Letters to the Editor
-
on empathy @Weeping etc.
Actually, from a certain point of view this makes sense: the ability to empathize necessarily means the ability to shift perspectives.Perhaps this kind of shifting strikes some people as duplicitous or as lacking a core.
This is also a topic I think about a lot as it is very woven into the work I do every day. For one thing, I deal part of my day with autism, in which empathy and theory of mind is a huge deficit. So I am constantly aware of doing things to help someone with severe deficits in this to move toward more awareness of others.
For myself, my job requires that I shift perspectives constantly. I work in one community that is racially mixed, (Latino, Black, white) with mostly low-income children, then drive 20 miles to a county known as "the home of the free and the white" that, as far as I know, in the past 20 years has had one Black family, living on the county line, and they didn't stay there long.
I work in the home on a very personal level with families who parent in ways that are sometimes pretty hard to watch. I have to sell myself to them as their ally in raising their child. And then I have to deal with the child's agenda which is often not aligned with their therapy agenda or with their parent's agenda for them. (kids just wanna have fun!). I have to sell myself to these kids so they bond with me because sometimes I'm with them for 15 years twice a week, in their home. Then I have to shift empathy to the national corporation I work for that is putting profits above service now, and I'm not doing quite so hot on that front lately. My supervisors have actually told me to stop trying to help my patients so much. hmmm.
I've been doing this many years now and it changes you. You see many things differently. Plus I drive a lot and this gives me "thinking time" to process all of this.
So I am shifting, shifting, adjusting to up to 12 different homes a day.
"The important thing is not to stop questioning" Albert Einstein