Ever feel like you have too much empathy...

Post Reply New Topic

rather than not enough?

I recently had a friend of my father who is mentoring a high-school student try to set me up as his algebra tutor. The first session I wasn't feeling very prepared and was fumbling around trying to figure some things out myself that I felt a little rusty with. Of course it's really difficult on the spot. Anyways, that was last Tuesday. I got in touch with the teacher and found that he had to take the test last Friday and I obviously hadn't been able to do enough to help him prepare the previous Tuesday.

So yesterday I called this kid again and asked him if he wanted to meet again today. He said he was busy. I asked about tomorrow and the next day and he said "I'll probably be busy then and the rest of the week too but thank you" along with mumbling something else that was in Spanish that I couldn't understand (He immigrated from Guatemala). Anyways, I could sense through the phone that maybe he wasn't telling the truth and was just too afraid of it not being polite to say that he wasn't interested (even though I'd completely understand). Of course I'm not 100% sure that he isn't actually busy even though that was my guy reaction. But the thing is that kind of awkwardness is just too much to bear for me. Putting people in a spot where they feel like they can't tell me the truth makes me really anxious for some reason. After that call I felt like I wanted to crawl under a rock. I can't really describe why it hits me so hard as I don't completely understand why.

Anyways does anyone else feel like they ever get social anxiety from being too empathetic rather than not empathetic enough? This is odd because it goes on the opposite end of the spectrum from being too blunt and not caring how you make others feel.

The problem isn't that aspies don't care, it's that they do5 realize how people with emotionally digest what they say. This is the exact same thing; you care about his feelings, but you don't know how to properly deliver what you wanted to say, so you want to avoid confrontation in general. Or something like that.

I'm an empath who can't identify emotions in myself or others. I'll start feeling other people's emotions, but will have no clue what they are even once I'm doing that.

Apparently this impresses NTs, I don't see why, it seems quite straightforward to me.

Nope. Apparently I don't have enough.

Same here, not enough.

I mean I care about those close to me but emotionally I don't see the point in getting all caught up in other folks baggage.

In the situation you described I'd be more upset that I didn't get to my own self imposed standards and it wouldn't effect me about the other person. Basically I'd be beating myself up.

I don't have enough as well.
But to NTs it may seem as if I have too much.

In order to fake it I have to first think of similar situations that I've been in. And then remember what I felt in that situation. Then just assume that's how the other person feels. If you know what i mean.

This can lead to big misunderstandings.

Sometimes I've been told, in effect, that I'm too moralistic: I will act too much at my own expense to help other people. Basically almost anything bad, I'd rather suffer myself than have someone else suffer it. When I broke up with the one girlfriend I have had, being a heartbreaker felt worse to me than being heartbroken. I would rather have been the one who got dumped. Which is probably why I'm likely to stay single for a long time: I don't want to risk having to break another woman's heart!!

I feel I have too much empathy, and it causes problems. When I'm with my friends (who are my age), I sometimes worry that I might intimidate other people, because usually socially anxious people like me hate to walk by a group of youngsters, so when I'm in a group of youngsters I know how other people on their own feel. So I smile at them, hold doors open for them, and let them on the bus first. Luckily my friends aren't the intimidating type, they are meek and shy and polite like me, but to other people when we're a group of youngsters together, we just look like a pile of youths.

Also, as most of you know, I get intimidated and upset when people look at me, so I don't look at them because I worry that they might get the same feeling as I get. Part of me knows that may not be true, because some people want to be looked at and you appear unconfident when you look down all the time, but because I feel so upset and angry when people look at me, I just think they might feel the same, or I might come across another socially phobic person and look at them and make them feel intimidated, and I don't want other people with social phobia to feel like that because I know what it's like.

Not really. I express my empathy just fine.

I know what you mean, I do too, but I don't think this is true empathy.

If someone is upset, I might take on this feeling and assume its me who's caused it, or try to fix it or avoid it. I should be able to accept someone is upset and allow them to have that feeling, it is their feeling not mine. Although I could and should offer a friend support, I don't need to feel the same way, just feel that they feel that way. That is empathy.

Jason

Yes. I sometimes sit here and realise I have a lot of empathy. Recently I discovered I do for lots of people... from people close, to total strangers, to myself and even to inanimate objects.