Hello there. Welcome to the Mathiaship Barker podcast. My name is Mathias and I'm a

psychotherapist in Spokane, Washington. And this is a podcast about mental health and moving

towards what's meaningful, even despite hardship. And I'm super excited to share this episode

with you. This is, you know, I first ran into Paul Bloom's book against empathy. Maybe a year after

my work at Lutheran Community Services, which was an agency that I specialized doing work with

sexual maladaptive behavior. For those of you who might not know that part of my story, I used to

work almost exclusively with kids who maybe sexually assaulted or had relations with other kids that

were really unhealthy and kind of just work for recovery with kids who particularly were the ones

addressing other children. And so I received training in that area and spent like a whole year

just like learning and scouring the research. And what I found in that research that was really

interesting was that empathy training wasn't really at the top of the list for treatment for

maladaptive sexual behavior. And I thought that was a bit strange and I remember asking my supervisor,

like why don't we do, you know, anything with empathy training? It seems like if you talk kids

what it was like to be in those, you know, the other kids shoes, then they would feel less, I don't

know, less driven to act aggressively towards them. And what they found in the research is that

that wasn't really the case because just because you have the capacity to understand where the other

person's coming from or what it's like to be the other person doesn't mean you have altruistic

intentions with that information. Like you can just as easily use that heightened awareness,

that heightened empathy to take advantage of somebody else or to use somebody else or to

to create a to create an environment where you can manipulate that for your own ends.

And so it wasn't just enough to show, you know, the child what it was like to be the other kid

who was suffering, it was there needs to be something more, there needs to be a motivational

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