I qualify as a sensitive INTJ. That means I've actually practiced feeling other people's emotions, so I have an understanding of empathy and, therefor, can share the emotions of others from their perspective when I apply it to my own life and my own feelings were I to be experiencing an event as if through another person's perception.
Cases in point are when my mother's father died an accidental death during a recreational outing which he took alone and was found drowned and frozen to death by one of his sons-in-law. I was angry at all of the young and old family members who were crying and retelling happy memories to the point that I had to leave rooms more than once to get away from how their emotions were so contrary to mine. I was pissed off that this man had hurt my mother through verbal abuse, which had made her a very defensive wife and mother, but he hadn't shown the courtesy of apologizing to her, instead he went and stupidly got himself killed thinking to have some fun by himself. I cried for my mother, then.
When, 12 years later, my father's mother died unexpectedly in the hospital, just before she was to undergo some kind of heart bypass surgery, I was in a great amount of shock along with the rest of our family. I kept watching my INTJ father to see how stoic he could manage to be, as I knew he wasn't made of stone. I kept thinking only of myself, of how I missed my long distance boyfriend who was deployed overseas. I finally realized, why am I being so selfish? What am I trying to not feel? My own father must be very sad, right now, but he is being strong- for everyone else? No, for himself. That isn't the way it must be, though. He needs to cry. I looked up at him from my seat in the church, listening to his voice, and I realized, this man just lost his mother. She is dead. He can never call her to wish her happy birthday again and hear her voice, or drive all the way to where she lives to hug her, again, nor can we go for walks together by the river side. She will never cook beans for dinner, again, or tell me I can have as many sodas as I want now that I'm an adult, or laugh with us when we play cards together. We'll never hear her say Grandpa's name again when she needs help with something in the garden...
My father just lost his mother. My grandfather just lost his spouse. What if I had just lost mine?
I looked around the church again at all my cousins who had been crying intermittently, realizing they had spent more time with my grandmother, after school and at Sunday dinners. I "felt" all these people in the building who had just lost someone very dear to them. Unlike my mother's father's funeral, I truly felt a loss of a positive magnitude. I felt no animosity toward my father's mother. I wished she had never left. I wished so much that I could hug my father to comfort him as I listened to him speaking, and I began bawling into my sister's shoulder, finally able to cry, and only because of the pathway that empathy allowed me to travel when I was brave enough to contemplate it for myself.
Emotions connect us to each other. I would not wish the hell of emotional disconnection upon anyone. Grieving, crying, mourning over a loss, it gives a value to something or to someone which was always there, before, we just hid it from ourselves, the reason why being something only each of us can discover in our own ways.
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