I believe everyone is capable of feeling empathy towards others. Unfortunately, many simply refuse, thus letting their own selfishness rule them instead. Does it take practice? Yes. Does it take patience? Yes. Is it worth the trouble? That’s for you to decide. Like it or not, all people are jerks. I mean every one of us can think of at least several people who we think are jerks. Of course that means that somewhere out there someone probably thinks you’re a jerk as well. Everyone - no matter their nationality, their skin color or their gender, has problems. Cancer, illness, heartache, hurt feelings, bad days, missed opportunities - they strike us all. How many times has your problem been so deep that you think no one else in the entire world could possibly know what you’re going through? How many times have you wished that there were someone, somewhere who could empathize with you? Yet so often, when we see someone else having a problem we simply turn a deaf ear to them. “That’s their problem, not mine”. Many times our problems are so deep that we get fully involved in them, ignoring others around us. “Hey, you jerk, why don’t you watch where you’re going?” We can’t know what another person is thinking. How do we know that they bumped into us because they were dwelling on the sad fact that a loved one was just diagnosed with incurable cancer? Maybe it was because they were rude and thought that their phone conversation was more important.
Every one of us goes through problems in our lives. Yet those problems make us better able to empathize with another when they go through that same problem. For example, someone who has lost a spouse knows more about how another who’s going through the same thing feels than a person who’s never experienced that problem. If you were having problems in your marriage, who would you rather talk to about it – a person who’d been divorced 8 times or someone who’s been married to the same person for 50 years? Empathy. It’s something we’re all capable of doing. But it takes effort. We have to set aside our problems in order to empathize with others. And that’s hard.
“I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet”
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Now, being an empath IS heredity (from the genes). An empath is a person who’s able to sense other people’s emotions just by being around them. They don’t have to speak to the other person or even see them to feel the emotions. Sometimes those emotions can be so strong that the empath actually takes them on themselves. Many empaths have to learn to block foreign emotions (not always easy to do) so that they can live normal lives. I’m a partial empath as was most of my family. My mom was a full empath. It took her 70 years to learn how to block other people’s emotions. Some call being an empath a gift, others call it a curse. I call it very annoying.
officegirl 