I think empathy with oneself is a meaningful concept, or at least there’s a substantial subset of people who have trouble noticing what they want or identifying when they’re being arbitrarily treated as low status.
Agree strongly on both points. Empathy with oneself is both meaningful and incredibly important. In fact as someone who at one time lacked empathy with himself (in terms of empathy with emotions and desires) I even assert that building empathy with oneself is one of the best ways to improve one’s ability to relate to others. (By allowing you to make use of all the wisdom embedded in your emotional and ‘gut’ responses and desires.)
Interesting. But one could have the awareness, understanding, and ability to describe, but also an attitude of not caring, with regard to one’s own emotions. Or at least some of them, sometimes.
On the other hand, I’m not sure the word ‘emotions’ means the same thing to everyone. I’m not even sure that what I take it to mean hasn’t changed substantially.
ETA: Here I seem to be defining ‘empathy’ in yet another way. It’s odd how my intuition about what a word means can vary situationally. It seems to me right now that I would want to claim I usually think ‘empathising with X’ is ‘(accurately) modelling the internal state of X’. But perhaps in contexts where the distinction is irrelevant I may also have been identifying the conjunct of ‘(accurately) modelling the internal state of X’ and ‘caring about the result’ as ‘empathising with X’. And then here I took ‘empathy’ to be just the ‘caring about the result’ part.
I think empathy with oneself is a meaningful concept, or at least there’s a substantial subset of people who have trouble noticing what they want or identifying when they’re being arbitrarily treated as low status.
Agree strongly on both points. Empathy with oneself is both meaningful and incredibly important. In fact as someone who at one time lacked empathy with himself (in terms of empathy with emotions and desires) I even assert that building empathy with oneself is one of the best ways to improve one’s ability to relate to others. (By allowing you to make use of all the wisdom embedded in your emotional and ‘gut’ responses and desires.)
Lacking self-empathy sound a bit like Alexithymia
Interesting. But one could have the awareness, understanding, and ability to describe, but also an attitude of not caring, with regard to one’s own emotions. Or at least some of them, sometimes.
On the other hand, I’m not sure the word ‘emotions’ means the same thing to everyone. I’m not even sure that what I take it to mean hasn’t changed substantially.
ETA: Here I seem to be defining ‘empathy’ in yet another way. It’s odd how my intuition about what a word means can vary situationally. It seems to me right now that I would want to claim I usually think ‘empathising with X’ is ‘(accurately) modelling the internal state of X’. But perhaps in contexts where the distinction is irrelevant I may also have been identifying the conjunct of ‘(accurately) modelling the internal state of X’ and ‘caring about the result’ as ‘empathising with X’. And then here I took ‘empathy’ to be just the ‘caring about the result’ part.