By Charles Garfield — 2017
Compassion is anything but abstract. It can be taught and practiced.
Read on www.latimes.com
CLEAR ALL
You not calling, as a friend, can actually compound the grief and loss they are feeling. Just pick up the phone, even if you get it wrong, just have a conversation and do your best. Your friend with cancer is still the same person they were before.
The truth is that many of us just don’t know the right words to comfort someone who is dying.
No matter what you say to someone whose parent or loved one died, it should be derivative of the same goal: communicating empathy and offering assistance, understanding what a person might need from you, and knowing how to phrase sentiments the right way.
Simply put: compassion is lovingkindness in action.
At its essence, compassion is a gift of the spirit—one with the power to change lives, reduce stress, and heal depression.
There are various developmental theories that go into the tool kit that parents and educators utilize to help mold caring and ethically intact people, including those of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg.
Nudge kids to be their best selves by encouraging them to consume positive, inspiring media and online content.
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In most modern cultures, it’s common for people to feel uneasy about death. We express this discomfort by avoiding conversations on the topic and lowering our voices when speaking of the dead and dying.
With each diagnosis, knowing her life hung in the balance, she was “stunned, then anguished” and astonished by “how much energy it takes to get from the bad news to actually starting on the return path to health.”
Studies of dying patients who seek a hastened death have shown that their reasons often go beyond physical ones like intractable pain or emotional ones like feeling hopeless.