Empathy, in spite of its pivotal role in both our individual interactions with other people and in society, is a relatively new construct. As human beings, we are attuned to other people’s distress or pain. Now, however, an interesting new angle to empathy is surfacing. It seems that having experienced pain yourself might make you better equipped to empathize with other people. Ironically, this could mean that pain may actually be good for more reasons than you’d imagine.
Empathy is an important part of being human. It enables you to see the other person’s side of an argument, to understand what is troubling them, and “feel” what is hurting them emotionally, mentally, or physically. But does this feeling extend to actual physical experience too? Can pain itself help you be more empathetic or sympathetic to another person’s problems and pain?
You may also like
What fewer marriages, and more illegitimacy, mean for our economy and our culture Schulz finds it helpful to think of these things in terms of character, a trait that social scientist James Q. Wilson described as a mix of empathy and se…
Empathy – real empathy – is a mysterious phenomenon. It’s reasonable to ask whether we have the capacity to truly tune into other people’s experiences, particularly when they’re traumatic. Perhaps we get closest…
Many of us know that if we want to become more physically healthy, we can exercise. What if we want to improve our emotional health? Are there ways to train emotional “muscles” such as compassion? Would such training improve our lives? Compassion medit…
The first person perspective yields self-awareness; the second person perspective yields empathy.Empathetic PsychopathyEmpathy means “feeling into” — the ability to project ones personality into another person and more fully understand that person. Em…