Empathy - not to be confused with compassion

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I believe empathy is one of the biggest problems for aspies. Others' feelings, motivations, hidden agendas, interests, plans, goals are a mystery to us, we lack the intuition to capture them, we lack the antennae to tune into them.

This is not to be confused with lacking compassion. Once I know (from my own experience with the same suffering) what another may be going through, I am extremely compassionate.

Empathy is the ability to figure what the other is feeling. It's what good salesmen are best at. They intuitively know how to catch your interest, what will hook you, what will make you feel at home with them. They're not necessarily compassionate. The fact that they can figure you out easily doesn't mean they care for your sufferings.

I write this because so many posts and threads on WP show a confusion between both concepts.

Isn't "theory of mind" the ability to figure out what the other is thinking? Now I'm

I always thought empathy was the ability to feel what the other is feeling.

Damo (my son) has no empathy but I do think he has a little bit of compassion at times, very rarely tho.
I have lots of compassion and alot of empathy.

I am not an Empath topic

I cannot believe it. After all these years, I did not realize I was not empathetic. Now I know I was experiencing compassion. I confused the definition with the condition. Now I know I am not sympathetic, either. Compassion is a better word. I do understand that others have feelings and emotions, and when I read about others' pain, I guess what I am feeling is compassion, but not empathy.

Well, at least I am not heartless, even if I cannot put myself in another person's shoes. And I understand injustice, prejudice and pain.

sartresue, as usual I totally identify with what you shared here.

I put extremely.

I'm not good at reading most non-autistic people in certain ways, though. Or detecting hidden agendas, etc. I can see some things, but some things are completely out of my comprehension. (I think I see different things about non-autistic people than they see about each other -- they are always surprised by the things I do see, considering what I don't see.)

But around autistic people I have a pretty large amount of intuitive grasp of why they're doing whatever they're doing, or at least a good guess. And I'm often right. Not all autistic people. But the portion who are similar to me in certain specific ways, we can often read each other like a book even if we have more trouble reading different people and different people have trouble reading us.

Non-autistic people's empathy is not graded on how well they can intuitively understand and predict the behavior of autistic people, and I don't think autistic people's empathy should be graded on how well we can intuitively understand and predict the behavior of non-autistic people. I think both sets of people have the full range of being able to do that to people unlike themselves in some major way like that, from none to a whole lot of good guesses.

But... around the people I can read... it really startled me once: I could see what the person was feeling, but not only that, but I could see his attempts to hide what he was feeling, and several layers of cognitive complexity on top of all that. He could see the same thing in me. It was really startling. Both he and I are autistic, and we are frequently misinterpreted by others (including a few autistic people). And that's an example of what I do intuitively see when it's the sort of person I can understand well. It was a startling experience because normally I only see a little bit of that in other people and am left to guess the rest.

Does it count if one can logically deduct what the other person is feeling? I think I'm capable of that, but I don't automatically tune in. Hidden motives are for the most part completely out of my reach.

I've only experience my own point of view so I don't know how empathetic I am.

And here I was thinking they were the same thing. I do have a little 'empathy', but it's pretty lousy. It used to be that it was practicaly not there with me, because I had almost none as a child. Compassion, yeah, of course, though I certainly wouldn't call my sort excessive by any means.

Keoren,

A brilliant salesman, one who sells because of his/her charisma, doesn't have a clue what the other is feeling or thinking if you ask them. They grasp it intuitively and use it, but they have no conscious knowledge of it. This is way more effective than logical understanding, because it's spot-on, infallible, always right, unlike logical judgement, and doesn't take time to form, so they can act on it immediately, the second they meet a new person or group, without any trial and error.

I've always been confused about empathy and compassion. I know that I have compassion, because of my love for animals, and the way that I cannot bear to see them suffer. It's harder to understand how I feel about humans. I have gotten upset at things I read or saw on the news, and yet closer to home, felt indifferent.

Empathy is intuitively grasping what makes another tick. Compassion is caring for their well-being. It's two completely different things. They are confused because it's (wrongly) assumed that one follows the other. As if grasping someone's pain would make everyone except aspies automatically care for him/her. Ha!

There's a test for empathy at the Autism Research Centre (www.autismresearchcentre.com) as part of their initial volunteer questionnaire. I did the test... average is 33 - 52 (42 for men, 47 for women) and maximum is 80.

I scored 9. Yes, 9.

!@#$!

But I do know that I am very compassionate, when I understand the feelings that are going on (if I have been in the situation or understand the impact of a situation on someone).

I feel a lot of sympathy, but I have problems with feeling empathy.