Empathy involves empathic concern, the desire to improve someone else's well-being. However, the goal of empathy is not to change or fix others. Feeling like empathy has failed because one cannot change someone else can be detrimental. It can lead individuals to believe they are bad empathizers or caregivers and can even make them quit their professions. The key insight is that the job of empathy is not to fix others because people are not within our control.
Since Covid hit, many of us have seen fewer people and experienced more loneliness. Listener Ivana Cole wants to know what we can do to reconnect and asks, if we can't reconnect: "Can we be happy alone?"
Dr Laurie Santos looks at social connections and how make them with Stanford's Jamil Zaki (author of the War for Kindness).
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.