what is empathy? how does one empathize?

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antique_toy
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20 May 2010, 2:05 pm

moments where i can feel my reality and envision myself from the other person's mind have been rare and have only occurred while i was high on cannabis (for some reason it affects my brain and makes me as happy, relaxed, and friendly as neurotypicals) and when the temporary joy of these brief glimpses into normalcy fade away, i become my old lost, confused, blind self.
i feel like i have been searching and searching for empathy but i have never been able to fully grasp it and live it. nobody truly likes me or desires my company. i just don't have the correct responses. has anyone learned the "key" to empathy? are there any good teniques or exercises of the mind one can use to be more socially connected to others? and if you're a neurotypical, how would you describe your ability to empathize?



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20 May 2010, 2:57 pm

Empathy yeah i seem to have alot of it

Well it's basically putting yourself in someone elses shoes and thinking "what would that feel like if that where me?" It's good for some situations and others i can built up from empathy to the point where your actually afraid to do anything just incase you hurt anyones feelings.


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poppyx
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20 May 2010, 4:29 pm

Empathy with others is a dicey thing. If you're an NT and you realize other people are in pain, it's like you feel it with them.

Many of the Aspies I know are very happy unless they have to deal with people.

If you're an NT you get the pain of empathy and the social rejection some of the time.

If you're an Aspie, you just get the occasional social rejection.

I tend to think you may have it easier.



AngelRho
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20 May 2010, 6:24 pm

"Empathy" is one of those silly buzz words used in pop psychology as of late that doesn't really mean anything of substance.

Most people have it confused with "sympathy," and the two are NOT the same thing. "Sympathy" means that you feel what someone else is feeling. It is a shared emotion or sentiment, and you both react to it the same way. If a friend of yours is upset because her best friend or a close parent or family member died, and this person comes to you and shares what happened, it breaks your heart, and you start crying with her, THAT is "sympathy."

Empathy is not even in the same ballpark with "sympathy." Most people do not share emotions or reactions to emotions as with true "sympathy." If something bad happens to you and someone says "I know what you're going through," more often than not you just want to slap them. You CAN'T know what someone else is going through because you aren't that person.

That's where "empathy" comes in. It simply means that, even though you can't possibly be going through what the other person is going through or feel what that person is feeling, you DO at least UNDERSTAND.

Here's a scenario of what might happen at Rho's house every now and then:

Door SLAMS. Wife comes in screaming obscenities. I ask "What's wrong, sweetheart?" She says, "I f*cking HATE my life right now!" I say, "You don't like me?" She says "No, I like you. I just hate everything else." I say "You don't like your job?" She says "I don't want to talk about it."

Now, she said something she doesn't really mean: "I don't want to talk about it." We have to tread lightly here.

"OK. So you had a bad day at work." She says, "YES, I had a HORRIBLE day at work." Wait a minute--I thought she didn't want to talk about it. "Boss being stupid again?" She says, "YES. I can't stand that stupid b!+ch. You know what she did? She..." At this point I start tuning her out and just nodding in agreement, because there's NO WAY I'm going to be able to follow this conversation! When she finally gets it all out, I'll say something like, "I see. You do really great work for her, and she doesn't appreciate all the hard work you've done and she just ignores you." She says "Yeah. And THEN..." At this point I've tuned her out again--see above. Repeat head nodding, the occasional uh-huh, oh really?, I see, and so on. So when she's finished, I say something like "And when she does [whatever the problem is], it makes you feel really frustrated." She says, "That's it exactly. See, YOU get it? Why can't my boss..." I follow this up with a glass of wine and some chocolate. By this point she's completely relaxed. And I haven't really done anything but go along with her, agree with her, and try to get her to agree with ME.

Empathy means you take the time to understand someone. The trouble isn't that we don't understand people. The problem is that we have a more difficult time making ourselves understood, and often times people look at us to get some sense that we understand them.

So it's not so much that we don't understand people, more that we don't SHOW that we understand. What you need is a fake-out approach. The thing that has worked for me is every time someone tells me something, I say it right back, I just say it in different words. It's comforting for other people, because when you say something in your own words, you MIGHT get it right, or you might be slightly off. That gives the other person a chance to clarify what they mean. If you rephrase it in such a way that it is in agreement with what that person says, that lets them know that you do understand.

