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Empathy

Can'tThinkOfAName

Does anyone else find it really difficult to figure out how much empathy they have, and what empathy even means?

I would like to think that I care about other people - I want to support my friends and family and make them feel happy, I have very strong moral and political convictions about how I should act based on what I believe is best for others, and I absolutely do not want to do anything to hurt anyone. However, often people seem to define empathy as the ability to accurately interpret people's emotions, which I think I (and probably many of you) often struggle with.

I find it very difficult in the moment to understand what people are thinking and feeling based on social cues, body language etc. For example, sometimes in conversation I can infodump about what I'm thinking about before realising that I should probably be asking the other person how they're doing. Sometimes I even do or say things that upset people and only realise this after the fact, but when I do become aware of it I feel devastated. I think in response to this I've developed the habit of worrying constantly about how I'm making other people feel, and I tend to be quite reserved and passive when I'm meeting people out of fear of getting things wrong, but this in turn can put a strain on relationships.

I've taken a couple of different online "empathy tests" and they give very contradictory results - Simon Baron-Cohen's "Empathy Quotient" test in particular gives me a low result "consistent with people on the autism spectrum" whereas other tests give me a fairly high score.

Does anyone else have similar experiences? If you have any advice about what you can do effectively to understand other people better then please let me know. I almost wish sometimes that people could say in simple terms "I am feeling abc and I would appreciate it if you did xyz for me" but I know this isn't always how people behave.

Parents

  • There are different types of empathy - I experience emotional or affective empathy, which means I can sometimes feel the emotions of others, or their negative emotions can make me feel distressed. However this can make it difficult for autistic people to respond appropriately, as the emotions may cause a meltdown or shut down, or we might not feel comfortable giving someone a hug. Cognitive empathy is being able to understand what someone else is feeling, and as I understand it this doesn't make you feel their emotions, it enables people to be sympathetic while being able to offer support from an emotional "distance". We're not usually good at this.

    If I'm not sure what someone is thinking or feeling, I'll often just say "are you ok?"

Reply

  • There are different types of empathy - I experience emotional or affective empathy, which means I can sometimes feel the emotions of others, or their negative emotions can make me feel distressed. However this can make it difficult for autistic people to respond appropriately, as the emotions may cause a meltdown or shut down, or we might not feel comfortable giving someone a hug. Cognitive empathy is being able to understand what someone else is feeling, and as I understand it this doesn't make you feel their emotions, it enables people to be sympathetic while being able to offer support from an emotional "distance". We're not usually good at this.

    If I'm not sure what someone is thinking or feeling, I'll often just say "are you ok?"

Children
  • in reply to Lotus

    This is so interesting. I didn’t know there were different types of empathy. I’ve always thought I have too much empathy and my resultant behaviours led to many people over the years saying ‘well, you can’t be autistic because you ‘have empathy’, which of course was not correct and set me back for many years in the sense that I didn’t really know myself as a result