I said I was leaving but I guess not!
I don't know but I do know that at this point the ineffable, immaterial, indescribable Ni sounds substantially less mystic and obscure than this Fi people are talking about. Walking through crowds and picking up people's emotions? Having to move your office because of being bombarded with people's energy? If this is the case, I'm quite happy I have a natural mental boundary between myself and others because this sounds like emotional and mental rape. And here's a mercenary thought: I'd find a way to capitalize on this ability and harness it into something lucrative.
I know for me, my empathy is bound to situations I've personally experienced. When someone says they have/had a family member who has cancer and all the effects of that I feel like I can safely say I empathize. When someone speaks of racism and sexism I empathize. I have once before in my life felt like I was going to murder someone. I've seen red before. Whenever my mother's face scrunches up in pain, I feel that to my soul. I've felt anger, love, lust, shame, disgust, happiness, contentedness, etc. so I'm fully aware that if I've felt it I can make a strong connection to how I've felt and the way another person feels/felt.
I admit to not having the ability to automatically
know what another person is feeling if I've never felt it or been in a similar situation. I understand that's not exactly what Fis/NFPs are saying, but that's the closest approximation I can wrap my head around at this point. I can ask, I can conjecture, I can speculate, I can watch their behaviors and body language and make educated guesses (which can be wrong!) but I don't
know.
Take this for example (and it's kinda melodramatic but bear with me), if I'm some villager in a war torn country and some American volunteer tells me they know
exactly what I feel I would hope for them to fall into a dinosaur sized pile of manure. I'd feel insulted. What would they know of my life? The lesser virtue of sympathizing would be more suited in a situation like this. Sometimes it's more appropriate to admit you don't know what a person feels but still feel compassion for them anyway and stand beside them. Maybe you'll come to develop some empathy in a meaningful and more accurate way.
And synarch, I agree; I find it highly PRESUMPTUOUS to even make such a claim although I don't find empathy itself presumptuous.
I like these definitions of empathy although there are many out there and I bolded what I think are the most important parts:
- A sense of shared experience, including emotional and physical feelings, with someone or something other than oneself.
- The feeling or capacity for awareness, understanding, and sensitivity one experiences when hearing or reading of some event or activity of others, thus imagining the same sensations as that of those actually experiencing them.
If NFPs want to assert that they have a greater capacity for/predisposed to/more concerned with/biologically hardwired to empathy according to the above then OK. It's not a competition and it will reveal itself somehow.
What's interesting to me is why this thread sat here for a couple of days before anyone commented? Maybe people were reluctant to...obviously there's a lot of opinion about this topic anytime it's brought up it typically explodes into this.
But why did it sit here? Maybe that's an indicator of something. Tesla's thread is winding down, people may not have wanted to answer because of that. Maybe people were reluctant to offend FPs? What would that be called? There hasn't been very much FJ comment on this thread and I wonder why that's so as well. Why was the first critical comment in this thread interpreted as an act of aggression?
I believe the best way to get productive discussion about this is to specifically go to individuals who seem capable of calmly discussing this without offense and that in my experience has happened via PMs.
I'm going to have to ask the NFPs I know if this is something they experience though.