empathy and allopathy

The word allopathy has two latin roots: it essentially means "to be against suffering". When faced with something wrong, allopathic medicine is rooted in the ideas of cutting it out or drugging it. The holistic health movement grew up to include other holistic practices and the idea of integrated medicine is now in full swing: working with the natural healing processes of the body to create better health and wellness, rather than fighting disease. Very different.

The book "don't think of an elephant" reveals the strength and weakness of the allopathic approach to anything: what I pay attention to tends manifest. When I hear the phrase, I think of an elephant. My mind ignores the "don't".

For example, I've spent a lot of my time, energy, money and brain capacity trying not to be miserable and trying not to fail. This path, as anyone knows who has tried it, is bound to misery and failure.

I grew up in the generation of men whose fathers, teachers and employers, in a well-meaning effort to help us improve, thought we needed to know all the things that were wrong with us, as if that knowledge alone was sufficient to help us improve by "correcting our deficiencies". This was the allopathic approach to parenting, teaching and employing: focusing on what's wrong. I'm being careful not to be ironic here and suggest that the allopathic approach is bad. Knowing a deficiency is a useful first step but it's not the only step. Focusing on what's wrong tends to bring me more of what's wrong. The first step in solving a problem is understanding the problem, but as Einstein famously said, a problem is not solved at the level of the problem. Beating someone over the head with their deficiencies does not work. The very question: "what is not working", is not a solution. It only defines the problem. There is something that we all have in us that does work. WE need only use what we have.

The word empathy also has to latin roots: it essentially means "put feeling into something". This kind of thinking is the positive analog to allopathy as it focuses not on what's not there but what is there. The important questions of an empathetic person is: what is working that we have to build on? Allopathy identifies an opportunity and empathy puts a vision in place with the necessary emotion to drive it home.

Spending some of my attention on what's not working is a good start. Spending most of my attention on building on what is working is the only way to finish what I start. It is the path out of misery and failure to higher levels of happiness and success.