You might be interested in ACIM’s discussion of empathy:

“To empathize does not mean to join in suffering, for that is what you must refuse to understand. That is the ego’s interpretation of empathy, and is always used to form a special relationship in which the suffering is shared. The capacity to empathize is very useful to the Holy Spirit, provided you let Him use it in His way. He does not understand suffering, and would have you teach it is not understandable. When He relates through you, He does not relate through your ego to another ego. He does not join in pain, understanding that healing pain is not accomplished by delusional attempts to enter into it, and lighten it by sharing the delusion.”

http://acim.home.att.net/text-16-01.html

Empathy as we learn it with NVC always focuses on restoring a sense of wholeness.

You are right. I am interested in wounds for one purpose and one purpose only — as a focus for healing.

Lesson 31: “I am not the victim of the world I see.”

http://acim.home.att.net/workbook031.html

These quotes hit me forcefully in that one way that spiritual texts will hit me when I need to hear what is being said. The relationship I am in now is filled with a lot of past emotional garbage stemming from abuse. I have noticed that if I attempt to empathize with the false (meaning pain) coming from some of the situations she has gone through, it only makes the problem that much more palpable. However, when I am focusing on simply observing and offering only presence, the pain associated with talking about it subsides. This was very illuminating. Thank you.

Some would say that this is sticking one’s head in the sand and burying the problem, but the reverse seems to be true. You are listening to them completely, but you are not acknowledging that the pain or suffering is real. I wonder if psychotherapy actually can exacerbate a problem by making it more real in the patient’s mind if a lot of wrong empathy is used. It is very interesting.

As thinking of yourself wounded, or hurt, there is a chance to sink into that victim mentality that time and again you get stepped on and it’s your lot in life to suffer unduly at the hands of others.

Along with the wounds and their ache, you can always play that external blame game and feel some kind of aggression or negativity towards those in the world you did the hurting.

All of this though is more wallowing about the fact that you have the wound or that you were in the pasted wounded…rather than healing whatever the wound might be.

The act of healing is as much a you-thing as it is a he-thing or an us-thing, and I’d probably argue that the you-component is the largest and most integral.

Granted, healing those wounds and having wounds healed is good, but there is still greater good in getting past the wound/wounded/will be wounded mindset.

Live more than the wounds. But don’t live around them either. This isn’t swiss cheese, you’re not defined by the content with holes in it. You are you because of all the bits: wounds, craters, imagined craters and good parts….it’s all you.

To draw too much attention to what you perceive as wounds is to dilute the attention devoted to what those wounds can do for you going forward.

Look up and out, not down.