What is empathy?

I don't know if it can be taught, but you can start by trying to put yourself in other peoples shoes and how they would react to various occurences.

Example: you want to tell someone something negative about them. Would you want someone to say the same thing about you? Doesn't matter wether or not it's true.

Basically, treat others the way you want to be treated, but also understand they might have different needs, emotions, feelings, preferrences etc than you.

I think that's something instinctive in people. Or it's taught as a child. It's about considering the well being of others. You have it or you don't. It requires people getting off themselves. Not everyone has that. Me first and only is a real thing.

It really can be. When someone’s been hurt especially deeply or repeatedly their emotional energy often gets rerouted toward protection and survival. Empathy requires openness, and pain tends to close doors.
But here’s the part people often overlook: losing access to empathy isn’t a moral failure. It’s a response. A shield. A way the mind says, “I can’t afford to feel everything right now.”
🧭 A few things tend to happen after someone’s been hurt:
• Emotional bandwidth shrinks. When you’re busy managing your own pain, it’s harder to hold space for someone else’s.
• Trust becomes scarce. Empathy feels risky when the world has shown it can hurt you.
• Self‑protection takes priority. The brain is wired to avoid repeating danger, not to be endlessly compassionate.
• Perspective narrows. Hurt can make everything feel personal, even when it isn’t.
None of this means empathy is gone forever. It just means it’s harder to access while healing is still in progress.
🌱 The encouraging part is that empathy often returns as safety returns.
When someone feels understood, supported, or simply not under threat, their capacity to understand others tends to expand again. It’s like a muscle that stiffens when injured but loosens as it heals.

You seem like a nice person. And you deserve happiness.

Have you ever been to a funeral for someone you didn't know that well, but you knew someone they were survived by?

Empathy is the way you didn't cry until you saw them cry and for that instant their pain became yours.

Surely you have empathy, it doesn't have to be for people, it can be for animals, or something else.
Try to tap into it and expand horizontally.

Empaty develops when you try to understand where the other person is coming from and try to understand how would it feel if that was you.

That being said, some people don't have it because of psychological conditions

Empathy is when you're able to understand other people's emotions, like you can imagine those emotions yourself. You can develop more empathy by frequently putting yourself in someone else's place, and think: "How would I feel in this situation if I was them right now?" After a while, it might start coming to you more naturally. (=

Ability to understand and feel emotions of others and have compassion. It's normally contextual and conditional though. For most it depends on their moral values, personal bias etc., so for example they don't have compassion for someone they see as evil or not important enough. You can test how people feel when you show them some movie scene where a group of people beat up a person without any context and then reveal it's some major POS abuser.

As for not important enough - it's usually some emotional fatigue. The wars happening on the other side of the world. The news blandly announcing deaths of children every day. People are like: 😐 But select a group of few, give them names, tell their stories, put sad emotional music in the background and everyone will be like: 😭 and 😡

I don't know if it's possible to develop it.

Feelings are like a muscle.
I discovered when I was young that if I do weights I get stronger.
Then I discovered the more I exerted my brain the sharper it got.
Now I have discovered the when you practice love, love increases.

Empathy is usually learned early in childhood, yet once passed the age of seven, it becomes very hard to learn. And like anything hard to learn, the more effort you must put into it.

So how badly do you wish to learn empathy? Do you have the drive and single mindedness to learn empathy?


Otherwise it's a waste of effort by the teacher.

Empathy is the ability to understand and share how another person feels. You can develop it by listening carefully to others, trying to see situations from their point of view, asking about their feelings, and responding with kindness and patience. Practicing these habits helps you become more understanding and emotionally aware of the people around.

Empathy can be defined as perceived joy or sympathy..

what if what happened to someone happens to us !

Being joyful when someone is getting wedded or in sorrow for someone's demise, is empathy.

When you understand who you are, then only you can better understand others. You can start with meditation.

Work, practice understanding the feelings o f others.

Empathy is a pain.

It's an instinct; you can't develop it. But you might be defining it differently to include things you can develop

At your age you don’t know?
It’s something you develop as a child…Unless English is not your first language and you’re curious about the definition of the word.

Trust me. You don't want it

Don't do it. It's a trap.

You're either born with it or not