Quotes About Empathy

Every person you've been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally)—all of them evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you relate to yourself and others. Sometimes you have conversations with them in your head; sometimes they speak to you in your sleep.

Whereas in their younger years, people often come to therapy to understand why their parents won't act in ways they wish, later on, people come to figure out how to manage what is. And so my question about my mother has cone from "Why can't she change?" to "Why can't I?

Neuroscientists discovered that humans have brain cells called mirror neurons that cause them to mimic others, and when people are in a heightened state of emotion, a soothing voice can calm their nervous systems and help them stay present.

Years later, when I've done thousands of first sessions, and information-gathering has become second nature, I'll use a different barometer to judge how it went: Did the patient feel understood?

Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.

regularly made an effort to remember one of the most important lessons from my training: There's no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn't be ranked, because pain is not a contest. Spouses often forget this, upping the ante on their suffering—I had the kids all day. My job is more demanding than yours. I'm lonelier than you are. Whose pain wins—or loses? But pain is pain.

Sometimes when we don't like our feelings, we toss them to others like a hot potato.

So much of what I'm doing to help him relies on our in-the-room interaction. Say what you will about the wonders of technology, but screen-to-screen is, as a colleague once said, "like doing therapy with a condom on.

It takes a while to hear a person's story and for that person to tell it, and like most stories—including mine—it bounces all over the place before you know what the plot really is.

There's also the issue of glitches. I was once on a Skype session with a patient who was in Asia temporarily, and just as she began crying hysterically, the volume went out. All I saw was her mouth moving, but she didn't know that I couldn't hear what she was saying. Before I could get that across, the connection dropped entirely. It took ten minutes to restore the Skype, and by then not only was the moment lost but our time had run out.)

It's impossible to get to know people deeply and not come to like them. We should take the world's enemies, get them in a room to share their histories and formative experiences, their fears and their struggles, and global adversaries would suddenly get along.

Sitting-with-you-in-your-pain is one of the rare experiences that people get in the protected space of a therapy room, but it's very hard to give or get outside of it—even for Jen,

Suffering shouldn't be ranked, because pain is not a contest. Spouses often forget this, upping the ante on their suffering—I had the kids all day. My job is more demanding than yours. I'm lonelier than you are. Whose pain wins—or loses? But pain is pain.

The cardinal rules of good parenting—moderation, empathy, and temperamental accommodation with one's child—are simple and are not likely to be improved upon by the latest scientific findings.

and I'm not sure if it's all of your annoying questions or the sadistic silences you put me through—but I feel like you get me, you know? And I don't want your head to get too big or anything, but I thought, you have a more complete picture of my total humanity than anyone else in my life.

Projective identification is like tossing a hot potato to the other person. The man no longer has to feel his anger, since it's now living inside his partner.

Every day, our patients are opening up questions that we have to think about for ourselves. If they can see themselves more clearly through our reflections, we can see ourselves more clearly through theirs. This happens to therapists when we're providing therapy, and it happens to our own therapists too. We are mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors, showing one another what we can't yet see.

But sometimes — more often than we tend to realize — those difficult people are us. That's right — sometimes hell is us. Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

Study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of your treatment is your relationship with the therapist, your experience of "feeling felt." This matters more than the therapist's training, the kind of therapy they do, or what type of problem you have.

How easy it is, I thought, to break someone's heart, even when you take great care not to.

the most important lessons from my training: There's no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn't be ranked, because pain is not a contest. Spouses often forget this, upping the ante on their suffering—I had the kids all day. My job is more demanding than yours. I'm lonelier than you are. Whose pain wins—or loses?

There is something likable in everyone. And to my great surprise, I found that she was right. It's impossible to get to know people deeply and not to come to like them.

alexithymia. She doesn't know what she's feeling or doesn't have the words to express it.

Your misery doesn't change their situation. You can't lessen their misery by carrying it for them inside you. It doesn't work that way. There are ways for you to be a better mother to them at this point in all of your lives. Sentencing yourself to live in prison isn't one of them.