Is empathy necessarily preceded by experience?

Had a conversation with a friend of mine the other night, and we were talking about how it's easier for us to connect with people who have had major struggles like we've had (as in, foundation-shaking, persistent, etc), because they seem to be the people that understand faults best, and also seem to be more willing to not let those faults cloud the fact that we're complete, whole people. We were talking about how sometimes when people haven't really had these things happen yet, and we did agree that most everyone goes through something major at some point in their lives but some sooner than others, it's harder to feel like faults are acceptable.

So, while I basically mean "suffering" when I say "experience", let me know if you think this carries over to any other type of experience.

Do you think that empathy can be taught or reasoned into, or do you think part of the necessary foundation (part of, because there are people who have struggled and are not at all empathetic- there must be more) is to have been through something in your life that shows you firsthand what empathy means?

 

empathy is a psionic function that is unrelated to any other thing.

as for connecting with other people, well yes, i feel the we connect statistically with shared experiences, suffering or not, more then with specific individual persons. we can have affection for specific individual persons, but that is seldom an actually mutual connection, however much we might feel that we are experiencing one.