Empathy, Compassion, Kindness

#Empathy #Kindness #Compassion #Triple5LightTherapy #BlackMaleTherapist

Empathy and compassion, while distinct, are deeply connected. Empathy acts as a gateway to compassion, serving as a transformative force. It involves understanding someone's emotions and imagining how they might resonate with you—a way of connecting.

Developing empathy is not a passive process but an active one. It can be achieved in various ways, such as understanding where the other person is coming from and their experiences. This is often referred to as 'walking in their shoes.' By approaching the other person with a gentle curiosity and acknowledging that we don't know the complete story, we can start to cultivate empathy. Another active way to build empathy is through active listening. This means carefully listening to the other person's words, understanding the underlying emotions, and reflecting on their words. Active listening encourages us to focus and connect more deeply, allowing us to better grasp a person's emotions through words, tone, and micro-expressions. Being an active listener boosts empathy and fosters positive feelings in the person we communicate with.

Compassion takes this understanding to a deeper level. It involves experiencing the person's feelings, embracing, accepting, and taking action. The power of compassion has been proven to be a potent tool in preventing burnout, demonstrating its transformative potential.

Compassion involves the desire to take action to help others. It encompasses traits and behaviors such as recognizing the suffering of others, understanding that suffering is a universal experience, empathizing with other people's emotional experiences, tolerating distressing emotions, and feeling motivated to help alleviate the suffering of others.

Kindness is not just a random act but a deliberate and voluntary choice. It's about dedicating one's time, talent, and resources to enhance the lives of others, one's own life, and the world. It involves genuine acts of love, compassion, generosity, and service. Kindness is a choice we can make, even amidst alternatives such as apathy and anger that life presents us with. This choice may be challenged by circumstances, people, and news, but it's a beautiful ability that each of us has: the ability to actively choose to be kind.

Comments

Are we really listening to what MLK had to say?

#MartinLutherKingJr #MLK #CivilRights #DrKing In 2020, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday falls in a national election year, one that reminds us of the importance of voting rights, citizenship and political activism to the health of our democracy. King imagined America as a "beloved community" capable of defeating what he characterized as the triple threats of racism, militarism and materialism. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, alongside the 1954 Brown Supreme Court decision, represents the crown jewels of the civil rights movement's heroic period. Yet King quickly realized that policy transformations alone, including the right to vote, would be insufficient in realizing his goal of institutionalizing radical black citizenship toward the creation of the "beloved community." King argued that justice was what love looked like in public. 2020 also marks the 55th anniversary of the passage of the Voting...

Coping With Moods: The Challenge of the Turbulent Mind

#Mood #Impulses #selfregulate #selfsoothe #Triple5LightTherapy #BlackMaleTherapist #Psychotherapy The power of moods and impulses can be overwhelming, but we can learn to self-regulate and self-soothe through awareness practices like meditation and mindfulness. By developing a healthy dialogue with our emotional nature, we can access deeper parts of ourselves and become more resilient in the face of stress and pressure. Rather than being swept away by our ever-shifting moods, we can learn to pause and reflect before acting. by Gillian McCann, Ph.D., and Gitte Bechsgaard, RP

9 things about MLK's speech and the March on Washington

#MLK #MartinLutherKingJr #MarchonWashington #IHaveaDream "I have a dream this afternoon that my four little children will not come up in the same young days that I came up within, but they will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin." The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke these words in 1963, but this was not the speech that would go down as one of the most important addresses in US history. King spoke these words in Detroit, two months before he addressed a crowd of nearly 250,000 with his resounding "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs on August 28, 1963. Several of King's staff members actually tried to discourage him from using the same "I have a dream" refrain again. As we all know, that didn't happen. But how this pivotal speech was crafted is just one of several interesting facts about what is one of the most important moments in the 2...

Your Inner Critical Voice

#Negativevoice #innercriticalvoice #innercritic #Introspection #Psychotherapy #MentalHealth #BlackTherapist #Triple5LightTherapy Our inner voice performs all kinds of important tasks—but when it gets negative, it can be hard to turn off. Ethan Kross, a psychologist and neuroscientist who studies introspection, has a solution. By Clay Skipper- January 24, 2022 We’ve all got a voice in our head. (Maybe you can hear yours, right now, reading these words.) And though you’re intimately familiar with that inner voice, since it talks to you all day long, you might be surprised to learn just how incessant it is. According to one study, it can spew up to four thousand words a minute. If you’re awake for sixteen hours, that’s more than 3.8 million words every day. That’s because that voice does so much for you: It helps you keep information in your head (remembering, say, a phone number or items on a grocery list), simulates and plans for upcoming events, like a date or an interview, ...

Triple5Light Therapy

Search This Blog