I’ve had empathy all my life and empathy is not what made me a good person. I’ve always had very high empathy and yet I haven’t always been a good person.
I had to learn how to be a good person and it took a lot of work. It involved things like gaining the courage to be wrong and to take accountability. The courage to have uncomfortable but necessary conversations. Patience and grace not to immediately jump to conclusions or get angry. I had to learn how to be kind to myself because it was hard for me to be kind to others when I wasn’t kind to myself. I had to address my cognitive distortions, like my Black and White thinking, and learn to reframe them so I would see people in their fullness and not just in “good” or “bad” terms. I had to learn (and am still learning) how to feel safe again after trauma so I would be less hypersensitive to people’s actions and feel like everyone was unsafe. I had to unlearn unconscious bias and learn about how I may be perpetuating forms of social discrimination so I could try to stop unintentionally harming groups of people. And on and on. It took hard work to be a good person. It still does. Being a good person is an ongoing learning process that never really ends.
It doesn’t automatically come with empathy.
So to every ableist person who keeps coming down on people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder for their lack of empathy– you don’t actually seem to know what it takes to be a good person. Empathy and lack thereof do not affect your ability to be a good person.
I have hyper-empathy thanks to Borderline Personality Disorder, and it didn’t make me a better person. I chose to be a better person. And I choose it everyday. And when I fail, it’s definitely not because I lack empathy, because I unfortunately have that in spades.
Empathy does not equal a good person.
Lack of empathy does not equal a bad person.
jacobvanloon
annaxmalina
areudirty
tangentwithtanner
vaporwave
dededos
kaledo-art
snowghoul
