I'm always leery of people who are convinced of their tremendous empathy because in my experience they're often so certain they know how others feel that they dispense with the unnecessary bother of actually listening to them.
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Replying to @SusieusMaximus @Hi_Mike_Gorrie and
If you believe that "empathy" is a quality rather than an action you're already on very dangerous ground I mean that's true of any word for a positive quality -- saying that you ARE honest or you ARE smart or you ARE humble or whatever
2 replies 5 retweets 32 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @SusieusMaximus and
But "empathy" in particular because people think it's actually a magical superpower of some kind -- the "empathy" so many people on the Internet talk about is clearly something that simply does not exist
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SusieusMaximus and
There is no amount of emotion someone can feel, however intense, however justified, that will *actually cause someone else to feel that same emotion* I cannot feel sad *because* you are sad I can see that you are making a sad face, and I can react to that in my own way
1 reply 3 retweets 21 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @SusieusMaximus and
But how specifically I react to that is a result of the combination of all the circumstances of your reaction -- the face you were making, the mood I was in when I saw it, the relationship between you and me
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SusieusMaximus and
And it's not an actual magical thing where the sadness I'm feeling is *your sadness* It's *my sadness*, caused by your face (or your voice, or your posture, or the poem you wrote on your LiveJournal)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SusieusMaximus and
The way people talk about "empathy" is collapsing something that's actually very complicated into something magical and simplistic, because it's comforting All these physical metaphors -- by feeling your sadness I draw it out of you and take it into myself, I lighten your burden
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SusieusMaximus and
(This is not actually possible in any sense whatsoever When you feel better by seeing that your sadness has made another person sad, this is actually a very complicated process contingent on many different factors Which is why it often, despite people's best intentions, fails)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SusieusMaximus and
There's a lot of really fraught shit all tied up in this kind of pat term "empathy" When we attack someone for "lack of empathy" making them a monster it's, by definition, policing another person's emotions, and that's a dangerous thing to do
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SusieusMaximus and
"Lack of empathy" is not a failure of one person to literally feel another person's emotions, because *that is impossible* It is saying that the emotional reaction they had to another person's expressed emotional communication was incorrect/inappropriate
2 replies 3 retweets 12 likes
And that, well, is a can of worms It tends to happen a lot in life that the emotions other people have in reaction to our emotions aren't the reaction we *wanted* at all This can be very frustrating But that's the human condition, because we can't actually read minds
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SusieusMaximus and
And I think that *sometimes* when people are constantly frustrated by other people's "lack of empathy" it is because for whatever reason that communicating emotion isn't automatic psychic powers, it's a fallible human process that sometimes takes effort to accomplish
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SusieusMaximus and
(Which takes us into "emotional labor" discourse, which is a whole other can of worms But I strongly believe when they say "women are more empathetic" they're not talking about magic powers or even "skill", just that women habitually do certain things that men don't do)
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