Paul A. Gilbert

“The experience of being born into a loving household or a stressed and abusive one would actually affect how my brain matured and the types of connections that were made between my neurons. It is not just my ‘values’ that would be shaped in a certain way by my relationships with others (e.g. my parents), but my actual brain, from where my thoughts, feelings and desires flow, is sculpted by my relationships.1 If I’d been unlucky enough to have been born into, say, an old-style orphanage where infants were left in cots all day and there was little care or interaction, then all the potential that lies inside me, which could have been sculpted by love and kindness feeding my brain, would simply have withered away. I would have suffered intellectual losses and decline.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

“True empathy, though, is an act of imagination. We have to imagine what it would be like to be in the minds of others, to walk in their shoes. We have to consider their background and how it would have impinged on them/us; we have to consider their context – that is, their fears, desires, hopes and wishes.”
― Paul A. Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind