Reply to People with good parents/nice childhoods who are selfish, unkind, unempathetic?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My neighbor meets your description. She’s not unkind, but just clueless about adversity of others. She was born UMC, worked three years for a friend of her parents, got married and never worked another day. She gets anxious about the tiniest little things because she’s never had a real problem in her life. [/quote]

Don't you see that it is likely to be her struggles with anxiety that resulted in the limited career path? I know several people for whom a scenario like that has been true, including a family member, and I am very sympathetic to their situations.

You are so quick to make assumptions and judgments about your "clueless" neighbor. Your advice to people who struggle with anxiety to the extent that limits their life choices is that they get "a real problem"?[/quote]

Not PP, but privileged people who are clueless about adversity in other people's lives can be really awful if they lack the ability to even try to empathize with others. They can be dismissive, rude, and self-centered. I have encountered people like this and the combination of privilege and inability to empathize can make them cruel, and often in a totally oblivious way where they can't even understand that their behavior is cruel. And since they have a worldview where no one else's feelings or experiences matter, you can't even just say "hey, that hurt my feelings" or "it doesn't feel like you are listening to me." They'll get defensive and dig in harder, and flip it around to where now they are the victim because you were "mean" in telling them how their behavior impacted you negatively.

I can empathize with the person PP describes who might have anxiety and recognize that's hard for her. But the problem with someone like this is that they will never, ever reciprocate that empathy. So you have to be careful with them and practice really strong boundaries. They will view your empathy as confirmation that their problems are, in fact, bigger than everyone else's. People like this quickly become toxic friends and I've learned to keep my distance. Call that judgmental if you want. I call it good judgment.[/quote]

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