Empathy

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I have loads of empathy to the point watching the news overloads me and I have to have a few hours of me time. I remember my parents putting things in terms I could understand and I learned how to be empathetic.

Yes, I definitely consider myself an empath. I'm definitely well aware of what other people are feeling, except when I get so angry and tired of the world that I just lash out with not a care.

I couldn't vote because my empathy varies depending on the situation and probably my mood.

I thought I had heaps of empathy but since taking all the ASD tests I have discovered that I really do not. What I thought was empathy is just a desire to get involved in causes and not a real understanding of peoples feelings, apparently this is quite a common aspergers trait. As mum put it you have plenty of empathy for yourself.

Well, it does depend on your definition of empathy.

However, I feel horible emotional pain and anger towards all of the propaganda going on in my country (the US) as it hurts so many groups of people. It then hurts me further on a personal level because the groups tend to use Christianity to justify it, when if anyone studied or truely believes in Chrisitianity they will know how Jesus felt about laying judgement on entire groups of people.

None.

I have a great capacity to sympathize with people, however I have no empathy. If someone is obviously sad, say a close relative has died, I do not feel sad because that is how they feel, which is empathy. I do however, having lost relatives close to me, understand why they are sad and offer my condolences and any support they need, which is sympathy. This goes for all emotions, joy, anger, guilt ect. .

I don't actually believe in empathy, having never really experienced it myself, it seems too foreign to me. However this is how empathy was explained to me by a therapist. (or at least my interpretation of that explanation.)

I have too much empathy sometimes. But I don't express it well.

i remember that when some of my close relatives died, i wasn't so much sad because they left this world, i just accepted it, but seing the others crying made me cry, too. although, i was quite young back then. now, i don't even feel connected when others cry. i believe we all have our own lives to live and when some one else is crying it's because of their own problems they have to deal with. when some one is crying over something that cannot be changed and the only thing to do is to accept it, then my involment would be quite pointless and unnecessary. it should not be my problem that they don't know how to deal with unchangeable problems.

i was actually surprised to discover here on WP that i have less empathy than most other aspies. it made me think that maybe i am just careless and it doesn't have much to do with AS.

I'm unsure how much empathy NTs have, so it's hard to say if I empathise as much as they do. I tend to think most people don't empathise, except perhaps with a few loved ones. To me, the whole world is a profoundly uncaring desert with just a very few individuals who still give a damn. But when I look at myself, I'm a complete hypocrite.

I felt very little when my parents died, though a few minutes after hearing of my father's death, it was as if the whole world had gone black and white. Couldn't really call it depression, though I clearly wasn't happy. For days, my sister was barely capable of talking on the phone without crying, but I couldn't think of anything to say to comfort her (to me, saying the "right thing" very often feels completely phoney and useless). To this day I've never missed my parents or felt any sorrow. People have told me that it might take years to come out, which scares me because it suggests there's an emotional time-bomb inside me. But I suspect they're wrong in my case.

When a friend of mine comitted suicide, I felt nothing for a few minutes, then felt sick, then nothing again for a couple of days. Somebody said I did a great job of comforting his girlfriend when we went to see her. Then when I got back home, I started crying uncontrollably. I thought "at last it's coming out," and figured I'd best go upstairs and cry on my girlfriend's shoulder, but by the time I'd got halfway up the stairs, I was fine again.

When my first wife cried, I just thought it was funny - of course I hid it very carefully and felt awful for being so callous.

When my sister's partner jilted her, she was beside herself. I cried then, but as my own girlfriend had just ditched me, I couldn't resolve the cause, and felt that on balance that it was mostly myself I was crying for. My father said "I'm sorry, I was starting to think you didn't care about anybody, but now I see you do." But he didn't know I'd just loved and lost. Later my sister's partner came back (he'd just had cold feet and panicked), but when she told me that, I just said "oh." Of course I was glad, but she must have thought I wasn't interested.

A lot of the time my efforts to soothe people felt more like an ego trip - "look at me nobly caring for the human race, aren't I lovely?" and the help I gave was often badly timed, I'd think about them and decide what they must need, without looking at the person or finding out where they were really at. I realised that if you're going to help a little old lady across the road, you'd best check whether she really wants to cross that road first, but actually translating that into action took a long time, and I've probably still got a long way to go.

