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Friendship, loneliness, and prayer: Praying about distractions from empathy

Lynne Baab • Thursday February 29 2024

Imagine you and a friend are walking in your favorite park. Your friend is talking about a challenging situation at work. During the ten minutes they’re on that topic, your brain flits back and forth from their story to the bird you see flying by, your discomfort in your new walking shoes, your concern that it might start raining and you forgot your umbrella, and your own concerns about work. Oh, yes, the craft project you’re working on these days also comes to mind.

You might think something is wrong with you that you can’t stay focused on your friend’s story and...

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Friendship, loneliness, and prayer: Praying to grow in empathy

Lynne Baab • Tuesday February 20 2024

First and foremost, empathy requires that we pay attention to another person. Their facial expression and body language. Their tone of voice. The way they describe situations, actions, feelings, and responses. As I’m sure you know, this is much harder than it sounds.

Obstacles to paying attention are manifold. Some obstacles come from outside, such as background noise, chaotic environments, or planes flying overhead. Most obstacles come from within, from our own thoughts and feelings. I can list so many things that flit through my mind when I’m trying to listen empathetically: the ingredients I need for dinner, the mess in the...

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Friendship, loneliness, and prayer: Praying to use empathy with love

Lynne Baab • Wednesday February 14 2024

Identify with. Experience. Understand. Those are the verbs in the definition of empathy that I have been highlighting in recent blog posts.

“Empathy is the cognitive process of identifying with or vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. . . . When we empathize, we are attempting to understand and/or experience what another person understands and/or experiences.” —Verderber and Verderber, Inter-Act: Interpersonal Communication Concepts, Skills and Contexts

Today, I want to raise the possibility that the three verbs I have highlighted can be exercised without love and actually cause harm. Ideally, we hope that anyone who makes an effort to identify with,...

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Friendship, loneliness, and prayer: Praying for wisdom in using empathy

Lynne Baab • Wednesday February 7 2024

Interest in empathy skyrocketed after the discovery of mirror neurons in the early 1990s. As I wrote two weeks ago, mirror neurons enable us to respond to and even experience the actions and emotions of others. The number of academic studies about empathy is astonishing. Empathy is studied in relation to just about any profession or life activity you can imagine.

I want to give you a sampling of the kinds of articles about empathy you’ll find online.

Here’s a quotation from a consulting firm specializing in negotiating skills: “Evidencing empathy leads to negotiation success.”

From an education center at U.C. Berkeley: “Students who...

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