Rotarian of the Day on October 30, Jane Purser, presented a program by her favorite speaker and former eighth-grade student, Eddie Jenkins, who holds a master’s degree in social work. Jenkins, who was raised here in Winnfield, realized that his life’s purpose was to serve people during a religious retreat in his young adulthood, received his MSW at LSU in 1979.
He worked directly with people experiencing mental health issues for many years, and later served as the Deputy Director of Louisiana’s Office of Mental Health for 15 years.
Jenkins focused his talk on “empathy,” the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. This is not the same as sympathy, which is feeling pity for another person or his situation. Empathy means you can feel how the other person is feeling and imagine how you would feel in the same situation.
According to Jenkins, most people are born with an ability to feel empathy, and many of us have role models in our lives who help increase our capacity for empathy. The elements of empathy involve our minds which allow us to understand why someone would feel a certain way (cognition), our feeling an awareness of another’s sadness and wanting to relieve those painful feelings (heart), and the ability to take action to help relieve the person’s sadness or other negative emotion and situation (compassion). Some people have greater empathy than others, and some have none at all.
“About five percent of the U. S. population is born without an ability to feel empathy,” says Jenkins. This is considered a mental health disorder called narcissistic personality disorder. Such people can be very successful in business or their profession because they know how to get their way and don’t care about how other people feel. They need admiration and are overly sensitive to criticism, never admit they are wrong, and will never learn empathy because they don’t want to change.
Most of us, however, feel empathy to one degree or another, and we can increase our empathy by being mindful, recognizing our own feelings and developing the ability to imagine how another person is feeling in similar circumstances. Why does the world need empathy? We find in the book of Genesis in the Bible that humans were created to be in relationship with God and others. As we experience relationship with God and other people, we find that we get back what we give. Empathy leads us to treat each other kindly and to receive kindness in return. Ultimately, empathy makes the world a better place to live.