Empathy!

I have affective empathy but Strong boundaries. I don't know exactly where my level of empathy would fall on a scale, since I will quite easily nope out of situations I don't think I can help with (without too much emotional cost to myself). Insufficient data here.

 

I was instructed to move my butt over here so uh:

I mean, I'm autistic like a lot of people here and my empathy is really wonky. I have to actively figure out how people are feeling because I can't just look at someone and go, "Oh, you're feeling [x] emotion," I have to match their facial expression, body language, and behaviour against similar experiences I've had to figure out what they feel. Empathy is being able to intuitively interpret other's emotions. I cannot do that.

That said, sympathy and compassion are emotions I feel. I do not need to be able to automatically understand a person's emotions to care about them. I know that being sad sucks, so I want to comfort people who are sad. I know being happy is a pleasant experience, so I feel happy when other people are happy. I know that grief is awful, so I try to comfort people who are grieving, and so on. I guess, I am basically thinking, "How do I feel when [thing] happens?" and then am assuming that what I feel is the same as other people feel. It's... not a foolproof approach in any way, but it's gotten me through thus far.

I also feel from a moral standpoint that people should work together and eliminate as much suffering as possible, and should try to live together harmoniously. This is a moral framework and maybe social logistics, since things work better when people are able to stay calm and compromise and try to meet as many people's needs as possible.

So... Not being able to feel or understand other people's emotions doesn't mean not caring about them. I care very deeply, even if I can't tell how someone feels from their face. I want people to be happy and to have the things they need in life.

Not feel empathy =/= not caring.

 

Like, someone can be sobbing in my arms, and on a logical level I'll be like, "Oh no, poor friend, how can I make you feel better?" but on an emotional level I'm like, "I wonder if any of my favourite podcasts have updated." So it's like... I have much more cognitive empathy than affective empathy >.>;

I also remember reading the Harry Potter book where Umbridge makes Harry write out lines with a quill that cuts into his hand and uses his blood as ink, and my hand started fucking killing me while I read that scene. Like, I had to put the book down multiple times because my hand hurt so much. I am very bad at watching action movies or any movie with realistic violence in it for this reason.

My empathy is incredibly borked.

 

So I mentioned this empathy thing to a friend of mine and we both agreed that the empathetic can often times do far more harm than good. Because they are empathetic and got caught up in things. This is personally an issue I have. I can be hilariously easy to rile up and firmly on someone else's side with no real thought on the matter. Because someone else hurts and now I hurt and BY GODS I WILL DEFEND THEM. All while ignoring nuance and particulars!

Another issue I have is basically being...incapacitated by empathy? Sometimes I just feel so strongly with another person that I cannot really do anything else but feel. This works with things like physical harm too at times. If something trips my "Oh this pain is real!" alarms then whoop there goes Aon screaming because she had a panic attack again.

Empathy can be a lovely tool for helping people and fixing things. It can also be a horrible, horrible thing that just makes you shoot yourself in the foot repeatedly.

 

a problem i have:
the closest approximation to empathetic emotion recognition is calibrated wrong. I recognize which emotions actors are trying to convey! via, uh context clues and their expression and their character's history (this can misfire because i'm also a bit faceblind and if there are for example too many white men with sort of brown hair in suits i will often fail to distinguish them unless there are actors I like involved i might recognize them because i've looked at their facial features more and can recognize 'this particular chin set is benedict cumberbatch' or 'this brow bone looks like tom hiddleston' or 'this smirk is natalie dormer' but i have trouble keeping track of them regardless sometimes)
real people do not Act Their Emotions consciously. so what happens is I don't... always recognize when people are havign An Emotion?

see i don't get the pain thing often. my mom will recoil from the screen at a gorey scene and I'll just go 'wow those blood splatters were pretty neat.'
the reason why i hate the ending of the Wave movie is not because the suicide of the teenager via gun to the mouth upsets me, it's because it comes very suddenly and upsets me the way jumpscares upset me. I don't liek getting startled.

 

So, I've been lurking in Tumblr.txt for a while, and this whole discussion really intrigued me because...I never really thought of it in these terms before? And now I'm kind of wondering about it from a cognitive standpoint, especially my affective empathy. It's definitely there, but I seem to be able to disengage it in situations where I'm not directly involved, and alternately I sometimes need to work to engage it in other situations. To put it another way, in some situations I don't seem to experience what Wikipedia calls "emotional contagion" consistently. My empathic concern--which is usually for people you care about in the first place, again according to Wikipedia--seems to be about average-level.

