Fun fact: I think I had to purposefully construct my sense of empathy.
I was literally like psychopath-sadist when I was really young. I didn’t really enact anything irl besides torturing bugs or imagining cartoon characters in pain, but around 4yo I started feeling like I was a bad person because other people didn’t seem to desire to do those things, in fact hero’s in movies purposefully avoided violence.
So the shame/guilt of feeling like I was a monster, a the desire to be like everyone else, lead me to try and make myself feel pain when I hurt other things. When my mother or sisters would tell me to come kill a spider I’d pinch myself or bite my tongue while doing so.
Then, being a curious kid, I started just trying to imagine the physical sensations of being in different bodies and having different injuries. This eventually spread to trying to imagine different emotions and by and by I didn’t have to force myself to feel it anymore. When I see someone/something get hurt, I don’t have to think about it now, I just feel it.
While I’ll admit it is possible that I’m correlating this purposeful imagination with some possible natural development of my brain creating empathy, considering that until recently I only really felt pain, negative emotions, and physical sensations through empathy, I’d say it seems most likely I built it myself.
Since realizing this a few years ago, I have started trying to feel happy/positive empathy too and it does seem like it’s been working. Though, it’s slow going because I’m hella antisocial lol.
Oh and just in case anyone is worried, I’m no longer sadistic at all. I literally can’t bring myself to kill spiders or other bugs, and there are some scenes in movies I can’t stand to watch. I can unfortunately still feel those old feelings and empathize with sadistic characters/actions, but the saccharine feeling of enjoying causing pain actually makes me physically sick now.
I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself, kids are weird in that they can have huge blindspots in their empathy because they’re too young to have had to wear another person’s shoes, so to speak. By the time you’re an adult, either you’ve gone through enough shoes to become a well-adjusted, empathetic person, …or not. But even then, we all have blind spots we can improve on.
So if anything, putting yourself in another person’s/bug’s shoes like you describe in the comment is proactive and should be lauded if you ask me. Lots of people don’t seem to gain empathy until they’re the ones on the other end. Hell, I don’t know you, but consider that maybe you being self-conscious about your capacity for empathy is ironically out of your empathy for the people you interact with. If you really had no empathy, then why would you care?
To me, it feels like there is a big difference between not realizing you are harming others and purposefully causing that harm because you know it is harm.
Blindspots in empathy is like saying something that hurt someone because you didn’t know it hurt them. Sadism is saying something that hurts someone because you know it will hurt them.
There’s definitely a difference between the feeling of sadism and revenge too. One you do because it feels like justice, the other you do because feels like eating candy.
This kind of ties into the answer to “why would you care?” This is actually something I’ve thought about a lot (big suprise lol) and the conclusion I’ve come to is that morality and empathy are not directly correlated.
There is a difference between not stabbing someone because you’d feel that pain, and not stabbing someone because you don’t want to be the cause of someone else’s pain.
Another influence for perceived morality is the desire to be like other people. We’re a social species so lots of us have an innate desire to feel connected to others. Sure there is some desire to be unique but often times that is constrained by the desire to be accepted.
You can satisfy this feeling Patrick Bateman style like most of the psychopaths I’ve met, where you just put up a facade, doing good things only when you know you’re being watched. Or you can satisfy it by doing what I did—which come to find out is basically cognitive behavioral therapy—trying to make yourself want to do the things others think are good.
I’m pretty sure this choice is also based on internal drives where people in the former situation want the benefits that come with being a good person or fitting in, while people in the latter case directly want to fit in, we don’t want to act good, we want to be good.
Honestly that desire to be moral that is separate from empathy can be detrimental. People tend to say that “empathy without bounds is self destruction” but it’s been my experience that the moral obsession is more damaging.
For example, not eating because your roommates have friends over in the kitchen and you would feel rude to interrupt them, is unhealthy and while it is empathy that may make you think you’ll ruin the flow of their conversation, that pain is minimal compared to the pain of not eating. You don’t do it because the empathy hurts, you do it because violating your overactive moral compass hurts.
Anyway this is turning into a rant, so I should stop. I do agree with you that most people seem to lack empathy for others and this is largely because they don’t try to see things from other people’s/things’ perspectives. But I disagree with your hypothesis that empathy is what drove me to increase my capacity for empathy in the first place. I think it was driven by much more self centered drives like pride and the desire to be wanted.
Just like birds are born with wings but it does not make them able to fly, humans have the capacity for empathy but it doesn’t mean it’s complete from birth.
Things need to be cultivated and let grow.
No one and nothing starts at complete. And this is something that we as a society need to learn again.
![Funny Feeling [Litterbox Comics]](https://lemmy.sdf.org/pictrs/image/ce0fea86-052d-4fa4-a272-1c0dfd46e5be.png){kind=link}
Fun fact: I think I had to purposefully construct my sense of empathy.
