Can someone help me understand empathy?

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The tragedy in Boston happen and I laughed. It's not "funny" just I know how America is as an American we will make a big deal out of this. Do a logo 4/15/13 and 1 yr. later remember the tragedy blah blah blah blah!! !! ! We try to prevent heart disease but the first thought in a tragedy killing isn't prevention but sadness/depression/grief. Lets try to stop things from happening again.

I find it weird I'M THE BAD PERSON HERE! Everyone on Facebook is OMG! sad etc. This will not be the last terrorist attack just as Newtown will not be the last mass shooting!! ! Yet everyone jumps to sadness. If you had a friend or family member in a tragedy then I feel for you and am sorry for your loss otherwise think. Have you ever been to NYC or Boston or little ole Newtown?? Why should you care what happens in these places?

All tragedies YES! But I live in Florida and have family in Tennessee let me know if something happens in THOSE two states. YES I had a friend in Boston but after hearing she was ok no biggie (She works at the local hospital there). Otherwise why should I get emotional and upset over this?

I'll go cry and be depressed over losing my job and being fired or such as what happen to me in real life getting kicked out of college. Not 9/11 two random buildings I never heard of falling to the ground or this Boston Marathon bombing.

They have no relation to me. Does anyone else relate???

sign,Brandy

i, too, find those tragedies remote to my emotions, as though they were in echelons beyond reality. however, if my long-sought squeeze were to have perished there, i would mourn in a most personal way. IOW it seems to be too big for my emotions to get a handle on it, and that part of my brain just goes "TILT!" in the same way as an overtaxed CPU in a computer. i can only truly feel tragedies in the small sense of having a certain intensely loved somebody there who was harmed. just thinking about it makes me shrink inside. another thing that keeps me from mourning in the same acute way as most folks, is that i have a strong belief that the people who perished are in heaven right now. and the survivors, all i can do is to fervently pray that they recover from this. sorry, but that is all i'm good for.

Naturally it is hard to relate to tragedies that don't affect us personally.

Perhaps the event somehow brought about a sense of irony that only you could see. Perhaps you saw how people respond to tragedies in the past and thought "here we go again". There is a lot of emotional hysteria that follows in events such as this and Newtown.

Don't feel too bad about it. My friend and I were joking a bit about 9/11 when that happened but I think it was more about the hysteria that people were feeling as opposed to the actual tragedy that took place. (I joked "we're all gonna die".) It is odd for some people how irrational and emotional people get when certain events/deaths happen close to home, especially when deaths occur everyday. The fact that politics and the media make it more hysterical doesn't help much either.

From another perspective, some aspies do feel more emotional about these kinds of events than what they actually express. It's often our rationalizing and our ability to desensitize ourselves that keep our emotions from surfacing but they are there. I don't believe that desensitizing yourself to tragedies like this is a bad thing. For some it can be a useful surviving mechanism.

That was, more or less, my reaction. A customer coming through my line at Walmart today told me about it before I saw the news and my outward reaction was to shake my head and say "oh God." Inwardly, I was thinking something like "what else can happen?" Stuff like this has happened too many times for me to react the way people are "supposed to."



Ditto. When President Bush was on the news that night...well, I was making some remarks that could have been taken out of context (think Hawkeye and company on M*A*S*H* in the face of the worst stuff anyone's ever had to deal with).



I agree completely. What is the point of letting yourself get punched in the gut by every tragedy of this type (and others) that happens? It does make far more sense to get angry enough to actually take action and DO SOMETHING TO STOP THIS KIND OF S**T.

just how can we stop the bombers? who has the answer to that? what will do the job?

I guess because I've been to almost every state in the union I don't feel a disconnect.

I've never been to boston. I see the marathon bombing as a tragedy. but I also see the young girl accidentally shot by her mother's boyfriend as he cleaned his gun as a tragedy, no less important. I don't mourn them nearly as deeply as I did my father's death, but i realize someone's whole world has been extinguished. your focus on prevention is a healthy one, which i'd say shows caring for one's fellow man. I don't understand the laughing, though.

