Is it possible to ‘feel’ another’s pain? Not entirely, according to Nietzsche.
Feelings are our emotional response to events. Our emotional response is shaped by our experience. Unless, two people have the SAME experience, it is impossible for two people to ‘feel’ the same way about an identical event.
So why should we help others unconditionally when we do not know how others ‘feel’, thus do not know whether others will help us when we are in need.
Well i think you would help that person regardless of ‘‘why’’ your helping them. If they’d killed someone or lost somebody they love, ask your self why you would help them? Because you care about them? You care about the person your helping? I don’t think you help someone because you want to help in a paticular situation but rather because you care for that person.
As to whether they’d help me. That isn’t really relevent because that could be your only reason for helping them in the first place?
When your completely non-discrimitary to someone. Then you can begin to share their emotions.
Psychiatrists try to, but only read at the most 3 signs of body movement hinting their patients emotions. Its unintentional reading someone else’s feelings, thinking what their emotions might be going through.
First: We don’t have to feel someone’s pain, to help them.
Second: We can understand what a person might be going through without actually experiencing their pain, to help them.
Third: We can feel sympathy, empathy or a need for charity and help them, not that we must or should or have to, it’s our own prerogative, our choice.
Feelings are universal so we can always identify with them perhaps not to the same extent and sometimes perhaps even more. A child could be in pain but the mother could feel the pain even more. And we certainly don’t help someone thinking that that someone will help us someday, that’s not help that’s business.
The mother could be feeling ‘‘a’’ pain even more, not the same paticular pain as the child but a whole different feeling so how can you help even though you don’t know what they are feeling? This is why i sad that you help ‘‘someone’’ regardless of what position they’re in.
the reason why you should help people is because you have extra resources to spare that they need. if youre motivation for helping people is to get something in return, i dont think i would call that charity. more like a business transaction.
so in that case your right, if you dont know want kind of business transaction you are getting yourself into, youd be wrong to expect much of a return.
then again, if the recipient of your donations is a pure parasite who hates you, id think twice. that doesnt describe any humans i know though. the thing is, only help them if they have the potential to contribute to the world, but dont expect to receive those contributions yourself from the same people you are helping.
To begin to fully understand anothers feelings.
3 Simple Steps
Look at yourself, and if you can’t be honest even with yourself. Like how to treat your self mentality, and physically. Then your depressed.
If not depressed, don’t listen to stereotypes to judge the person you are trying to understand (Do you judge some “black man,” on how a supposed non-bias “white” psychiatrist reads about a “white man’s” depression prone symptoms?? No!!). Look at how you felt happiest and saddest in your life, then look at the person your talking to, trying to be as non-discrimitary/non-stereotyping as possible. But begin to stereotype, if you see them stereotyping for you doing nothing wrong in the conversation (“Everydays a new day/Try not to rekindle fueds, when you conversate normally”). Questioning them subliminaly with the best slur you have. (P.S. “slur” is a play off of normal english grammer to subliminaly give someone up about something to yourself).
Then you can begin to try to understand someone else’s emotions/feelings.
Trust I’d be a 101% Certified Psychiatrist to people who want to hear the truth.
yeah there are people called empaths. basically anyone who trains for this ability can feel the pain of others. there you go.
Empathy and sympathy are not the same thing, you can have sympathy without empathy.
I think that sympathy or compassion arising spontaneously from empathy might be a more “real” emotion.
Where as in the absence of real empathy, sympathy is a “learned” reponse. However it can appear to be or be mistaken for real sympathy or compassion, and is even appropriate if that the best we can do, its just not real compassion. We are in fact jus trying to “be good”, so that we can like ourselves.
To me the only good reason to help someone is because I want to, simply put it makes me feel happy.
I was not always like this, I used to pretend to want to help because I thought that is what I was “should” do, and I wanted to be accepted by my peers. I in fact believed I was a scoiciopathic personalitity, and maybe at that time I was, although I think in truth the empathy was always there, just very deeply hidden from me because I so feared my emotions.
It took many painfull experiences, as well as a willingness to experience my own pain fully before I was able to allow myself to feel real empathy.
Real empathy is for me still quite painfull to experience, I suspect this is so for many of us. Finding it was also the biggest gift I was ever given by the creator. Had I not developed a willingness to experience that pain I could not be happy and whole today. If we hide from the pain of empathy we never get to see the softer, more vulnerable side of our selves… the part that leads us to help because we WANT to.
We are so afriad to feel the pain of empathy that we see only the hard shell of our own armour and think that is all there is, that we are missing something or are somehow evil.
Such a person can never be happy, though he may learn to fake it, just like he fakes compassion/ sympathy or empathy.