We Need to Stop Talking About Empathy

It's almost impossible to achieve and mostly pretentious self aggrandizing bullshit.

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Empathy is often considered a soft blanket, the comfort of understanding, the nurture of community, and a plush, warm shared experience. However, it is usually more a threadbare rug of exaggerated sympathy, stained by ego and not strong enough to hold together under the heavy footsteps of genuine suffering.

So when we open our communication toolkit, we should remove two tools:  unearned empathy and know-it-all ism. They are cousins. 

Chuck them.   

Unmerited empathy and know-it-all-ism purport to deliver information. However, so much of our lived experience is not captured by information alone; it is formed in a unique emotional context, so it is almost impossible for empathy to move past sympathy. But if the emotional context does not match the target of empathy, it is not genuine empathy; it is just threadbare sympathy masquerading as empathy; it is self-focused attention-seeking wearing the garb of empathy. know-it-allismIf

The empath asserts that they have walked in the recipient’s shoes, but this assertion is often based on hubris and self-delusion. It offers nothing to the recipient but requires them not to act annoyed when hearing the "I understand your story" while forcing them to express gratitude for the empathy missile that failed to launch.

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My friend was raised by her grandmother; her grandmother was a second mother by role and degree of attachment. Her grandma cared for her when she was young, and my friend cared for her grandmother when her grandmother was old.  They had a deep, meaningful, loving relationship; when my friend suddenly lost her grandmother, her heart was broken; she was devastated.  But she had other friends with grandmothers who had recently passed; their grandmothers lived in faraway lands, and they saw them every year or two, sent birthday cards, and exchanged pleasant shallow wishes.