Holy cr@p, I thought I was the only one who thought like this. I actually never told anyone except my shrink. When 9/11 happened a girl in my office burst out in tears hysterically and I just didn't get it. She didn't know anyone in there, so I thought, "What a histrionic." At the time I was depressed about my cr@p life. I was pissed off because I wasn't in one of those buildings that fell. Never told anyone else about what I felt, thinking they'd just think I was a sociopath or something.

This evening I was pissed that the news coverage interfered with my watching my DVR'd afternoon recordings of Judge Judy. I had to wait until 10pm to watch the second run of them. Then my husband said an 8-year old kid died in the bombing. That was kinda cr@ppy to hear, poor little thing. It just made me think of my own kids and how innocent they are and as a parent how that would kill me if something like that happened to one of mine. Other than that, I had no feelings about the incident. My firm has an office in Boston. I just figured that a lot of them over there are probably more affected and bugged out by it.

I guess some people here are going to probably think I'm a callous @sshole now. I do feel deeply about things. If someone I know is lonely and depressed (I've been there!) I really want to help, to take their pain away. However, I figure there are enough people crying over this tragedy right now so what's the point in my doing the same. Maybe I'll get to it later, when everyone else forgets, you know, when it really matters. I didn't expect anyone else to cry over when my neighborhood got devastated by Hurricane Sandy. I just wanted the damn neighborhood to get fixed, but it still isn't LOL

I view all that stuff with clinical detachment, which is something I've learned to accept of myself. I take it all as bad news. But none of it has any kind of gut wrenching effect whatsoever.

The one exception was 9/11, but that was because it was a fearful situation. "America was under attack" at the time, not just NY and DC. It was frightening at the time because where I lived might be next.

Personal "tragedies" like losing a job? That's a different story. I become a basket case over stuff like that.

In this European minds differ from American minds that war and warlike conditions are there in our collective memory. Who knows how many European cities were completely rebuilt after WW II. Some were leveled to the ground, not even streets remained. Take any adult European today and they can remember at least one person who had experienced war personally. This state of affairs, being at most one generation from any major war, has nearly always been true in Europe.

I'm not at all belittling what happened today in Boston or what happened in 2001. My point is that had these events taken place in Europe, the aftermath would have been quite different.

I feel a disconnect as well... and watched the clock wondering exactly how long until the "terrorism" word would be let loose... Took a lot longer than I thought it would... Other than that I have not given it much thought.

If I see tears in person... I will cry and feel a whole gambit of emotion... But in general... nothing....

I usually fake it.. but sometimes people close to me can tell...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux1o7F5oEb4
WARNING: Video contains strong language.
My personal hero explains his viewpoint on terrorism. Made me see it in a much different light. For general empathy, I always just think "How would I feel/react if the same thing happened to me?" Problem is, the way I'd react is usually quite different than "normal" people. At the end of the day, we have an overpopulation problem and continuously try to defy natural selection, so when something bad goes down I feel no sympathy for the victims, at all. If anything, seeing Darwinism in action makes me cheer inside, though on the outside I try to show the expected sadness/disgust.

[Mod. edit: changed video to a link so members can decide whether they want to click on it or not]

Some people need to experience personal suffering so they know what it feels like. That's the only way they'll care when they see others suffer.

Of course there is a huge difference.
I know what my grandparents did during the WW II., in some cases I even know what the grandparents of my friends did. I know the story of my city in WW II and even long befor that. I know exactly wich houses got destroid and wich didn't.
In another city I lived in, you could see exactly in one street, I was seeing every morning on my way to school, all the "new" houses between the old ones who were there before WW II. It was a part of the history of my city.
I've also been in areas and countries were terror was a problem and didn't have any real fear.
Even by conflicts or terror warnings in my area I was never really scared. Life just continued as usuall BUT when I stayed in the US for 10 months, some years ago, the fear of terror seemed to be everywere and I was scared.

then again, some people experience personal suffering and it makes them even meaner and less compassionate. those folks are sowing themselves a karmic whirlwind.

True, I get negativistic tendencies when I experience personal suffering and I really don't like that aspect about myself.