Have I said this before?

I think God gives us near-misses and brushes with disaster to learn empathy. Going through the pain of losing someone who's not sooo close to me gives me an inkling of the pain that people go through when they lose someone very close. Being pregnant, however briefly, gave me insight into what pregnancy feels like- I can commiserate with the sickness, the exhaustion, the worry, the advice. Losing the baby after only 3 months, (and then again after only a month) makes my heart break for people who lose theirs after carrying them full-term, or at delivery... I understand addiction, and compulsion, at least to some degree, because of my own
In every Lifetime movie, someone says to someone else "I know how you feel", and then the other person screams "HOW DARE YOU SAY YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL?? UNLESS YOU'VE BEEN THROUGH WHAT I'VE BEEN THROUGH YOU CAN'T UNDERSTAND!!" I don't believe that's true- I believe that pain is pain. Even if we haven't been in the same situations, we can relate to each others' pain, because we know pain.
Which makes my first point kind of moot, now that I read back. The point is, empathy.