The profound injustice of refusing empathy

Sean Fitzpatrick • June 27, 2023
A group of people are standing in a room holding signs.

Friends,

On a Thursday afternoon in early May, I sat with a group of courageous advocates shaken by their experiences at the state capitol in Austin the week before. Legislation banning medical care for transgender youth was working its way inexorably through the statehouse, and parents, children, and their allies were working feverishly to have a voice in decisions being made about their lives. If their voices were heard, they were ignored. On May 2, state troopers cleared activists protesting the legislation from the chamber, detaining two on charges that were quickly dropped. The governor signed the bill into law June 2, in the face of overwhelming medical evidence that the act would harm, not protect, youth.

This circle of faces grappling with their experiences – wise, determined, frightened, angry – remain vividly present for me, nearly two months later.  I feel profound sorrow and deepening shame. We Texans have told these precious humans that they are inhuman.

This isn't an exaggeration. One of the core documents guiding the development of this legislation is the current party platform of its authors, which opposes "all efforts to validate transgender identity."*  The choice of words is fascinating, and telling. It suggests of course that the endgame is not protecting children, but controlling the individual's experience of their personhood – indeed, determining the terms of one's existence. It suggests that we can stop the movement of the human psyche, which is far more complex, differentiated, and profound than our categories can begin to capture.

Along with those courageous advocates from the Transgender Education Network of Texas , one of The Jung Center's partners over the last decade is the Human Rights Campaign. Legislation like this has led them to declare a state of emergency for the LGBTQ+ community. The same party platform that refuses to see and acknowledge trans and gender-expansive identities also defines homosexuality as an "abnormal lifestyle choice,"* again in the face of overwhelming medical and psychological evidence to the contrary.

Words matter. They can liberate as well as subjugate, open ways of being and close them off. They cannot change the reality of the psyche, but they can exclude us from what we most need: community. The term I used above, "gender-expansive," was coined by researchers working for the Human Rights Campaign after a pathbreaking survey of LGBTQ+ youth ten years ago: "The term 'gender-expansive' came out of this report to classify youth who did not identify with traditional gender roles but were otherwise not confined to one gender narrative or experience. This term allows us to talk about youth who don’t meet our 'traditional' understandings of gender without putting their identity in a box."**

The researchers listened to the experience of LGBTQ+ youth with empathy and humility, and they developed language to increase experiences of freedom, dignity, and belonging. They created room for psyche to move in the world.

This is our task, too. Over the course of our lives, our old ways of understanding the world inevitably change, through experience, through trauma, through breakthroughs and breakdowns. At each of these moments, our growth depends on our humility before the mystery of existence, our willingness to carry our own uncertainty while new ways of being are emerging.

Our personal work is psychological and social at the same time. Listen to the voices of directly-affected people. Notice how and where they are being dehumanized and excluded from community. Educate yourself about their history and how they think and write about their own experience. Deeply question the motives and emotions of those who would act on their behalf without drawing them close, without empowering them to determine their own futures, without affirming their essential humanity. Our own humanity, and the strength of our community, depends on it.

Warmly,

Sean

* https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/texas-gops-new-platform-calls-gay-people-abnormal-rejects-trans-identi-rcna34530

** https://www.hrc.org/resources/resources-on-gender-expansive-children-and-youth

‌

Photo by Leila Saidane/The Texas Tribune –   https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/02/texas-trans-kids-health-care-ban/

Share

Recent Posts

Overlapping circles in shades of blue, purple, pink, green, and orange against a light gray background with textured appearance.

In the Community

By Alvia Baldwin • February 16, 2026
In my professional life, I am the Director of Counseling for Alief ISD, one of the most culturally diverse districts in Texas, with our students speaking over 85 languages. In my personal life, however, I am like many of you—a spouse, a parent and grandparent, a sibling, a daughter, and, always, a champion for mental health. During the height of the pandemic, all of those roles were stressed, strained, and stretched. In my professional life, I was feeling those same pressures, especially as I led our District Crisis Response Team (DCRT), which is deployed throughout our district when there is a death of a staff member or student. Last school year, when I had the great fortune to become more acquainted with The Jung Center through the generous support of H-E-B, our DCRT was being requested more and more frequently to support issues of death, grief, and loss. I became increasingly concerned that my team of amazingly dedicated counseling professionals may begin to give way to compassion fatigue and burnout. I shared my concerns with The Jung Center team, and Dr. Sean Fitzpatrick and Dr. Alejandro Chaoul created a dynamic two-day training for our team. I vividly remember that before the first day ended, there were already members of my team in tears as they expressed in small groups some of the collective toll of trying to balance work and home, and how it was impacting their emotional wellness. Over those two days, The Jung Center provided us space and understanding as they walked us through self-care versus community care, how to combat burnout, and mindfulness techniques among other tools, reminding us to navigate life in healthy ways. And if that was not enough, The Jung Center returned to present a full-day workshop to over 100 of our amazing school and district nurses, who, at the time, had conducted more than 25,000 COVID tests over nearly a two-year period, always with a warm smile—while understanding that every interaction could have put them at personal risk. During their “Day of Care for the Caregivers,” as we coined it, the nursing staff kept coming up to me and saying, “I can’t believe someone did this for us. Someone did this just for us.” Since then, The Jung Center has sought and received funding from The Junior League to return to Alief. This year, Jasmine Shah and Dr. Fitzpatrick led two workshops for our counseling team as well as a full-day workshop for our district and school nurses. So, when I think about the impact The Jung Center had in Alief ISD, I think about the thoughtful support and stellar resources that The Jung Center provided for our counseling and nursing staff to ensure that we were emotionally healthy while we cared for ourselves and others. For that, we, along with the over 40,000 students that we serve, say, “Thank you!”
Abstract watercolor art; blues, greens, and browns blend, with a central, light-colored figure and radiant halo-like shape above.

