Those who are clever, who have a Brain, never understand anything.
—Winnie the Pooh

I have a lot of patients who are exasperated by the types of information that people are believing these days. It sometimes seems that in order to have a normal conversation, you first have to make sure that you and the person you’re talking to hold basic concepts, like measurement, in common. Sometimes you don’t, and when that happens, it’s hard to imagine how something like getting someone to think empathically is ever going to be possible.

Let me begin with the ending: yes, it is going to be possible. It’s possible now, and it is happening all the time, all around us. That shift is gathering force, and empaths have a crucial role to play. We need to have compassion for the people who are lost in strange worlds of information. Like Winnie the Pooh says, they’re not stupid, its just that their intellects unfold under the influence of strange forces.

I’ve worked in all sorts of therapeutic environments, and I’ve witnessed all sorts of strange forces. Some of the associations and assumptions of causality that people make today, which can be amplified a zillion-fold in a few hours, are clinically schizophrenic. They can’t possibly match, but if you make that judgement, you just cause them to cling to the belief ever more strongly. This affects the world they live in, and so long as they keep their head in a hall of mirrors, that world will become more and more of their reality.

But they wake up all the time. Let me give you a really magical version of how this plays out. Not long ago, one of my patients was walking with a friend in Washington Square Park, one of my favorite places in New York. A female stranger wearing a long wool coat and a purple felt hat caught her attention, and smiled warmly. My patient immediately reacted with a New Yorker’s distant gaze and blank expression, and suspected that the woman was going to beg or con her. The woman approached anyway, and offered her what looked like a business card. She snatched it with a shake of her head, hoping that would get rid of the woman. It did.

Before she tossed the card, she glanced at it, to see what the scam was. It said simply, “You are loved. Love, Irene.”

My patient was floored. In that moment, she realized that everything about her attitude towards that woman was stained by negative assumptions. By the time she recovered from the impact of this revelation, she and her friend had to chase after Irene for a block and a half. When they got her attention, my patient apologized and tried to explain the magnitude of the awakening she had had. Irene’s peaceful gaze and warm smile never wavered. She said only, “You don’t have to apologize. I love you,” and ambled away.

Winnie the Pooh also counsels us, “If the person you are talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that they have a small piece of fluff in their ear.”

The forces that bend our thoughts are more powerful than the thoughts themselves. Empaths like Irene can help others break the surface of those forces, and realize in an instant that there’s an entirely different set of forces they might think along instead.

That’s how it’s going to happen. People who feel they are done with the ugly, and with the anger, and with all of it, they are not going to get angry back. They’re going to do just the opposite. They’re going to say, “I love you,” and mean it.

Photo by Ravi Patel on Unsplash