Are you capable of empathy?

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I think this cartoon says it all:

i can tell if people are happy or sad sometimes. but at other times i mistake crying for laughing or vice verse.

people can look like they are laughing if they are crying severely, and i can not quite tell how they feel until i hear what they say.

sometimes, if someone is hysterically crying and i think they are laughing, i get a pleasant expression on my face while i listen to them before i find out from their words that they are sad.

they do not like my slowness to know what is going on inside them.

even when i find out, i just understand that they are feeling badly, and i wish i could make them feel better. i have no idea how they are feeling badly, i just know they are.

it is like being with someone who has a rupture of an abdominal artery that causes them excruciating pain all of a sudden.
i can tell without question that they are in pain, but i could not guess why, or how it feels for them. i see only the external effects, and if i like a person, i am unhappy that they are unhappy. that is as far as my soul can reach.


i usually try to steer people i think need help to others that i know that are good at helping.

I am capable of rudimentary empathy.
I can see and understand when someone is obviously sad or obviously happy.
It's the more subtle types of emotions that I usually miss or mis-interpret.
Feelings like jealousy, worry, and boredom seem to be difficult for me to "get" in a timely manner. I will realize how the person was feeling hours after my contact with them. Which, of course is far too late to be present and empathetic with them. I guess it takes my brain a while to process those sorts of inputs.

I can imagine what it might feel like for somebody to be in a bad position, but I still struggle with empathy. However, I am not bad with sympathy.

I am fully capable of empathy.

I used to live in my own world when i was a kid, but i grew out of it.

Probably not. I suppose I've gotten better as I've gotten older. My empathy has improved but I don't have much sympathy. I can say to myself, "This person probably feels a certain way being in a situation, but it doesn't really affect me and I have enough problems of my own, so I can't feel concerned or bothered by it in the least."

Empathy is and can be learned. We've seen in the past and are still seeing that people empathize differently in different cultures.

In some cultures women are treated as precious livestock, and may be stoned to death if they do not follow the rules. I wonder if the men living in those areas, only lack empathy towards women or is their empathy level lower towards people in general.

When I went to Hong Kong and Guang Zhou some 10 years ago, I was shocked to see how people treated animals. On wet-markets animals were butchered and skinned without first being killed, right in from of my eyes. Hygiene regulations have changed and I haven't seen it in Hong Kong any more. But I have seen a waiter fillet a fish alive, and then people eat it while the fish was still breathing (requires some special way of slicing the fish). I guess it is a way for their obsession to show how incredibly fresh the fish is.

I have very strong empathy. However, being able to express it verbally is another matter. With text, no problem. I also seem to be able to extract much greater meaning from text conversations than most people.

My psychologist says I have empathy---I can pick up on others' emotions and I usually worry about others---but I'm not entirely sure...if this counts, I read a story about someone who kept remembering India, and she died from a tumor a week later....and there was this other one about someone who was "mentally ret*d" and he wanted to be in a men's choir, and he said that singing was the only way he felt happy. For some reason, I feel extremely connected to people with disabilities and physical problems, and sometimes I can pick up when someone is subtly irritated, but I don't know about the other things I feel empathy for. For example, would this be counted as empathy when you worry about your friend, who gets teased all the time for the way she acts, almost to death?

I've always thought that it's the autistic stereotype because autistic people don't express their empathy in the same way as non-autistic people do, or don't express it at all in some circumstances.

I empathize readily with people who have gone through similar experiences as me. I've met many people whose experiences are very close to mine. Because I've changed so much over the past year and a half, in a positive way, I want to help other people change their lives for the better, too. But maybe that's not empathy, but just sympathy, because I don't always realize whether people need my help or not. I don't always emotionally react to other people's emotions; it only really happens when I can directly recall a similar moment in my life and the replay of it in my head triggers the corresponding emotion. There are some rare cases when I've been extremely sensitive to the emotional states of other people under the influence of drugs. Most of the time, though, I experience a pretty much blank emotional state, except when something hits me very hard emotionally. Then, I get into an either very high or very low emotional state, and it can take me days to recover.

i think true empathy is a talent, & a rather uncommon one. (i learned this from becoming close friends with a highly empathic person: her life was filled with people telling her their troubles, from friends to total strangers; in another society she might have become a counselor, or a witch doctor.)

what passes for empathy is often simply a social demand that we react in a certain way. it is fundamentally no different from the demands that people look & dress within a certain range.

what i have always had is an instinct for justice; & anger when i see justice denied. (i think this is related to truthfulness, which i plan to cover as a separate topic on my aspie blog.)

there is something related which i have experienced, invariably when i spend a lot of time around a person. i start to involuntarily absorb an impression of their personality. it is not a fast process, & i don't even know how accurate an impression it is that i receive, but it feels like i am becoming that person to a small degree. i don't know how they are going to react in any situation, but i somehow imagine i understand a little bit what it is to be them.

i also experience this sometimes when i have read a good biography, or watched a movie which i identify with strongly. (in this case i am more willing to call it an illusion, since both of those artifacts contain only personality-simulations, created for a single purpose.)

i think this is a deep subject, & needs to be considered in several dimensions, rather than assuming that by giving it a name & then treating the name like a feature with binary dimensions, it has been comprehended.

i will end by admitting in casual encounters, i only intellectually understand other people have feelings; & i can be shockingly callous, if i'm not careful. (in 52 years, i have learned a thing or two, i guess.)

m.

