Thanks, that was a very interesting read!
I know paracetamol also works to some extent for emotional pain, and perhaps anxiety and physical pain share some neural and developmental pathways.
Do you feel any physical pain?
How about empathy?
I've always had a profound disliking for people without empathy, and for good measure -- those people usually are psychopaths or narcissists, but if they are compassionate but just don't feel empathy, it's ok, I guess... though the nauseating feeling in my stomach that I first got when I was maybe 5 and I saw the reaction of a child I struck and robbed of his sunflower, just as instructed by my older cousin -- that is so fundamental to me, that it seems inconceivable that you can become a decent human being without it.
I caught myself hoping that at some point in the article some professional would point out how the lady is in fact flawed in some major ways.
As in you can't have your cookie and eat it too, while the rest of us are struggling?
I also wish the article elaborated more about why the daughter thought the lady was in fact horrible -- was that feeling ongoing, or just something in her adolescence, or just the same nagging feeling I have -- that there MUST be something terribly bad about someone without empathy.
Take for instance the story of her bipolar husband that died(killed himself?).
Most likely she indeed could not have prevented it.
BUT maybe.... someone feeling empathy and not feeling reciprocated, would over time feel they are interracting with a robot, not with a human being.
I know I feel that way when I talk with my father and I know he's very low on the empathy scale -- the whole interaction feels so very fake and scripted after a while -- I can read his emotional states, I know what he wants, what he wants me to say, what his fears are, what his intentions are, but it is absolutely not the other way around.
Overall my father is a good person -- a very good and hard working doctor, contributes to charities and so on.
I wouldn't get my bad feelings about him if I only knew and spent a couple of days in my life with him as a writer writing an article about him, but I sure do as someone who wants a genuine and deep connection with him, just like the lady's daughter probaby did with her mother.