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Do psychotherapists, doctors and leaders develop "emotional chainmail"? Some ways of building both stability and empathy.

In the last couple of days I've written two posts on the possibility of developing "emotional chainmail" when faced with repeated experiences of suffering ... "Do psychotherapists, doctors and leaders develop "emotional chainmail"?  Description of a possible problem" and "Do psychotherapists, doctors and leaders develop "emotional chainmail"?

Do psychotherapists, doctors and leaders develop "emotional chainmail"? Two kinds of empathy.

I wrote yesterday about how, at the weekend, I was involved in an hour and a half's deep emotional conflict resolution with an old friend that was witnessed in a group by another eight people.  As pretty much always, in the feedback that emerged over the next twenty four hours, different people reported very different reactions to what they had seen.  I still (after forty years involvement in a wide cross section of psychotherapy groups) find it jaw-dropping the sheer variety of what different people feel & think when observing absolutely the same event.  However, it seemed that most of those who spoke were deeply moved and respectful of what we'd done and how well it had worked out ...

Do psychotherapists, doctors and leaders develop "emotional chainmail"? Description of a possible problem.

I've been in a peer "psychotherapy group" residential retreat again recently and I was involved in an interaction that has crystalised a series of thoughts about potential "emotional armouring" in therapists that I've been aware of more vaguely for some time. And in fact these "suspicions" involve not just psychotherapists, but also doctors and leaders more generally as well. Happily there are great advantages of this emotional stability & resilience, but I believe there can also be very genuine personal & interpersonal costs. So what am I talking about here?

Could increasing our compassion for others be even more "therapeutic" than increasing our self-compassion?

"It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself."  Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."   Viktor Frankl  

"To reach the other shore with each step of the crossing": a brief embodied cognition meditation exercise (3rd post)

                              (This blog post is downloadable as both a Word doc and a PDF file)

When I get to heaven they will not ask me, “Why were you not Moses?”  Instead they will ask “Why were you not Susya? Why did you not become what only you could come?”   Susya, a Hasidic rabbi

"Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy."  Thich Nhat Hanh

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