My cognitive empathy, on the other hand, might be a little bit overactive, possibly because I've been compensating. My mom is definitely the empathetic sort and there's times when I'm clearly supposed to be upset about the thing she's telling me about (your aunt is having a problem! Oh no, I barely know the woman!), so I go through the "imagine if it were you/your friend/etc." and that works. Actually it works a little too well because that's the place where I don't have boundaries--I don't automatically feel sad when I see an awful picture in the news, but if I look at it too long I might start imagining without meaning to what it would be like to be in that situation, and then I'm sad. This is also why I get secondhand embarrassment from movies, and can't watch the violent bits--I occasionally accidentally start imagining what that would feel like and nobody wants to imagine some of that.

I do not get the tingly feeling when other people hit parts of their body; I have said "ow" before in such situations, though.

Since we also seem to be hitting the philosophical side of this, I don't think that empathy is necessary to either being a good human or interacting well with others. I think it's useful, yeah, but trying to understand from the outside or even just caring in general is just as good as feeling as if it were happening to you. In fact, I think some people prefer having a person who's just there or a sounding board to someone who "knows how it feels" because ultimately every other person's experience is unknowable. We can only fully know our own experience; with everyone else, we're just making guesses of varying quality.

 

ok real talk I definitely thought the "feeling pain when other people are hurt" thing was complete bullshit

apparently it is not

I definitely do the thing of "oh no, hm, you don't look right/you are ill/you have said you are in pain, what should I do, guess I'll awkwardly pat you on the shoulder and walk away and maybe be more solicitous for as long as I remember"

weird thing though, when I hear either gagging or the cryvoice, I will mimic it and I hate it.

I hate it a lot

I have talked people out of panic attacks on text, but if you vocally tear up at me, I'm out

 

I have basically nonexistent affective empathy and I guess not great cognitive empathy. Feelings happen to other people. I don't really care about what happens to most people except in the abstract, and peoples' thought processes, especially emotional people, tend to baffle me.

Empathic response sounds really weird to me. I can understand it being useful socially, because it ties people's utility functions together, but the failure modes seem kind of horrific. Overidentification, enabling, dehumanizing to try to get away from the former. It's like the fear response: useful, very useful as a mental shortcut, but a shortcut that both has failure modes and makes it difficult to turn off in the event of failure. It's intrusive emotional response.

I don't have a great reason for wanting to help people. I have the reasons I tell people, like "happy people are more interesting" or "more cooperative" and if I want to center my morality on "being good to others is good for me" then I suppose that works. But of course that runs into the problem of individuals who would be more useful to you if they were unhappy, so a personal utility argument for morality leaves some obvious holes that a more selfish person might call doorways.
On the other hand, from what I can tell the empathy response just shifts everything one step: instead of "this person makes me suffer, so he is bad", it becomes "this person makes that person suffer, and this person is farther away so he is bad". And then it becomes a matter of what "farther away" means in context, but the end result is tribalism. I am not a fan.
Regardless, I don't see a big difference between "I am good because [God/the State/some authority] punishes me if I don't help people" and "I am good because my brain punishes me if I don't help people". I trust people who choose to do good over people who need to do good, because people who need do things to get away from that need.

 

This is pretty much my feelings. I don't empathy much, a lot of the people closest to me don't empathy much, so it would be kind of hard for me to see it as a dreadful fate.

Plus, on the occasions when I do experience empathy, it prevents me from being effective. Like, people will come to me when they are upset, need talking down, etc. If I'm not emotionally affected, I can do that, fine, and choose to out of the intellectual value of 'I care about these people thus I will put in work to make them happier'. If I am emotionally affected, I'm suddenly much less useful, because a large part of my processing power is suddenly chewed up by 'oh no they're upset what do I do this is wrong everything is wrong nothing is okay'. So I much prefer not to empathy at people, especially over negative things.

And this is my answer to @sicknastyspades' question, pretty much.

Like - my mother is a good example here. She wants to ~feel~ good and does everything to get away from ~feeling~ bad, so her morality is directed by whatever her empathic response is. So for example, she'll be so so kind to a friend's small child, but utterly horrible to/about gay people, because gay people aren't people and it makes her feel better to remind herself of how they aren't people. (And she also thinks that her feelings are what matters, not any action, which is a thing I've seen come up elsewhere. People say 'oh I feel so bad for you' and think that that is a meaningful reaction, and that by feeling bad they are absolved of any responsibility to, you know, actually help. Which is kind of awful.)

