Are you oversensitive & can you emotionally empathize?

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Do any of you, like me, overcompensate for lack of compassionate empathy with cognitive and emotional empathy?

Post dx my whole identity was so wrapped around significant others, believing I was a deeply empathic person, (which I believe I am) but I am now learning I come to this place of deep emotional resonance with another, via a long & very strained and painful route. (most likely due to intensive psychotherapy and other processes that have facilitated in the feeling of my feelings (moving beyond the intellect) at great depth).

I am learning in my post dx support that I have what's known as emotional contagion, which means a flooding of feeling for others that masquerades behind the mask of what is broadly understood as empathy (compassionate empathy)

Like many people in the spectrum I learned a language and a way of being that was not inherently my own, but acquired it and then adopted it. For me it's a bit like what I would imagine Spock would feel like after being thrown into RD Lang's lap and remaining there for half a lifetime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Laing

For me my failure to demonstrate empathy can arise from my inability (or not knowing how) to express my empathy to others, as opposed to my difficulty feeling it, internally.

What is becoming clear to me is that while people on the spectrum may not respond easily to external gestures/sounds, they do respond most readily if the initiative they witness is already part of their repertoire. This points to the selective use of incoming information rather than absence of recognition. It would appear that people with AS are actually rather good at recognition and imitation if the action they perceive is one that has meaning and significance for their brains.

Does this resonate with anyone?

I had to learn internal empathy from books. I learned to express it externally by watching my wonderful mother. It's still more of an intellectual process with me ("That person broke his arm. Would it hurt to break your arm? I don't like it when people hurt. What should I do? I should express sympathy by signing his cast."), but it's a good thing, if you can understand that.

Those not wired with musical genius can still learn to play the piano by rote. It is the same with having and expressing fellow feeling.

What you say resonates with me. I seem to be overly sensitive to the emotional states of others, which in turn, particularly when I was younger, led to my being in an emotionally overwrought state much of the time. It seems that subconsciously I reduced my emotional responses to protect myself, which resulted in the appearance of a lack of empathy. It was not that I didn't have the capacity for empathy, but that by feeling too much I went into shutdown mode. For me it is possibly an emotional regulation issue, not a lack of feeling.

Z

I don't seem to have more than a couple of feelings and I don't always get those correct either so I am not sure if I feel empathy or not. I can identify with copying empathy and acting out the sympathetic or empathic role, though I have no idea what I felt or if I actually felt anything. Intellectually, I know that I am fair and kind so I would be able to take the side of the wronged person or be kind if they were upset, though when I was much younger and as a child, I had no idea what to do.

I am not sure about the selective part criss. It may be that this bit of wiring is already there rather than us choosing what we will respond to; not sure, but certainly an interesting thought.

I have found that I am not so empathic as I thought I was because as you say, when Aspies are pretending to be normal, sometimes the pressure to be normal is so great that you just learn the actions and words and just cut and paste from your memory to survive.