This is a short post, mostly to be able to refer to it in the future from other posts — and maybe this is exactly how you got here, from another post.
In the end of Oct 2025 I went to a workshop offered by Dominic Barter [1] on what he calls Empathic Support Systems. I had been aware of and experimenting with support systems already before [2], but during that workshop, something clicked for me. These are my words based on what currently makes sense to me (but which might be different from how Dominic would describe it):
Empathy (in Empathic Support Systems) is whatever helps us to get back into an empowered, creative flow. Or, from another angle, whatever removes the blockages that leave us unable to move forward.
Two things, that struck me and shifted things for me, were:
- It’s about movement, not self-connection (although that is likely part of it). This isn’t exactly new to me, but it further shifted the emphasis. And “movement” is very generally, in the sense of moving towards what I want to move to.
- Whatever in the sense of whatever works: It’s not about particular (conversation-requiring) “empathy recipes”, but about whatever gets me back into that empowered, creative flow — which might a slap in my face, if it turns out that that is indeed what is most effective for me in a particular context.
For an example of a somewhat unorthodox, small support systems read the Unboxing Tax Letters. All that was required in that case was the presence of a friendly human being who loved offering his support in this way to me.
[1] Dominic isn’t easy to find online, but www.restorativecircles.org is one of his (outdated) websites.
[2] In the NGL Community, in which I’ve participated for many years, support was always core to what we were doing.