Quotes About Empathy

Ideally, friends are people with whom we can be our true selves, with whom we can fearlessly let our guard down. (Arguably, a close friend is someone with whom we can allow ourselves to enter the daydreaming attentional mode, with whom we can switch in and out of our different modes of attention without feeling awkward.)

For "full" emotional communication, one person needs to allow his state of mind to be influenced by that of the other.

Parents who speak with their children about their feelings have children who develop emotional intelligence and can understand their own and other people's feelings more fully.

For a child or an adult, it's extremely powerful to hear someone say, "I get you. I understand. I see why you feel this way." This kind of empathy disarms us.

It's also crucial to keep in mind that no matter how nonsensical and frustrating our child's feelings may seem to us, they are real and important to our child. It's vital that we treat them as such in our response.

We must keep in mind that only a part of memory can be translated into the language-based packets of information people use to tell their life stories to others. Learning to be open to many layers of communication is a fundamental part of getting to know another person's life.

What do you really want for your children? What qualities do you hope they develop and take into their adult lives?

The key here is that when your child is drowning in a right-brain emotional flood, you'll do yourself (and your child) a big favor if you connect before you redirect.

Sometimes parents avoid talking about upsetting experiences, thinking that doing so will reinforce their children's pain or make things worse. Actually, telling the story is often exactly what children need, both to make sense of the event and to move on to a place where they can feel better about what happened.

Engage, don't enrage.

I'm too angry to have a helpful conversation right now, so I'm going to take some time to calm down, and then we'll talk in a bit.

When your children are feeling upset, a loving touch can calm things down and help you connect, even during moments of high stress.

We want our kids to expect that their needs can be understood and consistently met. But we don't want our kids to expect that their desires and whims will always be met.

Everything they see, hear, feel, touch, or even smell impacts their brain and thus influences the way they view and interact with their world—including their family, neighbors, strangers, friends, classmates, and even themselves.

brain imaging studies show that the experience of physical pain and the experience of relational pain, like rejection, look very similar in terms of location of brain activity.

noticing not just their words but also their nonverbal patterns of energy and information flow. These signals are the familiar primarily right-hemisphere sent and received elements of eye contact, facial expression, and tone of voice, posture, gesture, and the timing and intensity of response. The

Attunement requires presence but is a process of focused attention and clear perception. We

That might mean giving a warning five minutes before having to leave the park, or enforcing a consistent bedtime so your kids don't get too tired and grumpy.

As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, "Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of being.

instead of a time-out, you might ask her to practice handling a situation differently. If she's being disrespectful in her tone or words, you can have her try it again and communicate what she's saying respectfully. If she's been mean to her brother, you might ask her to find three kind things to do for him before bedtime. That way, the repeated experience of positive behavior begins to get wired in her brain. (Again,

when a child is upset, logic often won't work until we have responded to the right brain's emotional needs.

As children develop, their brains "mirror" their parent's brain. In other words, the parent's own growth and development, or lack of those, impact the child's brain. As parents become more aware and emotionally healthy, their children reap the rewards and move toward health as well.

Connection is about walking through the hard times with our children and being there for them when they're emotionally suffering, just like we would if they scraped their knee and were physically suffering.

children whose parents talk with them about their experiences tend to have better access to the memories of those experiences. Parents who speak with their children about their feelings have children who develop emotional intelligence and can understand their own and other people's feelings more fully. Shy children whose parents nurture a sense of courage by offering supportive explorations of the world tend to lose their behavioral inhibition,