Girls and empathy

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I think that you are oversimplifying the case a bit. Just because you feel strongly does not mean that everyone will. We are all different. Sometimes polar opposites.

However, I do relate to what you say about feeling it too much when others are in pain. I am not sure if anyone around here remembers the TV series 'Charmed'? There was an episode where the sisters swapped powers, and Prue got Phoebe's powers as an Empath. Because she wasn't designed to have those powers, she ended up huddled in the corner sobbing and melting down, as all the voices and sensations in the world screamed around her head.

That episode was about 20 years before my diagnosis. But I remember at the time pointing at the screen and saying to my friend "oh my god, that's exactly it, that's what it's like in my head - all the time"

Now I wonder if the person who wrote that was Aspie. In fact I might go and research that now.

Anyway, I got a bit sidetracked there, my point was going to be that, certainly in my case, I might miss some social cues, or it might take me longer than the average NT to pick up on some emotions, but I think what other people see as coldness, or lack of empathy, is more of a defense mechanism I have developed to shut out the overwhelming sensations. You might be onto something with what you say about growing out of things (or maybe finding away to deal with them) because I was certainly a lot more emotional and sensitive as a child.

I have very little empathy. I'm not even sure if I have any to be honest.

I've never been particularly empathetic (in the sense of feeling what others feel), but I am very intuitive (able to pick up on what they are feeling and why). This is especially true when it comes to friends and family. Strangers can still occasionally mystify me, at least until I've had time to step back from the situation and assess why they might have felt a certain way, but I can read those closest to me like a book. I've actually had some friends express appreciation for this, since it means that I can be told about a strongly emotional situation, express sympathy, and provide insight into it without getting too emotionally involved myself. (Though, of course, I've had to learn when people want me to do this and when they just want me to sit and nod and tell them how hard their life is. It's an ongoing process.)

Sometimes my friends tell me about how stressed and anxious they are and I feel so much for them that I get as stressed and anxious as them. This is how bad it is. It's like my body takes on everybody's emotions. I'm like a sponge.
When people fights around me I usually have panic attacks too, conflict makes me really really anxious and sad. I fought with my best friend recently (well he also said thing that really really hurt) and I had panic attacks all night and now I have sleeping problems again

I REALLY agree with the "sponge"-feeling, I´m exactly the same. I´m also internalizing what happens to other people and feel it myself.

I think it can be a fairly complicated thing. I am definitely affected by other people's expression of emotion (and strongly) but I am not sure that it's because they are feeling it but rather that the expression is what I react to. I have terrible 'theory of mind' so I couldn't tell you what is going on inside for them and I get a really low empathy score on the test (consistently around 15). I normally just panic to expressions of 'negative' emotions and with excitement to 'positive' emotions. Irrelevant of what empathy is, I am a kind person. I was brought up to be kind and polite, to put others first (although I took that to extremes at times) and I try very hard to be. It may be an intellectual exercise rather than innate but I don't think that it's all that important as to which, surely the fact that I am kind and caring is what counts?!

Yeh, I'm very empathetic..

Hi girls, sorry to butt in.
I've been thinking about empathy for some time now. I'm writting a list of my traits for my mother, hoping she may come to some understanding of me. I'm high functioning, so most of my traits are not obvious to people. But I still struggle in my own hidden ways.

This thinking is; The experts that study Autism and write up the diagnostic materials are NT's. They have a particular view of the word and expectation. They set the standard. When two NT's talk with one another, they transfer and recieve emotions. When Autistic people talk, we don't pick up most of the emotional transfer, and probably don't send too much either. This lack of transfer has caused these experts to believe we don't have empathy, but that is wrong, we do, it's simplly a different empathy.

Like others here, I can't watch the news. The emotional overload for a murder article is too much. I read the book by Donna Williams "nobody nowhere" and cried for most of the book.

I believe we simply have a different type of emotion, or perhaps different situational emotion. We are simply different, not "without" as they like to tell us.

In my view, empathy isn't something you either have or don't have, nor is it a fact that because you display empathy for some people that you do it for everyone else.

So title in a sense is meaningless as many women do have empathy but so do many men, and even then, neither gender is proficient at displaying the most empathy because empathy is circumstantial and limited to a select group of beings (or, in some extreme cases, objects).

This doesn't mean, however, that there aren't those who are so completely devoid of empathy that they only care about themselves. But these people often have certain personality disorders that hinder them from properly imagining things from other's perspectives and feeling their feelings somewhat accurately.

I think descriptions of aspies as lacking empathy just depict what we look like to neurotypicals. Ironically, from my point of view, such descriptions don’t seem very empathic.