Here is an adapted excerpt from my upcoming book, Communication Breakthrough: How Using Brain Science and Listening to Body Cues Can Transform Your Relationships. This part is about how to listen when another’s pain bothers you. 

We all have times when other people’s pain makes us feel uncomfortable. So we often reach for ways to brush away our discomfort. How can we turn our hearts to a more compassionate stance to a person in pain? Take a breath and bring all your attention to the other person and let your ego concerns take a back seat for a while. How can we show a person that we’re interested in their feelings? Look the person in th...

BACKGROUND: I woke up this morning with a flash of fear from reading commentary warning about the trajectory toward fascism of the USA government under Trump. Items on the list toward fascism are things like - hatred of intellectual thought (elites), suppression and attempts to control the press (fake news), picking a vulnerable population as the enemy (e.g. immigrants) and blaming everything on them; lying and cheating with impunity, militarizing the police, racism, sexism, undermining judicial functions, demanding loyalty, denigrating challenging voices, disdain for human rights, corporate power protected over labor power, preying on people’s...