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with its roots in recognition, belief, and faith: the language of empathy
i love starting a topic off with a but, it gives such an edgy feel to the whole thing, and what i am butting away was how different i was when i decided that maybe, just maybe i had a problem with living and maybe just maybe my use of drugs was only a symptom of that problem.
so off to the the mental gymnastics and races required to appear to be eloquent as i muse about the language of empathy and how i have problems getting it today. actually a quick peek at wiktionary defines empathy as:

Noun
1. sympathetic identification and understanding of someone else's feelings or motives
2. the intellectual identification of the thoughts, feelings, or state of another person
3. pity, compassion or commiseration

well i can pitch number three right away, one thing i have learned is that most addicts, myself included do not want pity or to be pitied, although sometimes i seem to be asking for it! of course i could continue to seek out more definitions and fill this page with footnotes about what other people say empathy is or is not, but what is important is what i think empathy is. although at first it seemed to me that some members in the room were preaching to me, and could do nothing, save spout clichés, there were others, the vast majority as a matter of fact, that spoke to me in a language that i could not understand but felt like something i wanted. that little bit of feeling allowed me to open up a bit and stay in the rooms. that language was empathy. those members may not have seen what i had seen, nor did what i did, BUT they seemed to understand the bleakness of my internal landscape, and my motivations for needing to escape from the REAL world as often as possible. as i was still a bit put off by what i was experiencing, being the good addict that i am, those members who spoke that strange and wonderful language were the ones who i gave the widest berth, after all i was not really ready to be more than i am. and yes i hung with the parrots because i deemed them the safest members to be around, AND HERE IS THE REALLY BIG BUT, i chose my sponsor from the other group and actually listened to what those members were saying. i knew what the parrots were going to say, in fact i could predict the crap they would share without much difficulty at all but that of course is a topic for another day.
fast forward several days and here i sit wondering if i am one of those who knows how to speak the language of empathy, or just another parrot. i work at feeling what others feeling, by practicing that to the best of my ability on a daily basis. i identify with the the still sick and suffering, and i do my best to speak to my feelings rather than my behaviors. so perhaps i am doing the best i can today and being just that much more empathetic than yesterday, after all that is the best i can hope for!

∞ DT ∞