Blog Post #3
I think Jamison’s piece does give us an example of an alternative way of relating to understanding and caring for others that challenges and expands the definitions of empathy and compassion of Bloom and Ma. She expands on Bloom’s idea that compassion is better than empathy because how far can empathy go. She questions empathy’s usefulness. “When does empathy actually reinforce the pain it wants to console?”(page 239). That is another part of Bloom’s argument. With empathy, you’re just feeling what the other person is feeling but you don’t understand the pain. With compassion, you are just being there for that person and showing you care. She also expands on Ma’s idea that people who are going through the same experiences can express empathy more with each other because they have experienced it. She touches on having similar experiences that can help you better understand someone if you didn’t go through the same experience or a similar one. “I don’t offer my parasite story as decisive fable. Morgellons patients aren’t necessarily like the version of me who had a worm or like the version of me who didn’t. I honestly don’t know what causes the pain they fell: the rustling on their skin, their lesions, the endless threads they find emerging. I only know what I learned from my botfly and its ghost: it was worse when I didn’t have the worm than when I did.” (page 227). Ma says that empathy allows you to have a broader understanding of different areas for careers. Yet when with Morgellons went to the doctors they didn’t get any empathy. They were asked if they were on drugs and called crazy and delusional. When they brought threads, flecks, and fuzz to the doctors to show them that what is happening is happening to them it started to be called “the matchbox sign”, a signal that the patient had become so determined to prove his own disease that he could no longer be trusted.” (page 223). There was no empathy or compassion from those doctors and the doctors that still don’t believe them.
I have mentioned before on how Jamison talks about having similar experiences can help somewhat understand someone else going through something similar. This challenges Ma because if you think this way that people who have gone through the same experiences can fully understand. The people who have Morgellons can do that. They can fully understand and fully express empathy. Jamison does not show the empathy she wanted to show and express even though she went through a similar experience it does not allow her to fully express empathy and understanding. Jamison challenges Bloom with her approach to understanding people who have profoundly different experiences from her own by he says people who have the same skin color and ethics will feel more empathy when being compared to people of different skin colors. She may not have experienced the empathy she wanted to express but even though these people were different backgrounds, races, and genders than her she still felt the same empathy for all of them. She didn’t feel more empathy for those who were the same gender or same skin color. She felt empathy and compassion for all of them equally.
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