I was literally like psychopath-sadist when I was really young. I didn’t really enact anything irl besides torturing bugs or imagining cartoon characters in pain, but around 4yo I started feeling like I was a bad person because other people didn’t seem to desire to do those things, in fact hero’s in movies purposefully avoided violence.
So the shame/guilt of feeling like I was a monster, a the desire to be like everyone else, lead me to try and make myself feel pain when I hurt other things. When my mother or sisters would tell me to come kill a spider I’d pinch myself or bite my tongue while doing so.
Then, being a curious kid, I started just trying to imagine the physical sensations of being in different bodies and having different injuries. This eventually spread to trying to imagine different emotions and by and by I didn’t have to force myself to feel it anymore. When I see someone/something get hurt, I don’t have to think about it now, I just feel it.
While I’ll admit it is possible that I’m correlating this purposeful imagination with some possible natural development of my brain creating empathy, considering that until recently I only really felt pain, negative emotions, and physical sensations through empathy, I’d say it seems most likely I built it myself.
Since realizing this a few years ago, I have started trying to feel happy/positive empathy too and it does seem like it’s been working. Though, it’s slow going because I’m hella antisocial lol.
Oh and just in case anyone is worried, I’m no longer sadistic at all. I literally can’t bring myself to kill spiders or other bugs, and there are some scenes in movies I can’t stand to watch. I can unfortunately still feel those old feelings and empathize with sadistic characters/actions, but the saccharine feeling of enjoying causing pain actually makes me physically sick now.
I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself, kids are weird in that they can have huge blindspots in their empathy because they’re too young to have had to wear another person’s shoes, so to speak. By the time you’re an adult, either you’ve gone through enough shoes to become a well-adjusted, empathetic person, …or not. But even then, we all have blind spots we can improve on.
So if anything, putting yourself in another person’s/bug’s shoes like you describe in the comment is proactive and should be lauded if you ask me. Lots of people don’t seem to gain empathy until they’re the ones on the other end. Hell, I don’t know you, but consider that maybe you being self-conscious about your capacity for empathy is ironically out of your empathy for the people you interact with. If you really had no empathy, then why would you care?
To me, it feels like there is a big difference between not realizing you are harming others and purposefully causing that harm because you know it is harm.
Blindspots in empathy is like saying something that hurt someone because you didn’t know it hurt them. Sadism is saying something that hurts someone because you know it will hurt them.
There’s definitely a difference between the feeling of sadism and revenge too. One you do because it feels like justice, the other you do because feels like eating candy.
This kind of ties into the answer to “why would you care?” This is actually something I’ve thought about a lot (big suprise lol) and the conclusion I’ve come to is that morality and empathy are not directly correlated.
There is a difference between not stabbing someone because you’d feel that pain, and not stabbing someone because you don’t want to be the cause of someone else’s pain.
Another influence for perceived morality is the desire to be like other people. We’re a social species so lots of us have an innate desire to feel connected to others. Sure there is some desire to be unique but often times that is constrained by the desire to be accepted.
You can satisfy this feeling Patrick Bateman style like most of the psychopaths I’ve met, where you just put up a facade, doing good things only when you know you’re being watched. Or you can satisfy it by doing what I did—which come to find out is basically cognitive behavioral therapy—trying to make yourself want to do the things others think are good.
I’m pretty sure this choice is also based on internal drives where people in the former situation want the benefits that come with being a good person or fitting in, while people in the latter case directly want to fit in, we don’t want to act good, we want to be good.
Honestly that desire to be moral that is separate from empathy can be detrimental. People tend to say that “empathy without bounds is self destruction” but it’s been my experience that the moral obsession is more damaging.
For example, not eating because your roommates have friends over in the kitchen and you would feel rude to interrupt them, is unhealthy and while it is empathy that may make you think you’ll ruin the flow of their conversation, that pain is minimal compared to the pain of not eating. You don’t do it because the empathy hurts, you do it because violating your overactive moral compass hurts.
Anyway this is turning into a rant, so I should stop. I do agree with you that most people seem to lack empathy for others and this is largely because they don’t try to see things from other people’s/things’ perspectives. But I disagree with your hypothesis that empathy is what drove me to increase my capacity for empathy in the first place. I think it was driven by much more self centered drives like pride and the desire to be wanted.
Just like birds are born with wings but it does not make them able to fly, humans have the capacity for empathy but it doesn’t mean it’s complete from birth.
Things need to be cultivated and let grow.
No one and nothing starts at complete. And this is something that we as a society need to learn again.
I’m glad you found space to grow.
deleted by creator
??? what the fuck
I’m very curious what this deleted comment was