Dear Anita:

I agree. I was thinking more about the first time one extends empathy to someone one doesn’t know well.

I also agree about getting to know someone before becoming too invested, but I suggest that one can never be absolutely sure about another. As with the woman I wrote about, she and I had slowly gotten to know each other over the course of several months. It wasn’t until we started to become emotionally intimate that the problems started, but I was already invested in her as a person, and as a friend. In the calm objectivity of distant hindsight, I can say that I should have required a higher level of proof regarding her veracity before proceeding, but at the time I trusted what I had come to know over a period of months. It would have been more convenient had she told me that she had a disorder (and had she named the disorder) that specifically caused problems with emotional empathy, and caused her behavior to be extremely destructive the closer to emotional intimacy she became, but she didn’t. She only told me about the diagnoses that elicited my compassion, and gave me a vague warning that she was un-loveable.

But, as I mentioned before, our relationship was a learning experience.

Lesson learned.

CMI