Newsreel footage of starving masses in the third world don't move me. My father used to say people aren't wired to care about the whole world's problems. My mother used to say he had a callous streak that she hated. If he found a lame duck (a real one), he'd just kill it, "to be kind," but there was never a trace of sorrow about it. Actors in films crying just looked stupid, though that's improved a bit in recent years.

When I was very young I'd get upset if an insect died - I thought it would have a grieving family somewhere.

My father was adept at guilt-tripping, and would often refer to a time in the future when "your old Daddy will die. I was aghast at the thought.

It's such a sad subject for me Some of these topics unlock memories I haven't opened for years, and this one is the biggest so far.

I think I'll shut up now and let somebody else talk for a bit.

I don't know. I honestly thought I had a lot of empathy. People would be experiencing something, and I could understand what they were feeling, though feel nothing about it myself.

I totally get the helping someone so you could be "noble". I know I've done that alot. I do know that when something happens to my partner I understand why she's feeling that way, but don't feel anything about it. She always tells me I'm so logical.

With my kids it's different. When they are upset, I am very often upset, too. I want to help them to get past it, and am upset until they do.

Crazy thing, empathy. I'm still not sure.

Sorry, I couldn't vote in your poll. The reason being none of those choices represent my empathy issues. I do feel lots of empathy at times, absolutely none at others.
When I feel no empathy it's usually because I am feeling resentful, jealous or angry about something, a situation in life and I don't really care about anything else at that point.
When I do feel empathy it's for others who I feel have had just a tough of life as mine and I wish we all had things just a little easier.
I guess that's somewhat black and white. I need to remember that everyone takes in their experiences differently and even someone with a charmed life may have had experiences that, to them, are just as traumatic as my life's disasterous ones. Sure, breaking a fingernail can be traumatic if you have nothing worse to compare it to, I guess.

I honestly don't know the answer to this question, so I didn't vote.
It's something that someone else would have to tell me.
I try to be helpful, kind and polite. I guess empathy would be measured by my success at being helpful, kind and polite.
And I am unaware of whether I am truly successful.
I am lucky to have someone I trust to give me honest feedback on this sort of thing.
He is positively biased, but at least he is honest. I'll have to ask him.

I feel a lot of empathy towards animals, I can't stand seeing them suffer. It wasn't always like that though, I know from my parents that as a kid I used to rip spiders' legs off and such without realising that they felt pain.

I used to think I had a lot of empathy for others, especially for all kinds of underdogs. I clearly remember arguing with a friend when I stood up for teenage vandals who destroyed her garden- I gave her a long lecture about the anger and resentment they feel growing up in poverty while being surrounded by rich people blah blah so on. the way I looked at them was not really empathetic though, it was like describing a bunch of monkeys and trying to logically explain their behaviour. I can't imagine myself in their situation at all.

I do feel a lot of sympathy for people who've experienced injustice, even if they are criminals. I find it easy to imagine how it feels to be treated unfairly cause I've experienced it myself in so many ways.

It sounds pretty morbid but I think I feel more empathy towards Chinese drug dealers who get publicly executed or for Arabs held in Guantanamo without trial than I actually do for people living around me who's feelings I do not understand.

do spiders feel pain? of course, even if they don't, it shortens their lifespan so it's wrong thing to do.


i hate injustice so i understand this, too.

The one saving grace about the nobility thing is that I can't be sure it's entirely that, at least as often as it seem. So many things in life have multiple motivation, I see one motive and think it's the whole story. A counsellor once suggested I was habitually refusing to give myself credit for kind acts. And I was told repeatedly as a child that I "just didn't care."

When my partner is upset, I feel awful until it's resolved. Could be empathy in there, but I've also had very traumatic experiences of partners getting upset and becoming destructive.

Yes it was different for me with my son also. I always put it down to protective instinct. I once nearly drowned myself while stopping him from drowning, thinking didn't enter into it, my body just did everything while my mind watched . And when he went missing from school, all shyness dropped from me as I tore around trying to solve the mystery, approaching people I didn't know, mind sharp as a razor. Didn't know I had it in me. He turned up safe and sound though.