Summary

Chapter 7: Places We Go With Others:

Compassion and Empathy - Brown differentiates between compassion and empathy in this section. Compassion, she explains, is a practice, something a person must incorporate into their everyday existence. It is the act of being with other people in their pain, of “sitting in the dark” with them (119). Compassion is an act of shared humanity that allows for human connection. Empathy, on the other hand, is the skill of understanding another person’s pain. There is, Brown writes, cognitive empathy and affective empathy. When using cognitive empathy an individual reaches into his or her memory and recalls a time when he or she felt a feeling similar to the feeling being experienced by the person with whom he or she is empathizing. Affective empathy is when an individual actually feels that feeling with the person experiencing the difficult...