Are you capable of empathy?

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Truthfully I rarely feel empathy, but I do feel it. If I have been through a similar situation like a outsider in a group, someone talking behind anothers back or someone scared about entering into a new situation, it hits me very intensely like I'm feeling it myself, though I'm not sure how much of that is merely applying my memories to other people as I'm not assuming I always get it right what their feeling.

However, although I empathise rarely I sympathise a lot. You can be very caring and not need empathy for it, thats what people forget sometimes.

There should have been an option of "I don't know" because I still can't grasp the difference between empathy and sympathy.

I'm one of those who feel empathy really really strongly. Only problem is I hardly know how to showit.

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 retarded" 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.