JOURNAL LOGS:
"Checklist item 31 is generally acknowledged as the most important category: 'Voiced empathy for my situation/problem.' We are instructed about the importance of this first word, voiced. It's not enough for someone to have a sympathetic manner or use a caring tone. The students have to say the right words to get credit for compassion" (Jamison 3).
- Empathy, sympathy, and compassion all correlate to work together to create this "voiced empathy", but this voiced empathy isn't always the reality and what is need to be heard at that moment in time.
"I grow accustomed to comments that feel aggressive in their formulaic insistence: that must really be hard [to have a dying baby], that must really be hard [ to be afraid you'll have another seizure in the middle of the grocery store], that must really be hard [ to carry in your uterus the bacterial evidence of cheating on your husband]. Why not say, I couldn't even imagine?" (Jamison 4-5).
- Stating the obvious facts that something is really hard isn't gonna make it any easier, as it can actually make someone more and more frustrated as they hear it. Sometimes it's the simplicity and honesty of, "I couldn't even imagine". Be real.
"Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes a seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response. My Stephanie script is twelve pages long. I think mainly about what it doesn't say" (Jamison 5-6).
- Things tend to push boundaries and go over the borders, "Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries." Something always leads to another thing, and soon empathy will require more than just a response of, "I couldn't even imagine".
"Rating high for the study's 'sensitivity' cluster feels intuitive. It means agreeing with statements like 'I have at one time or another tried my hand at writing poetry' or 'I have seen some things so sad they almost made me feel like crying' and disagreeing with statements like: 'I really don't care whether people like me or dislike me.' This last one seems to suggest that empathy might be, at root, a barter, a bid for others' affection: I care about your pain is another way to say I care if you like me. We care in order to be cared for. We care because we are porous. The feelings of others matter, they are like matter: they carry weight, exert gravitational pull" (Jamison 21-22).
- We are all human, as we give empathy many of us expect/want to receive that empathy back.
"Sometimes we care for one another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn't make our caring hallow. The act of choosing simply means we've committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I am deep in my own. To say going through the motions- this isn't reduction so much as acknowledgment of effort-the labor, the motions, the dance- of getting inside another person's state of heart or mind" (Jamison 23).
- Sometimes people feel obliged to give empathy, but this doesn't mean our action wasn't true. The action of going beyond our own emotional roller coasters to set foot and take a ride on someone else's is deeper than just feeling obliged.
"You want him to listen, for hours if necessary, and feel everything exactly as you feel it-you pair of hearts in such synchronized rhythm any monitor would show it; your pair of hearts playing two crippled bunnies doing whatever they can. There is no end to this fantasy of closeness. Who else is gonna bring you a broken arrow? (Jamison 25).
- Want and desire is a human characteristic most have, and as we go through these motions we can't help, but to wish that someone else was going through the exact same thing we are. This is the want and desire to be understood on a personal level.
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