I’m not sure what empathy is or how to feel it. It’s sometimes left friends and partners feeling frustrated with me when I can’t comfort them in the way they need and it causes me to be upset that I don’t understand it. I want to understand what it’s like.
Edit: tagged as chemistry because I guess technically it’s brain chemistry.
Edit: I’m talking about this issue with my therapist later today.
Edit: just got done with therapy. Turns out I do feel empathy, but it just comes off as not caring because I get frustrated that I can’t always figure out how someone needs to be comforted. I might look into getting tested for autism because it happens a lot.
In: 7230
I’m going to say that everybody’s individual experience with what empathy is is going to be different. We hear the word and then we connect that word to a certain feeling or process we have.
Personally, I have three different things I connect to the word “empathy”: two are a feeling and one is a process.
The feeling is pretty basic: I feel a certain negative emotion when seeing or hearing about the pain of someone else. The pain is not always the same. Sometimes it is a feeling similar to guilt, probably like “survivor’s guilt”. In other cases, it’s like a feeling of sadness or pity. I call them both “empathy” but we can analyse them as distinct feelings / reactions.
The process is more like a logical thing: I see someone’s situation, and try to understand it: how they got there, why they feel the way they do, why they make the decisions they do, etc. It’s trying to be as free of personal bias (ie: “this is what I would feel or what I would do”) and prejudice as possible. It’s the perspective that everybody makes decisions informed by their knowledge, feelings and life experiences and therefore all decisions are “rational”, it’s just my job to understand how they could be seen as “rational” by the person. Obviously, this isn’t a feeling or an emotion, it’s more like an epistemology.
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