To whoever commented and then deleted their response: that's exactly what I mean! How often are we totally convinced that the advice we're dispensing is in someone's best interest, that we're doing them a favor by insisting on this change of course or behavior, when really, our brain has tricked us into maintaining our ego, tricked us into insulating our behavior from change by "legitimizing" it with our own wordswordswords. I'm not saying that every time we give advice, we are feeding our own ego. But an insecurity can delude your better judgment and cause you to project onto someone else the issues that you are yourself dealing with.
Exactly. A mentor of mine also in psychiatry labeled this as the difficulty of being a psychiatrist specifically and relating to others generally. We were having a discussion in the context of people who reject the very existence of some types of mental illness (e.g., anxiety, depression), and he mentioned his own difficulty in working with patients with addiction issues (opiates specifically) as someone with his own personal history of opiate abuse: The last sentence especially I think is critical to truly "getting" empathy and understanding your fellow man. Needless to say, that's not the kind of stuff you're typically going to see in online comments, where the whole interaction is extremely superficial at best and totally artificial at worst. Artificial not because it's not face-to-face but because the very nature of an online persona allows it to be edited, created, and willfully produced. Your attempt at relating to an online persona may be futile because the persona is just that and not a real person. By the way, I absolutely love this blog. One of my favorites.I'll give an example of my egocentrism. I've had multiple back surgeries after a work injury and was on heavy round the clock narcotics for 2 years. After my 2nd major surgery and my wound healed I told myself one day I'm not taking any more narcotics. Period. And I didn't. And went into violent withdrawal. I was curled up in the fetal moaning, waiting for it to pass. So on my addiction psychiatry rotation I was having trouble empathizing with heroine addicts and why they seemed convinced they would die if they didn't get their suboxone. I asked my seniors on the psych forum about my rejection of their experience. Learned from them. And after thinking about it decided I was stuck with the problem of viewing things through my own consciousness which had the resources and ability to go cold turkey. And that not everyone was me. This is both the problem of the doctor/patient relationship in psychiatry and why it is so fascinating. It requires the commitment to imagining the consequences of alien consciousness to our own.
Maybe not most places, but I'd like to think here you would. ;) I strive to practice empathy in all I do (where's my gold medal??? I kid). Example. while driving: when someone cuts me off or doesn't notice the red light turned green, instead of assuming the worst, I try to invent in my head a story where their actions are perfectly reasonable to them, and are excusable because they're on their way to the hospital or because they're having a ridiculously bad day. I'd like to think it's saved me a few instances of high blood pressure.The last sentence especially I think is critical to truly "getting" empathy and understanding your fellow man. Needless to say, that's not the kind of stuff you're typically going to see in online comments.