, and then removes him/herself to think about and to verbalize.

Since the empathizer is not taking the other's feelings personally, the empathizer does not feel that they have "caused" the other's feelings and thus does not react with anger, shame or guilt.

Varegg wrote:

Jane Bolton wrote:

Empathy requires much more of an advanced integration of thought and feeling. In empathy, no past is spoken about. The only thing present is the other person's experience, feelings, and story. As Kelly Bryson says in Don't Be Nice, Be Real: Balancing Passion For Self With Compassion For Others, "Relating to another's experience is about you. Empathizing is about them."

When one person understands the other's plight and at the same time maintains a healthy emotional distance, that's empathy. Active thinking is required to calm one's own possible emotional reactivity. The automatic impulse to judge and criticize must be put aside.

Empathy is concerned with a much higher order of human relationship and understanding: engaged detachment. In empathy, we "borrow" another's feelings to observe, feel, and understand them, but not to take them onto ourselves. By being a participant-observer, we come to understand how the other person feels. An empathetic observer enters into the equation to be with the other's experience, and then removes him/herself to think about and to verbalize.

Since the empathizer is not taking the other's feelings personally, the empathizer does not feel that they have "caused" the other's feelings and thus does not react with anger, shame or guilt.

This is pretty much a prerequisite for anyone working in my industry, as I've been trying to explain to some extremely dense people.

It doesn't matter though. We could be discussing the colour green and I could be talking about how grass is green, and yet I'll be wrong because someone has seen brown grass before and can't possibly imagine how grass could be green.

Even saying how professionals who's job is to study this isn't enough for some, because they've got some notion in their head that clearly must be correct despite decades of psychological study telling them otherwise. Maybe they should write to some universities to let them know they're teaching the wrong meaning of empathy, because clearly they're the expert