There are people in this world who have no concept of empathy.
They have learned to respond to the feelings they see, but other's actual pain is unknowable to them.
They can only relate to their own feelings, their own pain, their own concepts of what is going on in the world around them.
I'm not sure why this is so. I suspect it is because as children they were taught the safest way to make other people happy was by doing what was expected.
Therefore their own feelings were often neglected and they assume other people deal with life the same way.
These people often respond in inadequate ways when trying to help others. It is kind of like being in charge of a furnace, but never having a thermometer to measure the heat being put out. It could be too much or too little. It could even be fatal.
They are not easy to spot unless you see them quite frequently and they will never understand the difference if you try to explain it to them. That part of their reasoning atrophied many many years ago.
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