Quotes About Empathy

If I as a helpless child was abused and am not allowed to see this, I will abuse other helpless creatures without realizing what I am doing. I will also refuse to read books on abuse, or I won't want to understand them because, if I did, I would have to feel the tragedy of my childhood and the pain of having been misled at such an early age.

Only if young people are allowed to know exactly what happened and why, if they no longer allow themselves to be deflected in their curiosity and do not fear the truth, can they free themselves from the burden of their forefathers' blindness. Such young people will certainly not condone the production of poisoned gas.

Once the adult self has decided to find out the whole truth about itself, the body feels understood, respected, and protected.

This story sounds as though it were invented, but it is true from beginning to end. There are people who have to pay for the smallest things in life with their very substance and their spinal cord. That is a constantly recurring pain, and then when they are tired of suffering… Does not mother love belong to the 'smallest', but also indispensable, things in life, for which many people paradoxically have to pay by giving up their living selves?

Today, I believe that to mistreat children as I was mistreated—to punish them, to forbid them to weep, to speak, to defend themselves, to revolt against brutal treatment—is the greatest crime that there is. It is a crime to discipline children so much that they become blind, dumb, lifeless and then, later, to deny the whole thing. No wonder such children would later as doctors rather subject others to electroshock treatment than confront the repressed misery of their past.

The path to adulthood lies not in tolerance for the cruelties we have been exposed to but in the realization of our own truth and the development of empathy for the maltreated child. It lies in the appreciation of the way in which cruelties have handicapped our whole

If a mother can make it clear to a child that at that particular moment when she slapped him her love for him deserted her and she was dominated by other feelings that had nothing to do with the child, the child can keep a clear head, feel respected, and not be disoriented in his relationship to his mother.

Frequently, parents withhold such communication from the child, not because they are in any way malevolent but because they themselves never experienced such a token of affection in childhood and consequently do not know that such a thing exists. They can learn to communicate meaningfully with their children, but only if those children have the full support of a therapist who has shaken off the influence of poisonous pedagogy and is totally and unreservedly on the children's side.

To free themselves of this compulsion they need to be able to share their feelings with someone—they need the experience of being listened to, understood, taken seriously, of no longer having to hide. Only then will they know that this is the nourishment they have been searching for all their lives.

To free them from this isolation—the feeling of being the sole guardian of a guilty secret—parents would need to summon up the courage to admit their errors to their children. This would change the whole situation. In calm and collected conversation with their children they might say something like this:

Empathizing with a child's unhappy beginnings does not imply exoneration of the cruel acts he later commits. (This is as true for Alois Hitler as it is for Adolf.)

Those who persecute others are warding of knowledge of their own fate as victims.

Because the victims are "only children," their distress is trivialized. But in twenty years' time these children will be adults who will feel compelled to pay it all back to their own children.

Consciously experiencing one's own victimisation instead of trying to ward it off provides protection against sadism; i.e., the compulsion to torment and humiliate others.

True emotional understanding has nothing to do with cheap sentimental pity.

These people have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her.

What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.

Hatred is always a sin, my mother told me. Remember that. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. I was struck by that and meant to try it, but knew I shouldn't waste the milk.

One's appreciation of meager comforts, it seems, depends on what misery one has gone through before getting them.

That was her way. She carried not noticing to an extreme. Not noticing, not intruding, not suggesting.

Sick people grew to resent well people, and sometimes that was true of husbands and wives, or even of mothers and their children. Both

We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.

People doing something that seems to them natural and necessary. At least, one of them is doing what seems natural and necessary, and the other believes that the important thing is for that person to be free, to go ahead. They understand that other people might not think so. They do not care.

It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness -- however temporary, however flimsy -- of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another.