Whereas the people I know and care about who don't empathy? Their morality is based on what they believe to be true. So, first off, it's consistent: they aren't going to change their morals just because they got random empathy or randomly didn't get empathy. And secondly, it is internally logical, rather than being based off 'this person is sufficiently like me that I empathise, but that person is too different and thus they don't matter.' So I trust that formulation of morality a lot more; depending on the person, I may disagree with their conclusions, but at least I know what's going on.

 

I have known several people with low/no empathy, and I don't think I've disliked any of them. The people I knew were very helpful because they were logical. Also, I have a very deep sense of shame stemming from pure-O OCD. I don't feel comfortable telling most people even the most mild bad things I've done because I'm convinced I'll be dismissed as a horrible, irredeemable person. The people I've known who lack empathy tend to not have strong negative reactions towards situations they weren't involved in, therefore I've felt that I can 'clear my conscience' with them so to speak because I'm not as afraid they'll be like 'you STOLE something? You heartless monster!!!' They respond logically, and the lack of an immediate 'you don't belong on this earth' reaction helps me.

 

Is it possible for one to just run out of empathy and sympathy?

I've never been physically empathetic, but until about half a year ago, I was very emotionally empathetic. I feel like this changed not too long ago, during a time where my online friend circle either were in the middle of nervous breakdowns on a daily basis or engaging in near-weekly 'let me eat this Dead Dove, despite the fact I know I dislike this, oh no, this was terrible, Nina I need to tell you how bad this Dead Dove was and agonize over this as I have panic attacks over doing this thing that I know I hate to do but keep doing' events that just left me exhausted. I've since backed out massively, but even then I'm just... Honestly more frustrated when I see people emotionally distraught over things.

And I know intellectually it's just not that easy to pick up your spoons and go and do things that make you uncomfortable or get out of a traumatizing household/life situation, and I try to act as kind and gentle as I can. But at the same time, I'm also just frustrated because people are unhappy and I'm not ready to help others yet, but it's been at least six months since I just broke down on empathy. Is this just gone after this point, or can I build it back up? Or is this a sign of greater issues that I need to deal with first? I will admit, I have on again-off again depression, but I'm also feeling the least anxious I've been in my life.

 

@missoyashirou That sounds kind of like compassion fatigue. It's basically when you spend so much time working with other people's trauma that you start kind of picking up the other people's stress. It's a thing that people primarily associate with healthcare and other jobs where caring about people is part of the profession, but it sounds a little like your situation as well, so checking it out might be worth it?

 

hm, thinking about affective empathy, is that like how if someone nearby (or on a podcast or something) starts laughing, you sort of pick up some of that? I do get that but idk if it's a case of my brain going "Ah Yes the Laughing Time Is Now" or if it's like, it's cool that they're happy/being silly and I am happy because I like them. Data point: I'm autistic.

And for people being sad, idk the couple times I've had my parents cry at me I was mostly like "this is awkward, pat pat pat, rub circles on back, can I go do something else". Also is it a thing to get angry when someone else is angry? Because my response to their anger is mostly being wary of them if they're a stranger, or if I'm supposed to be helping them (like when my coworker and I were having software issues like 20 minutes before a deadline) then I just try to be unobtrusive so they have less reason to be upset in general and at me specifically.

As far as physical response to gore/etc, I don't have a lot of data on that because I really don't like to look at gore. I remember really not liking the once-an-episode autopsy scenes on CSI or NCIS or whatever my parents watched, because I'd have to sort of put my hands on my chest to get like constant reassurance that I wasn't all Y-incision'd? But I don't remember if I physically felt anything.

One of my mutuals on tumblr is (self-DX'd?) autistic as well and reblogged a thing about how some autistics are like, overly empathetic and get super distressed by other people's distress. Which is apparently her experience, so, another data point there.

 

So I have no idea whether or not I'm autistic, but I do have very high empathy in every sense talked about here, and I also have a mood disorder. The combination is frankly fucking annoying most of the time and downright devastating in the right circumstances.

