Are you capable of empathy?

Post Reply New Topic

I do not believe that I am capable of empathy.

As time has progressed, I have become somewhat better at being tactful, to avoid hurting the feelings of people whose emotions I do not understand.

Maybe I'm a little too capable of empathy. I can feel the emotions of everybody in the room.

I am an empathetic person.

Yes, very much.

I'm pretty emotive and empathic... which is why I end up being an INFP more than an INTP.

There are a few cases where I don't feel normal empathy, but I'm pretty capable of it. If I hear about the earthquakes in China killing thousands, I can't feel really sad towards them - really, I just don't know how to feel, how to respond.

I often feel like I have to force myself to cry at funerals. There has only been one instance where I remember crying over someone's death... and that was late last year, somewhat recent. On the football team, we'd had a horrible year, losing the majority of the games. Once, we had an away game, and we were metaphorically being spit on by the other team. Just before the game started, one of our coaches passed out on the field, (cardiac arrest, i think) and he later died. By half-time, we were already losing bad. At that point, most of us were crying... the fact that one of our most respectable and humble coaches was dying and taking the **** from the other team not being able to do anything about it... that gets to you. Noting how that was a week or so after one of my favorite teachers died, too.

I'm not sure. I've always thought I was pretty much incapable of empathy, but I've been told recently that's not the case. I do empathise with people going through something I've been through -- one of my friends is deeply depressed right now, and since I'm coming out of a depressive phase myself, I empathise with her feelings of despair and hopelessness. She senses this and tells me I'm one of the few people she can talk to honestly, because she knows I understand. Some of my friends who know I'm an aspie and what AS is have told me that they think of my as empathetic, but I wonder how much of that is just me faking. While I can be moved to sympathy easily, I don't think I'm generally capable of empathy. For example, I have found that I don't really empathise with other gunshot survivors...then again, I've never met another survivor who took a bullet to the chest. I might feel empathy with that person if I met him or her, but generally I think, "Shut up, what happened to me was worse!"

As it as defined, I am not capable, or have great difficulty showing empathy. However, I do have sympathy for people. That is, I can recognize a persons plight and sympathize with them, but yet at the same time have no idea what it must feel like for them to be going through whatever it is they are experiencing. It is sort of a strange way to interact with someone on that level.

I'm actually hyper-empathetic most of the time, which is one of the reasons why I've been reluctant to accept a spectrum diagnosis. But it's possible that I'm empathetic in a different way from a normal person, and that what I'm calling empathy is something that most people would call something else.


Cheers,

TH

I can empathise with a few other women I am close to like my sister and sister in law. They understand me and I understand them. We can communicate without words and often find we have bought the same clothes as each other and the presents we choose, without any sort of consultation, are actually something they were looking at buying for themselves. Weird but fun. When my sister or sister in law are sad I am sad, we sometimes cry, sad and happy, with and for each other.

I cannot empathise with any other humans, especially men. I have a pang of self-shame when I see war and natural disasters wiping out humans and feel nothing. Those adds for hunger charities with dirty babies and kids annoy me because kids and babies everywhere give me the creeps.

I empathise with other animals and loathe most humans for their abuse and exploitation of living beings.

when i was a child i was subjected to many tests in the institution i was in, and one of the tests was a test where i had a cap on that had a laser light aimed at my eye while i was watching a video clip that i was told to watch.

the video was about a woman who learned that her son had been killed in a car accident.

the video started off with the woman opening a door to someone who came in and gave her the bad news.

the laser light traced where my focus was while i was watching the video.

the woman opened the door and i looked at the door handle, and continued to look at it after the person came in until the camera panned and the door handle was no longer in sight.
then i looked at the woman's face and i looked at her lips for a short while than i focused on her temple

then i looked at the necklace she had on.
during this time, the man who came to give her the bad news was telling her that her son had been killed, but i did not look at the man. then my eye went to the skirting board near the floor and focused on a power outlet. after a short while the camera angle changed, and it was showing from behind the man toward the woman, and my eye went to a lamp on a desk behind her. then my eye went to the lamp shade and then my eye darted around every object on the table, then my eye looked at the skirting board behind her. there were no power outlets on the skirting board and my eye went back and forth along the skirting board, and then my focus went to the window behind her and traced the cross pattern of the timber frame.

anyway, the next week my parents were told that i had very little connection to the main thrust of the video and that i had very little empathy because the people in the video were extremely emotional and i missed it all.
my parents were not supposed to tell me that.


but that is not the only isolated reason why i do not believe i have empathy. i just have never felt the same things anyone else has felt before. when people cheer when they hear the sports results i am left unaffected.
at weddings where people cry in happiness, i am totally disconnected and i look at things like the carpet pattern to bide my time.

i can have compassion if i see and understand that a person feels bad, but i can not feel it myself and i always sleep soundly.

i am going to play age of empires now so goodnight.

Very often, when someone else cries, I cry. I think it triggers a well of sadness that exists within myself because of the extreme degree of adversity I was subjected to throughout my life. When I was a small child it was the same or worse in that I seemed to experience other people's pain, or what I perceived as pain, which would overwhelm me to the point it was unbearable, while I was completely unable to identify, get in touch with or feel anything for my own sake or what was happening to me. I'm better now at experiencing my own feelings but is still very difficult to get to and sometimes have to be clubbed in the head, figuratively speaking, to finally get to my own feelings. When I go to a funeral however, I don't feel anything. When my grandfather died when I was fourteen, I went through an attempt at trying to make myself cry because I thought that's what I was supposed to do but I was unsuccessful and wasn't able to shed a single tear. Now, after a lifetime of painful experiences at the hands of other humans, I don't feel much for other human beings for the most part, though I still have the trigger happy response when I see someone else cry and the waterworks begin that way. But really caring about people I can't say I do. When I see animals hurt even in the slightest way, however, it feels literally unbearable to me and I almost come unglued and can't watch or look at it. It appears from my own perspective that our experiences dictate some of these things, i.e., when we have limited experiences, we experience a limited range of emotions based on that lack of experience and when we have more experiences, either positive or negative, we are affected that way and have a wider range of emotions, likewise, with biology playing a part, as well.

Yes, but I have a tendency to make people sad or mad before I realize what I'm saying - at least I can see that they're sad after the fact. But I wish I could prevent it.

There are a lot of feelings I can't discern though. And nonverbal communication tends to scare me because I don't know what I'm implying. I also considered myself a very empathetic person in the past but noticed that a lot of my empathy was based on how I felt!

I do

_________________
I have autism.