Aspies, do you lack empathy?

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I think I have some empathy, not for as*holes but for helpless children and animals. I feel sorry for them, and bad for them. This makes me somewhat different from Kiriana Kosawage.

I admit I have no empathy for as*holes and in fact when they suffer misfortunate I feel glad. The German is schedenfraude.

Who's Kiriana Kosawage ??

I have to admit I'm not all that empathetic towards people. Unless it's something very sad, out of the blue. I feel that very few people care when I have misfortune, so I don't feel sad for them. I know yer supposed to, and all that.

I lack empathy, my family are upset about something at the moment and I just don't seem to care, thus making me feel sad in myself, that I don't care about them being sad, that is some sort of feeling. I don't no if it's that I just don't know how to feel about different situations, or if it's down to not feeling empathy at all. I do think that everyone can have empathy but are just confused about how to show it.

Ironically, as of this Christmas, I will not have ANY empathy/sympathy for strangers, etc.... or even most of my family. After I got injured getting my father pudding he asked for, I didn't even get a little ice in time, the injury got FAR worse, and my father doesn't even know if I am still alive! So why should I care if he was hurt, etc...

SO, I go back to the lack of showing I once did. I should never have changed one whit. It has hurt a bit, and wasted time, but acheived NOTHING!

When I think of all the time, etc... wasted, and for WHAT?!? I shouldn't even have agreed to get the pudding. That would have made my time now like a VACATION instead of like a PRISON!

Steve

I have lots of sympathy, but am confused about empathy. Empathy is meant to be "shared feeling" - ie someone is able to understand AND FEEL how *I* (or someone else) feels in my situation, given that I am me - not how they would feel were they in my situation. Shared feeling means that they should somehow be able to conjure up that feeling (Me, as Me), and somehow share in it. I'm not convinced that anyone can do this, although I think lots of people pretend to/genuinely think they can. If NTs really did have such superior powers of empathy, then you'd think they could empathise with everyone else, however different they may be. In general, I think that the word "empathy" is overused, and that usually when people mean it they are talking about "sympathy".

Yes I do and borderline sociopathic behavior.

I wouldn't say I lack empathy, at least in some cases. Sometimes I seem to feel others' feelings as if they were my own. Usually it's strong joy, strong pain or sadness, and strong anger. But I may not know what had brought these feelings about, and why they are there in the first place. I may not even really understand the person I am with. (One friend of mine who's known me for about eight years keeps telling me that I try to love people I can't understand and have no idea *what* is it that I love, which is just not good. She's right, I think).

More often than not, it's painful, especially when the other person is distressed. I end up just wanting to escape because I don't know how to cope. I know that one is supposed to react with feeling sympathy and wanting to help, rather than running away, but I can't always help it. There were several times when my mother was crying and I wanted to literally bang my head against the wall (otherwise I've never done this, or wanted to do this, but this is as close as I can get to describing this feeling). It was almost like anger, and I thought I'd burst out and say something really inadequate, until I realized I was simply feeling her pain and it was making me frustrated.

This sort of empathy is probably normal. I can't imagine how one could sense all the emotions that somebody else has, apart from the most basic ones; it's beyond human capacities, I think. We'd all be saints if it weren't.

What disturbs me, personally, is that I can't always respond adequately to the empathy when I have it, and get the urge to withdraw and save myself instead of staying and helping in some way (it doesn't happen always, but it's there).

It's also strange how those emotions coming from somebody often seem out of context; I don't "get" the general pattern of how somebody is feeling when talking to me, and I may not get the subtext of their words as well, so I basically may be misunderstanding more than half of what they're saying, when all of a sudden there comes this sudden outburst of emotion and I am kocked off balance. It's bewildering. I could easily imagine how somebody who has greater difficulties reading facial expressions or gestures could feel the same way and be even more confused.

Now I *loathe* it when children and animals are being hurt. Or rather, I can't bear to see it. It makes me want to beat up the person who's doing it, or worse. I don't think I'd be in control of myself if I saw something like happening before me in real time. When it comes to it, I think I'm a lot more empathetic/sympathetic towards animals than people, really.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/modules.php? ... hy&start=0 had this talk...

I find it best to search before posting on stuff as I found out how much they is on stuff been asked even me asking... That's why I don't really like forums that much no structure... Got to search to see how many times its been done before...

empathy is a confusing subject... i have always felt very strongly empathetic and sympathetic, but since other people's reactions are different to mine, i'd think they were worried in situations where i'd be worried but in reality they weren't, so i was feeling 'empathy' pains where the other person wasn't feeling anything at all!

empathy often gets treated like an objective thing which NTs have and we don't. but unfortunately my experience has been that few NTs have ever demonstrated any empathy for me, even though they go to pains to demonstrate empathy to each other! yet on the other hand, once i discovered other people with AS i was surprised about how much i could relate to the feelings of other aspies - or at least the ones who were similar to me, not all - and how much empathy i felt. so empathy isn't really an objective thing but more a phenomena that seems to work between similar people.

i do know what it's like wanting to run away from emotionally charged situations when you don't know what to do, that's what i'm like. but curiously, if ever i'm in an emotional state the last thing i want is someone talking to me!! so if you run away, you did the right thing by me

does anyone find tv/film dramas too painful to watch? because i feel so much empathy that i feel the pain of every single character amplified a thousand times, making any programme total emotional agony to sit through

I am full of empathy and sympathy.

Tim

I guess I have empathy. A week before I joined WP, my grandparents had a golden wedding anniversary party. Anyway, nearly everyone, including me, had quite a lot of alcoholic beverages, and two cousins had an arguement over something I didn't really understand. Maybe, because of the alcohol, I blew things out of all proportion, and I didn't want to see family members fall out, especially on this occasion, so I got qiute upset, and was in tears. Both cousins had told me their sides of the story (it was something about one cousin not being invited to the other's wedding).

I have a really serious lack of empathy and sympathy, and compassion.

For plants and animals, I have far too much.

I have (what I take to be) massive empathy for my cats and for my housemate's dog.

Some have accused me of lacking empathy. I think that what's really going on is that my emotions are there, they just don't manifest in the way a Normal would expect them to.

For example:

When my grandmother died I showed no remorse. My father, a mildly manly Army guy, said "you know you can show sorrow son, it's ok." The truth is I didn't feel bad that she died.

Six months later I was finshed paiting the living room in my new house. I did it in an orage & yellow sponge pattern. I thought it looked really nice and said to myself: "I wish my grandmother could see this."

So did I feel bad about her dying? I guess I did, but I didn't do it in the way a Normal person would expect.

Alicorn, I think that's really a very important observation. I think that when people talk about others "lacking empathy" they should at least be able to define their terms and explain what they mean. There is no real consensus on the issue, and to me that suggests that the definition is still up for grabs.

I 'think' empathetically moreso than 'feel' empathy. When I do feel empathy, it's usually for animals or children. I've never felt guilty, although there are some things I'd do differently if I could.