Elouise D Oliver on the Importance of Empathy

• Introduction

  • Elouise D Oliver, Senior Minister East Bay Church or Religious Science

  • Best place to Worship in says East Bay Express

  • Having a good time

  • 79 years old

• Living in a community versus in industrialization

  • after several generations of industrialization we've lost empathy

  • people need to understand the police

  • police may see community as making their life harder

  • talking about empathy may help bridge that gap. That is my hope, that this conversation will be able to help people to understand. You need to be able to talk about it.

• Young people and the aging process

  • we don't want to see images of what's real, ie getting older

  • a lot of what we do is denial about what's really going on in life

• Empathy means the ability to feel what somebody else feels, As long as you don't acknowledge your own pain, you can not empathize with somebody else's pain. We have a great drug epidemic, it's all about numbing their pain, so we walk around in denial all the time about how we really feel and that suppresses the empathy. Because you're not empathizing with yourself.

• The culture we live in seems to goes out of it's way to keep us from feeling what's really going on.

• Worked as an LVN and gave pain medication. One patient wanted to feel the pain.

• Teenage years and difficulty. 

• How to build a culture of empathy?

  • Allow people to cry. Crying we are human and will feel what the other feels. When crying they are feeling their own pain. Now real empathy is happening. Just watching that person in pain, they are starting to empathize now and we don't want to do that. If you can remember your own pain and your own suffering, your own feelings. I can empathize with anyone because I'm a mother. What I know is that every person has a mother.

  • I don't have to figure out his pain, I can think of him through my own pain, because I'm a mother.

  • If this were my son, I'd want mercy, healing and care.

  • Empathy is like what I feel for my child