Pretentious-Empathy

“But”, is the most condescending word in pretentious-empathy.”

Empathy, which is the basis of interpersonal emotional-intelligence, is one’s ability to recognize, understand, and share the feelings of others; and vice versa. Empathy enables us to relate to others through our emotions. Empathy is also an important aspect of perspective-taking which lets us recognize that others also have thoughts and feelings.

However, more and more in modern society, empathy is being unemotionally and/or deceptively portrayed not to make someone else feel good, but to control or disparage them. If empathy is not displayed and communicated with the intent to understand and sooth someone else’s feelings, such display of empathy is pretentious and condescending. Pretentious-empathy often begins with an empathetic statement “but” is followed through with a non-empathetic, hurtful, and even demeaning second phrase to the statement. For example:

“I really feel bad for you, but you did this to your Self.”

As stated in Theory of Self-Relativity, true empathy is:

“When you know how it is to feel something; you will then have better understanding of how others feel about the same thing.”