Judging others puts you in a position of superiority that no human being can boast to have achieved. If you exercise empathy in all life situations you meet, you not only allow yourself to judge others, but deny them the much needed support to get out of their circumstances.
The first step to helping another is to refuse to empathize with them
It is noble to want to place yourself in the shoes of another person, feel their pain and experience life from their point of view. This is what is called empathy — a much needed trait in humanity that has the power to transform the world.
The irony of this trait is that it puts you in a position of judgment. It is involuntary judgment because the heart does not want to view the negative in the character of a person, but the negative in their circumstances.
A good person cannot be without empathy and this is how the world expects all of us to be. If you do not seem to understand what another human being is going through, you are viewed as cold and ruthless.
While empathy is meant to understand all human circumstances in the same way, we find ourselves showing the most empathy to our close friends and relatives.
If you allow yourself to feel empathy for everyone you come into contact with, you set yourself up for a bumpy ride of emotions that accompany every situation.
Empathy becomes more pronounced if you see someone going through a situation that you have found yourself in the past. It may be a situation that has still not been resolved completely and this has the power to bring back a flood of emotions.
If a situation you have been happens to another person, you think that you are better equipped to empathize with them because you have risen past the vibrations of that negative energy.
Judgement in Empathy
Judgment in empathy stems from the fact that you had made judgment of a situation when it happened to you and when it occurs again even if it is in another person, the same judgment will be transferred to them.
The business of judging others is not for human beings and it should be avoided at all costs. Trying to empathize with others not only lowers your emotional strength but also makes you lose your connection to divinity, which could actually be helpful in helping the other person to heal.
The human soul equates empathy to compassion which, in reality, is deciding what another person is feeling and then trying to condition your heart and mind into their same exact state.
The universe has a way of channeling positive energies where there is positive thinking. If both the victim and the empathizer were to fall into a state of lower energies and suffer as a result, then there will be no one to help the other to come out of this state.
Just do it!
Being too compassionate will invariably make you think too much about the problems of those that you want to help, which, in turn, will make you analyze the circumstances that led them to where they are. And, sooner or later, you will find yourself judging them for making the wrong decisions.
Not only that you don’t have the complete picture, but it’s not your business to judge them in the first place.
The only way out of this cycle is to deliberately refuse to be over compassionate, empathetic and judgmental. Don’t think too much about helping someone — just do it!
Compassion is important.
This article is confusing empathy and compassion with being judgmental.
I like that the article points out how empathy can work negatively as well as positively. I like that it acknowledges the ‘sticky matrix’.
Empathy has a dark side. It’s called idiot compassion. You feel the other person’s pain and it triggers your own, with no benefit to anyone. Being aware of how the other feels is easy. Feeling it (and what it triggers in me) without judgement is compassion. It’s not enough just to have empathy because that sets you up for judgement. It’s getting beyond the judgement that I think the article is talking about. We live in an energy matrix. There’s no way to avoid “empathy” in a universe of shared vibration. [links edited out]
Empathy is not about judgement. It is practiced with Unconditional Love. Few humans can truly practice being emphatic. It can be likened to a mother’s love. If you cannot understand something, try not to write about it, as if you did.
This article is very misleading in the sense that true empathy and compassion is void of any kind of judgement. One might surmise that the Author is describing “sympathy” rather than empathy. They are both similar and yet so very different in their own response to any one thing or circumstance.
I have real problems with the article and the comments. I know that just giving people stuff is not really helping them. Being overly sympathetic just enables people. And wealth does not define good or bad people. Empathy requires time. Trust needs to be built. Discernment is needed to avoid enabling and to point to a better outcome in the life of a needy person. Jesus would not have us just ignoring people and not making an effort to show them God’s ways. I’ve not met a person in a public meal or a clothing outreach who were there after doing everything right. But society, peers, and enabling, blind people to what they need to do in their lifestyle choices and grasping a theology that frees them of their destructive (spiritual and lifestyle) choices. Look at my blog for “Sympathy and Empathy” and “Judge Not”.