I've talked about this in CDCF before, but I've had several abusive narcissists in my life*, so I can actually recognize when someone is purposefully hammering on my empathy buttons. Which is great! And because of that my empathy absolutely shuts down in any kind of situation with narcissists. But people hammering my empathy for the response they want doesn't always happen in narcissist situations, and just knowing that someone's trying to get a response out of me on purpose doesn't mean that I don't get that response. Normally it just means that I then have to analyze what they are actually trying to get me to do while Having An Emotion. For example, my old boss would try to do that to get me to agree to come in to cover a shift when someone was sick. Or customers would try to be sad at me because then I would be sad and try harder to find them an appointment (spoiler: things do not work that way, I am already trying my hardest to find you an appointment because I want you out of my face). And because of the mood disorder, before I was on medication that shit could be devastating, in that it easily dragged my hard-won neutral state into either depression (I felt bad when they performed bad feelings) or a really nasty irritable mania (I was mad enough at them making me feel bad that I swung into 'this bad feeling makes me Energized and Invincible!' - this did not happen often, my anger response is profoundly broken, but it was almost worse than the depression if only because it made me treat other people way worse).

It also makes it really hard to help other people sometimes. My sister has BPD and we share a lot of the same traumatic childhood experiences, but if I'm around her too much when she's really feeling bad, whether we're talking or not, I feel the same thing to an uncomfortable extent, and I have to leave. Or I will force myself to stay regardless of the discomfort to me, and even on mood stabilizers the effort of feeling so much and of trying not to be overwhelmed by it will make me useless for the next few days. My best friend just lost a friend of 22 years who she considered a brother, and just talking to her on the phone with her right after she found out made me have to go hug my boyfriend for five straight minutes. Because of this, even though I love helping people and get a lot of self-actualization from it, I've had to institute a very firm policy of whose emotional problems I will actually listen to and try to help with - boyfriend, best friend, and sister. They're the only ones I'm close enough with that I'm willing to put up with the shared pain.

I also can't be around a lot of people feeling a lot of emotions for an extended period, either, because whether they are positive or negative, it feels like they are Having Feelings At Me Specifically, and I get bowled the fuck over by it. Occasionally (like with cons or really good sports games or concerts) if this is positive and I am feeling enough of the same positive emotions I can deal with it. But I've had to dip out of, say, family celebrations before after like half an hour, because the amount of people feeling things was just way too much.

And I get physical mirroring for hurts - not to a huge extent, but there's a flinch or a sting, for sure. Not in response to actors - I watch a shitton of violent, gory media - but irl for sure. And I cry at fucking everything. Even when I know 'crying' is the response someone wants from me. Even when it's fiction. Even when I know that everything is really fine. It's awful, I hate to cry.

In response to @sicknastyspades - I judge on how someone acts and how they treat other people. Sometimes when I feel bad, I'd much rather be around low or no empathy people, because high empathy people will feel bad because I feel bad, and then I will feel bad that I'm making them feel bad, and it's a horrible feedback loop of negative emotions. Sometimes I just want to say 'I'm sad' and, instead of having to explore it, have someone say, 'okay, that sucks, let's have a drink and do something fun to take your mind off of it.' Which, as a high empathy person, I am really bad at. I help people deal with their shit by having an in depth conversation about it. My lower empathy friends are much better at this response.

Eta: occasionally, my empathy response is useful. Some people really need to know that their pain is absolutely felt and understood before they can begin to get over whatever caused it, and I can guaran-damn-tee you I feel and understand it. I make an excellent mediator, because I can tell what each party is feeling and can explain that to the other party as needed, and I'm very good at knowing when a break is needed. It's very easy for me to tell when any situation is going south, and therefore to bounce (and get my friends to leave) before anything can escalate. I'm very good at telling when someone is being deceptive. And my best friend told me a few years ago (after a few instances of me saying 'this person is bad news' and her/others not believing me at first until they irrevocably proved they were) that she is never trusting anyone new again until I meet them and tell her they're all right.

* @BlackholeKG you said something about not thinking narcissists can recover in the other thread, iirc, and yeah, it is really rare, but as a piece of anecdata, my mother is a narcissist and she is very slowly but progressively recovering. I will never have a true healthy parent-child relationship with her, but I will actually talk with her sometimes now, about kind of important stuff. Huge progress.

 

That happens to me too, but it's not what I'm talking about. That's when I recognise someone as a clear and present danger to my survival/mental health/continued quality of life.

What I was talking about was: I lost a friend once because she completely lost her shit in a crisis and I turned into a robot. I felt nothing. I just concentrated on getting her to the hospital, getting her taken care of, and getting her back to the apartment. I wasn't able to be very comforting because somebody had to have brains.

