Empathy Against Torture

I’m spending a lot of time working with anxiety and awareness at the moment. It is obviously work that is well worth doing, and when I come across clients who feel that they do not have the right to be helped, because there are people who are in worse circumstances, I try my best to convey to them their incomparable, individual worth. There are always people worse off and better off than ourselves and as I see it, we are all interconnected and we can only start with ourselves, both for our own good and the good of the world.

Of course I genuinely believe this. But once every few months I get a bulletin from the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and it shakes me from head to toe. I feel helpless and that what I do to help people in unimaginably desperate circumstances is laughably small and quite futile given the scale of the problem. This passes as I let the actual survivors’ stories and facts sink in, the incredible sadism and torture perpetrated by people, people like us.

I wonder (although it is a less of a musing and more a feeling of bashing my head up against the question) how human beings can do such things to other people. Is it a lack of moral values? Should religions or humanism or some kind of code be refined somehow or better enforced? Codes and religions seem helpless here when a society’s values break down (by which I do not mean binge drinking and a decline in the quality of television but when people start killing their neighbours as in the Balkans or Rwanda all too recently) or indeed when society’s values change and start to support killing. So what can inoculate us against behaving in this way, whatever the circumstances?

I think the answer is empathy, no more no less. So in our humble ways, when we consciously practice empathy as we do, for example, during counselling, we are doing something vitally important. It’s also important to offer practical support in every way we can to people whose anxieties are rooted in real experiences of terrible brutality that were often officially sanctioned by the societies in which they lived. These people usually go on to be discriminated against in countries such as the UK where they seek safety.

Let’s all do what we can.

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