5 Blocks to Empathy: How to Hurt Your Love

5 blocks to empathy“I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.”                                 Maya Angelou

Now that we’ve talked about what empathy is and why it is important, it can be easy to wonder why more people don’t practice it more often. As with most human characteristics and behaviors, there is more to the story than meets the eye.

Empathy has to be developed. It is taught and practiced. We learn through words, actions and the experiences we have with important caretakers in our life. As we have pointed out before, when our teachers are less than adequate, we don’t progress as far as we could.  Blocks can and will develop that greatly hamper or prevent our ability to be empathic. Continue reading

Empathy: A Way to Make Love Grow

Empathy: The Way to Make Love GrowEmpathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes. Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.  (Daniel H. Pink)

Empathy is more than a word in a quote posted to someone’s Facebook page in an attempt to be poetic.  It’s a key ingredient in fostering loving and caring relationships. Being able to experience a situation from someone else’s point of view is a requirement for creating intimacy. Continue reading

“Finding Dory”: Words of Wisdom from Dory, Her Family and Friends.

Words of Wisdom from Dory, family and friendsSometimes, life is simply too much.  Too much at home, too much in the news, too much violence and sadness and loss. Times like that, your best option can be to escape the intense moment and rest your mind and spirit.  This week, I escaped with my grandchildren and a fish named Dory.

After rushing to the theater, buying popcorn and getting two small children settled in their seats, those new reclining ones, I settled back to enjoy the beauty of Finding Dory (“Not Dora, but Dory,” my granddaughter says. “Repeat after me: Dor…y.”).

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5 Ways to Have Intimacy In Your Relationships

5 Ways to Have Intimacy In Your RelationshipsThink about the last few movies you watched… or television shows… or books you read.   What kind of relationship did the main characters have?  Chances are good they were either falling in love or falling out of it.

Popular culture presents us very few examples of what an actual intimate relationship looks like. Most entertainment today focuses on one of two points in a relationship: the romance, or the conflict that comes after “the thrill is gone.”  There is another aspect of relationships that we seldom see, and is something we do want to achieve. We have few models as to how to get there, or how to maintain it when we arrive.  That something is intimacy.

What Is Intimacy?

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