Have you really, really felt another person's emotional pain?

We recently had a sleepover of eight college girls, all in their mid-forties, and late in the night the conversation drifted to sharing of painful experiences. These ranged from loss of a child, to being cheated on, to attempted suicide, etc (mercifully none of us was raped); and we found ourselves weeping and hugging and consoling one another. This sharing of eacb other's pain, which we were not aware of, has brought us very close together, closer than we had ever been. We feel tightly bonded.