Spoiler: potentially triggering if you have issues with medical stuff, dissociation maybe too

I didn't respond appropriately when the nurse gave her her tetanus shot while her back was turned because she was so freaked out about needles, because I knew she didn't consent to the shot and that was wrong, but I also knew she really needed that shot because of the wounds she had and I wasn't sure how to calculate the wrongness of giving a shot without consent vs the wrongness of letting someone get tetanus and the fact that she was so out of control and upset she really did not seem like she would have been able to give or withhold meaningful consent to anything at that time, and they still needed to treat her, and ultimately, my brain was focused on getting her taken care of so she wouldn't get an infected wound and die or something. And it was 100% calculations and what do I need to do next in that time. I literally felt absolutely nothing. I was practically dissociated, almost like I was floating over my head.

She felt like I saw her as less of a person after that and I couldn't explain enough that all my life, since a way inappropriately early age, I have frequently been called upon to be the only one who has their brains turned on when people around me are all freaked out, and I actually take a lot of pride in that because it's really fucking useful. I felt bad that she was hurt, but I also felt frustrated that she couldn't understand that when someone is flailing and screaming and crying and totally not processing reality, it was more important to me to get her taken care of because I could talk about feelings after she wasn't bleeding all over the place.

 

Oh mine isn't even them actually being dangerous. You can trigger it simply by being someone I personally dislike for a stupid reason.

 

hmmm... talk to me on my vent thread about this if you want. We're derailing but I'm interested?

ETA: I reported the post you replied to (not yours) and asked it to be moved in case we're annoying everyone.

 

I'm pretty sure there's a "what even is empathy" thread somewhere, if someone feels like reviving it.

 

Ways and situations in which I can imagine hurting someone even though my empathy doesn't have an off switch:

Spoiler

-The pain is hypothetical rather than immediate

Affective empathy is involuntary for me. Cognitive empathy is not. Something like shoplifting for example probably would not trip my empathy. I've never worked in retail so I don't have much of a mental image of how the negative effect would go down. It would be a bad thing that might harm an unspecified person I don't know at an unspecified point in the future. Getting caught would be very upsetting and involve dealing with a lot of negative emotions I can't avoid, but that is more likely to be a risk assessment factor than something that actively makes me feel bad to consider. I don't shoplift because I believe it's morally wrong, not because of empathy.

-The person is already hurting me

They may be intentionally hurting me, as in bullying. It could also be totally unintentional, like being very grumpy in my vicinity in a way that's getting picked up by my own empathy and tanking my mood. At its most benign, being grumpy back at them might convince them to back off. At its most malicious, I might take vindictive satisfaction from being able to feel the pain I've inflicted on someone I perceive as an attacker. This is also something I consider immoral, try to avoid, and experience a great deal of remorse if I don't avoid it.

-There is a wound that cannot be helped without causing pain

Sometimes people describe to me situations that are causing them a great deal of pain. I listen carefully and do my best to run a simulation, asking questions as necessary where the shape in my head is incomplete or does not seem to match the shape that exists. That's often not terribly pleasant for the other person, but it's fairly calm and reflective on my part. When I think I have a workable model, I look for the cracks. I start mentally running options for the least comfortable paths to pursue, and how likely I think each one is to hit something that really hurts. If I can get it right, I will be able to very gently ask something devastating. I've made a lot of people cry. But that's why they're there, having that type of conversation with me. They're in pain and they could use some help getting to the bottom of it.

That combined use of intense affective and cognitive empathy on my part, when successful, produces a profound feeling of compassion. In that state I become capable of feeling overwhelming amounts of love without hindering my ability to feel pain. So my empathy is not compromised by this additional, very different emotion, but it turns the experience into a very positive one. And it's extremely helpful in providing the safest, most supportive environment I can for someone who is trusting me in an incredibly vulnerable moment. This sort of experience hurts, but being allowed to share it is a gift of incalculable value.

-Brains are weird and people are complicated?

Sometimes I experience empathy as something like synesthesia. Occasionally I meet a person who hurts in a way that registers as the flavor of syrup or a breathtaking arrangement of lights and colors. If I were a much less healthy version of myself, I might be dangerous to people like that. As it is, the idea of getting close to someone to appreciate their pain, much less cause more pain, is abhorrent to me. That doesn't mean I will avoid people because of it, but if it becomes a factor in my relationship with someone I will tell them. Usually the specific details of the sensory experience are highly condensed abstractions of a lot of information and impressions I may not have consciously processed. They tend to be incredibly useful and evolve as I get more or different information. It's involuntary and not inherently malicious or harmful. So far most people have seemed to find it more interesting than creepy or upsetting, though I would understand and back off if someone was not okay with it.

ETA: Hmm, now that people mention it, this is getting deraily. If someone pulls up the empathy thread I would be happy to move over there instead.