What is empathy?

Empathy is an emotional feeling for someone who is suffering. It is as if a person can feel, and even share, the sufferer's pain. The ancient Greeks came up with this concept and they even taught their citizens how to have empathy. Unfortunately, in modern times, the practice has gone out the window, so to speak. This is the result of the impersonal nature of today's media driven detachment from real human contact. We have become true islands in a sea of digital data, unable to experience real emotion face to face.

Empathy has become a trite ghost of its former meaning. There are many ways that empathy plays a part in everyday living: medical professional and his or her patients; teacher and his or her students; safety forces and the public in need; care giver and his or her person in need; trainers and his or her customer; parent and his or her child; and everyday person and his or her neighbors. In order to feel empathy in these situations, one must understand the emotions and feeling of the person one is interacting with.

As you might have guessed, psychologists and philosophers have had a field day with this idea, and the first thing they did was divide empathy into categories. This is the human way of trying to understand something more spiritual in nature. In the case of Affective empathy one is supposed to have an appropriate emotional response to another person's metal state. I'm sure this is what the psychologists came up with. Cognitive empathy is where one is supposed to understand another person's mental state. That's not going to be easy.

The strange thing about empathy is that children seem to practice it more than adults. You often see children as young as one or two comforting another child. I suppose it's because children live life at a pure emotional and primal level. When people become adults they tend to rationalize things and put them into boxes, so to speak, where they become more formalized. Children see things more through their senses of sight, hearing and touch. They don't start to rationalize what they experience until later when they start to think more abstractly.

One way that we see empathy in action is when there's a disaster. Oftentimes, people come out to help others in a life-threatening situation, and in many cases they ignore their own safety. This was seen in the Oklahoma bombing incident and during the 9/11 attacks. Some scientists believe that empathy is wired into our brains from evolution. They think that it's a survival trait. One proof of this is that we see this type of behavior in animals, particularly in chimpanzees. I don't know about you, but I have seen this empathy-like behavior in dogs. They often show pity for their owner's pain or suffering.

Another way that empathy manifests itself is in empathetic anger. In other words, you get angry when you see someone, especially your friend, being picked on or beaten. It often moves you to help fight off the attacks.

I believe that empathy has suffered from the constant media flow of violence and war. We as a people have become desensitized to other people's suffering. We see it as if it were just another movie. The only time this isn't true is when we see suffering or pain in a movie like 'The fault in Our Stars' where it's part of the plot and meant to invoke emotion.

I might add that impaired empathy is a symptom of mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and it's also a sign of autism. This is also a proof that empathy is wired into our brains because these mental diseases are accompanied by brain dysfunction. In any event we humans must go back to what the Greeks taught us and begin to teach empathy to our youth.

Thanks for reading.