As mentioned a few posts ago, I've had exams over the past few weeks, hence the short updates; I've been working more or less all day every day for a month and it's had a significant effect on me, changing my outlook and depositing a load of new ideas.
One of the first things that hit me was my lack of empathy, or perhaps more accurately the realisation of just how difficult it is to empathise with people. The all-consuming stress and workload of this time of year is something that always seems to take me by surprise, and now just a few days after my final exam I am already finding it difficult to evaluate how I felt just a week or two ago. When someone mentions to me that they have exams it's not a big deal, I forget the immense effort that revising entails, practically shutting down your life for a few weeks; if I can barely empathise with myself a week on, what chance do I have of understanding what someone else is going through?
This is just a specific example; I have realised that the difficulty of empathising applies to most everything. I can't really understand someones pain unless I am experiencing the same pain myself, I can't re-conjure any of the most intense feelings I have had in my own life, let alone understand what it must be like for someone else feeling them. There's a glimpse there, for sure, I understand what someone means when they say they are happy or sad, or in any other state of mind, but there is such a gulf between knowing and feeling, to understanding on an intellectual or even emotional level and placing yourself into the situation of the other person, to feel what they feel.
Can empathy be cultivated? I think so. I think the more time and effort you place into manufacturing a particular perspective in your own mind, the closer you are going to get to someone you are trying to communicate with who is in that situation. Having past experience is a massive help too, the closest you are going to get to real understanding is if you are going through the same thing at the same time; but even with the greatest possible effort, there's always going to be a gulf between any two people; the gulf of individuality, of personal perspective.
Perhaps not being able to empathise fully isn't such a bad thing, if we could understand what everyone else feels we would never need to venture outside our own mind, never have the satisfaction of really communicating and understanding someone else.
Try to remember pain, you can’t. You remember you were in pain but not the physical feeling. Why is this? I think its because you dont want to remember - you dont want to relive it, its the same with emotional pain. Try to remember being depressed. Thats why i think its hard to feel empathy. Seeing someone else under those conditions reminds you what you felt but you dont want to relive your pain. Perhaps its too much to assume that your forgetting about it on purpose without knowing it but it certainly seems to be.
Although it is difficult to remember pain, often the most vivid memories you have are created in a time of emotional extremes, maybe the vivid nostalgia with the lost emotion makes it even harder to be empathetic.
I can’t really see what your problem is regarding empathy. I’d have thought anyone with an imagination and a willingness to use it, would find empathizing with another person relatively easy ? OK, so experience is relevant, but by the age of 30, say, most people should have learned enough from life to relate to another persons ‘feelings’. And it only takes a little bit of effort to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes for a moment !