I was with an NT man and he wasn't able to empathize. His reaction to seeing someone cry was to get angry and say that the person was "stupid". It was really hard for me.

Im not really sure on the definition of empathy. Someone enlighten me.

You're finding a lack of complexity where there is much complexity.

For instance, much of what people consider empathy depends entirely on who the "one" in that definition is, and who the "someone else" is. And that affects it in not just one way either.

For instance, the more similar the "one" and the "someone else", the more likely they experience empathy for each other.

But it doesn't end there.

Also, the more powerful the set of people similar to the "one" is with regards to the set of people similar to the "someone else", the different the resulting ideas about who lacks and who has empathy is.

Consider this:

Nonautistic people generally have trouble feeling the emotions of autistic people as if they were their own. Autistic people generally have trouble feeling the emotions of nonautistic people as if they were their own.

In an ideal world, both would be considered to have, or lack, the same amount of empathy towards each other.

But this is not an ideal world. Nonautistic people are more numerous and more powerful. Therefore, even though it goes both ways, in the real world it's seen as going only one way. The (messed up) reasoning goes like this: "Autistic people have trouble understanding nonautistic people. Therefore, autistic people lack empathy. Nonautistic people have trouble understanding autistic people. Therefore, autistic people lack empathy."

Only, they don't phrase it like that. It would be too obvious if it were phrased like that, and they lack the insight into the phenomenon to phrase it like that.

What happens is that autistic people generally have trouble understanding nonautistic people (in specific contexts anyway). So, they say that autistic people generally have trouble feeling/understanding all people. Because nonautistic people are "all people" as far as they're concerned. They never even think twice about this unless someone brings it up to them.

Then, nonautistic people have trouble understanding autistic people. Only, they don't phrase it like that. What they do, is they don't see huge amounts of information about the way autistic people experience the world. But instead of thinking "We are missing huge amounts of information," they simply assume that all those things they cannot see about autistic people, are not there. And that is part of how they assume that we lack empathy, among many other things we're supposed to lack. (Since they can't see it, it's not there.) Which is anything but simple to explain to them, because the entire conversation around autism is framed from their point of view. They have an extreme amount of trouble seeing it from our points of view, and they also have an extreme amount of trouble seeing that they have trouble. But if they do get an inkling of how little they know about autism? They think it's not because they, like autistic people, like most people in the world, lack automatic insight into a type of person that is quite different from them in many fundamental areas. (They don't think about that at all, it' just can't possibly be that.) No, it's because autistic people are inherently mysterious. (They are just as mysterious to us, but nobody runs around talking about the "mystery of nonautism" the way they talk about the "mystery of autism".)

Of course it's even more complex than that. Because there is not one kind of nonautistic person. And there is not one kind of autistic person. Some autistic people are absolutely overwhelmed with empathy in general. Most autistic people experience empathy for people like them, however "people like them" is defined (generally more narrowly than just "autistic people", but getting into various specific sorts of autistic people). Most people, autistic and nonautistic, lack automatic empathy for people very different from them unless some kind of lingua franca is used (such as your idea of "exaggerated emotions").

So any one person generally has different degrees of empathy, from almost none to near total, for different people in their life. But the way various power structures play out, affects how most people see the empathy in each person.

For more information, see Thoughts About Empathy.

Most notably this quote (bolded emphasis my own):

I'm not sure what to say. I've had a hard time understanding empathy that is expressed in a way for me to understand with me as the major variable.

I have not cried at many funerals. I have not been happy either.

I have a problem with my own emotions conflicting with the current topic and person at hand.

I have problems with shutting down completely and not feeling from any of my senses at all, except minor ones like seeing.

Sometimes when I do feel empathy, it is so emotional that it tears me apart. The few times I've been able to feel it has been only times that I have already experienced and understand an emotion. Which is only basic emotions at this point. (Happy, sad, angry) Even then, it seems I do not know what to do with it and initialize Fight or Flight instead.

I have been told that I'm un-empathetical because I talk about myself often. Though I thought originally it was good to show you relate to someone, especially since it's the only way I know how is through relating experience. *taught by therapists.

I am not good with social ques, and apparently these are what causes people to become empathetic. I do not become empathetic based on social cues I see. I become empathetic based on the expression of tone in their voice and the story. I think seeing only out of one eye has given me extra brain space for things like this.

I don't know.

99% of the time, I don't feel a thing, or feel very little. I learned when I was a teenager to emulate it whenever somebody starts staring at me looking for a emotional response by selecting a related memory and playing it back in my mind quickly to trigger the emotion I had at the time. This seems to satisfy most people, even if it is tiring and not 100% accurate.

There are exactly three people I have met who I can feel genuine empathy for. The first two are not on the spectrum, and in both cases the feeling is so profound it overwhelms me. One person was not accepting of this, the other person is very accepting of it and extremely helpful. The third is an Aspie, and it caught me totally by surprise but was less overwhelming. I'd guess this third person to be the more NT experience of empathy.

Therefore, while I am capable of it, it's certainly unusual.