Typology How Empathy Helps Us Experience Love Deeply, with Drs. Bill & Kristi Gaultiere
Oct 16, 2025
Drs. Bill and Kristi Gaultiere, therapists and spiritual directors from Soul Shepherding, delve into the power of empathy in fostering deep love. They reveal how shame and emotional wounds hinder our ability to receive love. With insights from their book, they discuss the importance of self-empathy and how various Enneagram types uniquely struggle with it. The Gaultieres also differentiate between tactical and transformational empathy and explore how experiencing God’s empathy can bring healing, even amid suffering.
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Shame Hides Love From Us
- Unconscious shame blocks our ability to receive empathy and love from God and others.
- Learning emotional language and being known by another person is essential to self-awareness and healing.
Car Ride Breakthrough
- Kristi described resisting Bill's empathy during grief because childhood messages told her to 'snap out of' emotions.
- Bill naming that resistance helped Kristi become conscious of shame and receive care.
Define Empathy By Its Purpose
- Define empathy as seeking to understand someone's thoughts, feelings, or experience to help them know they are deeply loved by God.
- Use empathy to connect people to God's love, not merely as a listening technique.
