Let’s get things straight: an empathetic person isn’t weak. An empathetic person is strong.
Weak people have been all over the Internet and television the past 36 hours. One lost her job by saying it was all right for terrorist Stephen Paddock to gun down hundreds of people in Las Vegas because in her opinion, they were supporters of Donald Trump.
Still others are busy gathering social media “likes” and retweets or shares by repeating whatever sentiment is popular among their group of equally weak-minded individuals.
I just returned from school this morning in which the students’ lesson was about describing complex emotions using concrete, physical words and examples. We watched Brene Brown’s video about empathy, and her TED Talk on empathy.
Brene ends her TED talk by describing how we stop living when we stop confronting painful emotions like fear, vulnerability and shame and try to bury them with addictions like drugs, booze, and food. We can’t just shut the negative emotions off, Brene says. She explains that the process means…
