Can a person with Asperger's have TOO MUCH empathy???

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I am always reading on this site that people with Asperger's have little, if any, empathy. I once asked someone if she thought I didn't have empathy and she told me I had a lot of it, in fact I could be too emphatic and end up stressed out or depressed because of it. I worry that people might think I don't have Asperger's just because I have empathy.

ASD people have plenty of empathy, they just may not reveal it in a recognized fashion to others. I believe the rest boils down to TOM issues, but I thought the idea of lack of empathy was well established as false by now.

when I try to comfort people, it almost always comes out wrong.

Just to clarify, if I'm not mistaken the kind of empathy that psychologists are talking about is the ability to recognize emotions in others, not the ability to feel compassion for them. You can have your own emotions and feel a great deal of compassion for other people without being able to tell how they're feeling.

I can tell when people are down.

Aspies can get really upset at the thought of someone suffering, but don't always recognise that those people are actually suffering. very often by the time we realise its too late, and then there is a tendency to be overcome with emotions.

Nope

It's like asking if someone with AS can be too socially able.

Nope

So we can't even agree on basic concepts like whether autistic people have more/less/equal empathy? In my case I excel at understanding emotions.

Short answer: Yes.

My husband sometimes even calls me an Empath!

So yes,I think we can feel a lot of empathy,maybe sometimes even more so then neurotypical people.
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If so, then there should be an effort made to update the diagnosis to remove "lack of empathy" from the criteria. Cause as it appears, our empathy seems to differ from person to person just like the NTs.

Sure I do have empathy. My empathy does not come naturally. I have to replicate the scenario in my mind and deliberately put myself in the situation, think HARD about what I "might" feel, then like answering a difficult multiple choice question, I eliminate the improbable and hope Sherlock Holmes is right. (That's s SH quote.)
Then I crank my brain up again for something that might make that person feel better, but usually I wind up standing silently by his/her side, holding a tissue box or making a cup of tea.

Does this help somehow?

I'm OK with being able to tell how others are feeling through body language, and I'm hardly ever wrong (I don't say ''never'' because we all make mistakes). But generally I'm OK with it, unless you get an awkward person. Like at the charity shop where I used to volunteer, the manager there was very difficult to ''read'' sometimes. I couldn't always tell if she was being sarcastic or not. I knew I wasn't the only one who thought that because a few of the other (NT) volunteers also pointed that out when the manager wasn't there of course.

Well, it probably has to do with reading it in the wrong way, not showing/faking it when expected and showing it in the wrong way.

For example when certain colleagues are sick or I see a homeless person, I could not care less, it is not my problem, they are not related to me, done. While people expect others show empathy.

On the other hand I have a lot of empathy for certain children in my volunteer work (a lot of times they have an autistic background as well), where other people say that you should not bond to the children.