Sherpas and Guides

By Karleen Koen • February 2, 2026
When I had passed midlife but didn’t quite think of myself yet as old, I came across a quote from Carl Jung: “No, thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening become a lie.”* The words hit me in some truth center of my being. They clarified feelings of unease, displacement, restlessness, uncertainty—quiet and deep—that had been building in me since midlife. They gave me the beginning of a way to age differently from what I had seen modeled in my family and the culture around me. Family— despair and bitterness. Culture—Botox and pills. And then I stumbled onto the beginning of the Community for Conscious Aging at The Jung Center. It became a home with fellow sojourners in this journey that we all face: growing old and dying. How does one do that in a way that is vital and purposeful, willing and willful—creative, and real, and in community? How does one live from midlife onward when the way ahead is unclear and goals of the past may no longer work as well as once they did? There is no ritual or meaning out there to help me move into this. Carl Jung writes in his essay “Stages of Life” that there is no university for midlife onward, but I feel like the Community for Conscious Aging gives me what I need. I find knowledge and advice. I find people who are on the same journey as I am, or even ahead of me. I find community. I’ve attended free programs, as well as book studies and workshops. Every month, I can hear a speaker over Zoom talk about some aspect of aging, from the practical to the esoteric. The talks are called Lunch & Learns, and they are free. I’ve learned about everything from how to age in place, to what records and documents I need done before I die, to the fact that “my kids don’t want my stuff” and the practice of Swedish death cleaning. This spring, my Lunch & Learn choices are: “Understanding Death in a New Way,” “Ethical Wills,” and “Stories We Inherit.” This spring, I can attend workshops like “Letter to My Children on Inheritance,” “Positive Aging: The Spirituality of Later Life,” or “What Matters Most: How Can We Accept Mortality?” I can meet in circles to talk deeply about anything and everything. I can go to a Jung Center Gallery Artist Talk to learn that creativity is ageless. And being part of The Jung Center means programs exist in its other divisions— The Mind Body Spirit Institute, Creating Your Life, The McMillan Institute for Jungian Studies—that cross over to enrich and feed my life. I’m now 77. I am climbing the high mountain whose summit I cannot see but know is there. Two of my sherpas and guides are the Community for Conscious Aging and what it offers, followed by The Jung Center itself with all its riches. *“The Stages of Life”, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 8)
Colorful abstract painting of trees in a landscape. Reds, blues, and yellows dominate.

My Father’s Telescope

By Lois F. Stark • January 5, 2026
When I was twelve years old, my father took me by one hand. In his other hand, he held a telescope. He led me to our backyard, where he had set up a tripod. As he positioned my eye to the scope, he asked, “Can you imagine what life on other planets might be like?” He was teaching me to wonder as much as he was teaching me astronomy. Telescopes allow us to see the unseen in stars and planets. Imagination is also a telescope for the unseen. My father pointed out the shape of the Little Dipper with its handle ending in the North Star. Once you know north, you can navigate the globe. Thinking back to that moment, he was showing me how to zoom out to infinity, how to zoom out to the possibilities imagination brings, and how to zoom in to the clue that is always available—how to find north. You can be lost in the wonder of infinity and still find your place on Earth. I followed his prompts to zoom out, to practice seeing things from above. When I was in high school, Sputnik went up. This Russian satellite was the first to enter space. It kicked off a space age, a scientific race, and a new worldview—seeing Earth from above. At that moment, I knew immediately what I wanted to be. It was not an astronaut. I wanted to be a “space lawyer”. I wanted to invent the terms that would bring agreement to the biosphere, as admiralty law did for the oceans. I imagined space law as the next iteration of the United Nations. I did not become a space lawyer, but I still practiced zooming out. I joined NBC Network News in Washington, D.C., and made documentaries in Liberia, Abu Dhabi, Israel, Northern Ireland, Cuba, and other countries in tension and transition. Filming foreign cultures was another way to see the unseen, to experience the wild variety of ways to live in this world. Just as the Big and Little Dipper use shape to key us to the stars, I started to think of shape as a way to understand human history. I remembered that when I filmed in tribal cultures, their shelters, social systems, and sacred sites were all circular, from round thatched huts to Stonehenge. When I filmed in cities, it seemed a ladder dominated their worldview, from pyramids to skyscrapers. Today, the network model masters our global lives, from technology to the map of our brain. These thoughts led to my book, The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times . Throughout my life in Houston, I came to The Jung Center as the place to understand the shapes and patterns in human history and in my own life story. I took courses in mythology and fairy tales, studied my night dreams and daydreams, researched symbols and wrote poetry, and took courses in the history of human ideas. The Jung Center is a place of learning, though not a school. It is a center that addresses spirit and mystery, though not a house of worship. It is a place of creative arts, though not a museum. The Jung Center offers us ways to see the unseen, to zoom out to the universe, and to zoom into ourselves.
Show More