It's a fakeout kind of thing, but it works.



Exclavius
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20 May 2010, 7:34 pm

How can an aspie know what it would be like to be in the other person's shoes (well, in the other person's brain is a more interesting question)?

They do not think like us (well, at least not like I do)
So how can i know what they're thinking? How could they know what i'm thinking?

If i were simply to put myself in their brain... I would see how i would take it from an aspie point of view.
but I can't see how they would see it from an NT point of view, because i'm not an NT any more than they are an aspie.

I have to question if it really is a problem that we have with empathy, or instead it's that we learn very young that when we do empathize, we do not do so correctly, because we see the world different than others.
As a result, we give up on attempting to empathize at a very early age, and any potential skill in it is lost, and those portions of the brain usually dedicated to it, are then directed to other skills.



poppyx
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20 May 2010, 8:44 pm

They have done experiments with kittens where they blindfold them at birth, and then after several weeks of being blindfolded, the cats are blind permanently because the visual cortex didn't develop.

NTs develop mirror neurons very early in life because we have the genes that code for oxytocin (the bonding hormone), and we seek to understand what we're bonding with, almost as soon as our eyes can focus.

Assuming you can't see, you can still hear and smell and touch.

The idea with empathy is that you don't assume they're like you--you assume that you are reaching towards someone entirely different.



MrEGuy
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23 May 2010, 11:50 pm

Empathy is a BS game. People tell you to empathize, but what they're really doing is trying to trade at a lower price. I've seen no proof that NTs mean anything when they talk about empathy.



poppyx
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24 May 2010, 11:03 am

You've never had an NT do something for you because they felt something for you?

That would be empathy.



Kat15
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24 May 2010, 8:46 pm

Well, im not going to waste my time wasting what empathy is as everyone else seems to have done that.

empathy is a hard thing for me, a family friend came over and she said that her sister in law had only 48 hours to live. I had NO idea what to say but i was scared if i had said nothing i wold come across as rude which is the least i want people to think. So i just kinda mumbled "oh im sorry" and gave a "thats to bad" smile. And scrambled off into the kitchen, to avoid conversation. It's very hard.



CannabisForAutism
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21 Jan 2011, 7:35 am

MDMA is an empath (it was developed in 1912, long before it was discovered as a rave drug).

I can't really say that it 'gives empathy to an autist' because I don't know what empathy really feels like (I am aspergers).

However, when I used to take MDMA / ecstacy, it taught me, for the first time ever:


"How it feels to actually feel genuinely interested in another persons boring rubbish conversation."

After a few years of this I was stuck with a permanent appreciation of this - in effect I used MDMA to grow an empathy-like function where none had existed before.

I haven't used MDMA for over 10 years now.



SearchforSerenity
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21 Jan 2011, 9:13 am

AngelRho wrote:
"Empathy" is one of those silly buzz words used in pop psychology as of late that doesn't really mean anything of substance.

Most people have it confused with "sympathy," and the two are NOT the same thing. "Sympathy" means that you feel what someone else is feeling. It is a shared emotion or sentiment, and you both react to it the same way. If a friend of yours is upset because her best friend or a close parent or family member died, and this person comes to you and shares what happened, it breaks your heart, and you start crying with her, THAT is "sympathy."



I see this is an old thread, but since it was commented on I wanted to post. The quote above is explaining sympathy and empathy backwards. Empathy is when you feel what another is feeling, and sympathy is where you show understanding.

Here is a good link that explains the differences and similarities of the two.

http://www.diffen.com/difference/Empathy_vs_Sympathy

I am a good sympathizer because I can usually logically understand why someone would feel a certain way in a situation. However, I tend to come off as unemotional and cold hearted anyway, because of the way I express my understanding. As far as empathy, I am terrible at this unless I am watching a movie where a mother loses a child, or an animal is hurt. Then I feel what the characters feel. There are occasions where I feel others emotions too much though. Usually if someone is stressed or nervous, I start to feel anxious around them and it becomes overwhelming.



asperquarian
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21 Jan 2011, 10:38 pm

SearchforSerenity wrote:
I see this is an old thread, but since it was commented on I wanted to post. The quote above is explaining sympathy and empathy backwards. Empathy is when you feel what another is feeling, and sympathy is where you show understanding.

