Carleene

“couple of serious watch-outs when it comes to disconnection. The first comes from researcher Trisha Raque-Bogdan. She writes, “To avoid the pain and vulnerability that may result when their efforts to achieve connection are unsuccessful, individuals may enact their own disconnection strategies, such as hiding parts of themselves or discounting their need for others. They may learn that it is safer to keep their feelings and thoughts to themselves, rather than sharing them in their relationships.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Empathy is not relating to an experience, it’s connecting to what someone is feeling about an experience.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“There’s compelling research that shows that compassion fatigue occurs when caregivers focus on their own personal distress reaction rather than on the experience of the person they are caring for. Focusing on one’s own emotional reaction results in an inability to respond empathically to the person in need. In this view, the more appropriate term, rather than “compassion fatigue,” might be “empathic distress fatigue.” We’re not hearing the story, we’re inserting ourselves in the story.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Cognitive empathy, sometimes called perspective taking or mentalizing, is the ability to recognize and understand another person’s emotions. Affective empathy, often called experience sharing, is one’s own emotional attunement with another person’s experience.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience