so figuring out that
“A person in my vicinity is sad and therefore I am also sad because I am experiencing empathy”
and
“A person in my vicinity is sad and therefore I am feeling distress because I care about how they feel but currently can’t help alleviate their sadness”
are two different things was mindblowing
Wait.
WHAT?
The first is empathy, specifically emotional empathy, where you can effectively “feel” another person’s emotions and your own emotions reflect theirs as an automatic response.
The second is compassion, which is being aware of someone’s distress and having the desire to alleiviate it.
Generally, what people call empathy is actually compassion. You can care about someone’s pain and happiness without actually feeling those things with them, and you can feel another person’s emotions without actually caring about them.
you can do both at once.
And then there is:
Someone close to me is sad and i don’t know how to react so i just do nothing
Yeah I feel that one as well. I think we were just raised by people with 0 emotional maturity.
The 'perks' of divorced parents
