{"id":128,"date":"2007-11-10T00:27:39","date_gmt":"2007-11-10T05:27:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/angel\/blog\/?p=128"},"modified":"2007-11-10T00:49:21","modified_gmt":"2007-11-10T05:49:21","slug":"the-heartache-of-empathy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/?p=128","title":{"rendered":"The heartache of empathy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"photo_h\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/photos\/2007\/11\/Uncle_Steve_and_Damian_Surfside_04Nov2007.jpg\" \/><br \/>\nUncle Steve and Damian<br \/>\nSurfside Beach, Texas<br \/>\n04 November 2007<\/p>\n<p>It is in our very nature to take on guilt.\u00c2\u00a0 Through empathy, we feel the pain we have caused others and the guilt becomes our life companion.<\/p>\n<p>And from guilt, we inflict self-punishment.\u00c2\u00a0 The problem is, when you are your own judge &#8212; the warden to your own self-imposed prison &#8212; the punishment never ends.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0We rarely show mercy to ourselves.<\/p>\n<p>When I am punishing Lily for hitting her little brother, I send her to her room, and when she comes out, I remind her that we don&#8217;t hit people, and the incident is over.\u00c2\u00a0 I take pity\u00c2\u00a0on her.\u00c2\u00a0 We take pity on most people who are careless or selfish or cruel, especially once they have realized the pain they have inflicted on others through their actions.<\/p>\n<p>But we can&#8217;t seem to do that for ourselves.\u00c2\u00a0 How do you forgive yourself?\u00c2\u00a0 When does the punishment end?\u00c2\u00a0 When does the pain of empathy stop?<\/p>\n<p>How do you change the past?\u00c2\u00a0 And if you could, would you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Uncle Steve and Damian Surfside Beach, Texas 04 November 2007 It is in our very nature to take on guilt.\u00c2\u00a0 Through empathy, we feel the pain we have caused others and the guilt becomes our life companion. And from guilt, we inflict self-punishment.\u00c2\u00a0 The problem is, when you are your own judge &#8212; the warden [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}