Empathy is something you cannot learn.
You can learn behavior and adapt into a pattern simulating that of someone with empathy, but it is impossible to feel what you don’t.
At the same time, it is impossible to turn off empathy. I have spoken to countless empathetic individuals who have time and time confirmed what I already knew:
Even when your mind tells you that there are situations in which you would be much better off not having empathy, you still cannot stop feeling for those who might hurt you in one form or another.
The only advice I have been able to give so far:
Hide your empathy from others.
The problem with empathy is that it attracts the wrong people.
I agree Mike. I think its genetic. I just wonder how much a person’s childhood/environmental factors/etc., affects their capacity to feel empathy? Like if a bad early life experience(for example) could make someone have more empathy or less.
I think there are shortcuts where something triggers the soul and the mind’s memory and warrants a more immediate reaction. There can also a delay of the mind allowing oneself to allow the soul to react when there is something that you yourself have adapted to accepting as it was a norm when you grew up.
Overall, I keep thinking about what one student wrote when I asked “What is love?” and the answer included “You cannot force someone to love you and you cannot force someone not to love you”.