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.
