“If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can't survive.”

Source: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

Source: Turning to one another (2002), p. 92

Trump campaign speech in Greenville, North Carolina http://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/15/politics/donald-trump-classified-information/ (6 September 2016)
2010s, 2016, September

Lammond in Ch. 36 p. 227
Into the Green (1993)

Where Is God (2009, Thomas Nelson publishers)

Variant: I think it's easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It's hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.
Source: Hannibal

First Mansions, Ch. 1, as translated by E. Allison Peers (1961) p. 18
Interior Castle (1577)
Context: It is no small pity, and should cause us no little shame, that, through our own fault, we do not understand ourselves, or know who we are. Would it not be a sign of great ignorance, my daughters, if a person were asked who he was, and could not say, and had no idea who his father or mother was, or from what country he came? Though that is a great stupidity, our own is incomparably greater if we make no attempt to discover what we are, and only know that we are living in these bodies and have a vague idea, because we have heard it, and because our faith tells us so, that we possess souls. As to what good qualities there may be in our souls, or who dwells within them, or how precious they are — those are things which seldom consider and so we trouble little about carefully preserving the soul's beauty. All our interest is centred in the rough setting of the diamond and in the outer wall of the castle – that is to say in these bodies of ours.

Song lyrics, Blood on the Tracks (1975), You're a Big Girl Now

"What Is Empathetic Superintelligence?" https://www.abolitionist.com/transhumanism/index.htm presentation, 29 Jan. 2011