I am glad someone pointed that out!

There's a third word to consider here, which is perhaps the bridge between sympathy and empathy, and that is compassion. Compassion means "co-suffering," or to suffer with.

Here's how I'd break it down: NT's talk about empathy but actually, the NT mode/mood is entirely devoid of real empathy, because to be NT means to be locked into your own little "me" ID. This is why they talk about it so much and why they feel threatened by autists who mirror back at them their own (the NTs) internal coldness. (Pls. note when I say "they" it's just short hand, I am talking about myself here, to a degree, though I am on the autist spectrum).

The NT version of empathy is sympathy: it's a kind of simulation, which requires identifying mentally with the other person and then feeling bad or sorry for them, basically because they wouldn’t want the same thing to happen to them. This is effective to a degree, but it only works with other NTs, because it's kind of an act.

Empathy is not merely to imagine being in the other person's shoes but actually to experience their distress, or whatever, as one's own. It's a "psychic" connection. Empaths are telepathic, and autists are empaths, I believe; hence the huge irony of NTs saying that autism entails a lack of empathy. It's really the reverse, I think, in that autists are so susceptible to the "unconscious load" of other people, their pain and suffering, beyond what even the NT may be aware of him or herself, that they shut down and cannot express anything. Hence they appear cold and disconnected.

(My wife is more autistic than I am, so I am speaking from experience.)

Compassion is the bridge - because it is via compassion that we allow ourselves to feel and express the empathic pain we feel for/with another, as sympathy, understanding, etc. This is the hardest thing of all. For an NT, it's easy enough to express sympathy when you don't really feel the other's pain. For an empath, it's all too easy to feel what the other's feeling (or even what they don't let themselves feel). But to feel it and express/communicate it, that is something very few people can do, either among NTs or auties, albeit for opposite reasons: NTs don't feel enough, auties feel too much.


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ComplexRobot
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22 Jan 2011, 12:50 am

From Wikipedia (has citations)
"The cognitive ability of children with AS often allows them to articulate social norms in a laboratory context, where they may be able to show a theoretical understanding of other people's emotions; however, they typically have difficulty acting on this knowledge in fluid, real-life situations."

Basically, we are capable of understanding emotions and the correct emotional response, it's just not easy to do it the moment it is needed.
I can't tell you the number of times I have done something awkward or rude and realized later exactly what it was that I did and exactly why people reacted the way they did. (From what I know makes logical sense, of course.)

One has to practice applying this information when it is needed, but it's really difficult.
Not impossible, just difficult.

Not sure if this is relevant, but it comes to mind: One thing I realized is that when you try to say something (to a group or to an individual) you must say something at least partially in the context of what they're saying. There's just something in their brain that tells them to ignore what is said if it doesn't fulfill their need of being relevant to what you're saying.
A lot of the time, things will just pop into my head, and seem irrelevant to the person I'm talking to, so I can't verbally express it, because they would get annoyed or offended.



asperquarian
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22 Jan 2011, 2:34 am

Presumably because it seems as though you weren't listening to what they were saying when what's really the case is that you weren't following their train of thought - ie buying into their personal narrative.

When in a NT mood/mode, when I speak I am constantly seeking validation of one sort or another: "Love me, tell me I'm good," bla bla, all from childhood patterns. How NT I am feeling depends on how NT the other person is; usually I am the least NT guy in the room; with my wife, I am the most (unless we have company).

So with most people, I am aware of how much they want me to validate their story - ie., respond appropriately. But from having shaman-autist mentors and an autistic wife, I know how it feels from the other side too. That's increased my sympathy for NTs.


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22 Jan 2011, 5:37 am

I have some in some areas, not so much in others. I've met truly empathic people though. Really nice and caring and not at all fake.


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