Do you feel other people's feelings?

[DogwoodTree]

When someone near you experiences an emotion, do you notice what they're feeling? Do you have a reflective experience of that emotion (or something related) within yourself?

 

[DogwoodTree]

If I watch someone struggling and embarrassed and nervous when they're doing public speaking, I feel their anxiety. If I see someone being teased and bullied, I feel their shame and fear. If someone near me has lost something important to them and can't get it back, I feel their sadness and disappointment. If someone has been treated unfairly, I feel their anger.

When I have these emotions for myself in my own situations, sometimes I can feel them, and sometimes I can't. When I do feel them in my own situations, these difficult emotions can be overwhelming, essentially "flooding" my system. When I'm flooded with emotions, I shut down outer interactions and turn inward to try to metabolize the emotions...to process them.

So then when I feel these emotions from other people, I also get that flooding sensation, which makes it difficult to think but easy to empathize with the other person. However, because it's their situation and not mine, and because I'm flooded and having a hard time thinking through how to handle it, I don't express empathy well. I'm both overwhelmed with their emotions, and coming across as being cold and flat, because I've had to turn inward to manage these emotions flooding my system.

However, none of this tends to happen when people near me are experiencing positive emotions. If someone near me is excited, I tend to feel uneasy and even scared. Excitement in the adults who raised me indicated a danger of impulsiveness, and poor decisions, and demanding certain behaviors from me to contribute to their pleasure in their own experience. Excitement can also be loud and chaotic, and often involves unpleasant physical contact.

Other positive emotions in other people, though, I rarely notice or feel myself. I think I learned to pick up on other people's negative emotions, despite having AS, because it was necessary information in order to protect myself when growing up. But pleasant emotions fly under my radar--I never learned to feel these things from other people. I might notice signs of those emotions, but I don't feel them like I do the negative ones.

So, I'm thinking this might be part of why I don't feel "connected" with other people. Their negative emotions create unpleasant experiences in me, while their positive emotions don't create pleasant emotional experiences for me. When they approach me with warmth and compassion, those feelings don't generate reflective, positive emotions for me. So I have a hard time even believing those feelings toward me are true.

Now that I've identified the mechanism underlying this systematic failure in relationships with others, I wonder if I can find other ways to generate positive emotional experiences with other people to compensate.

 

[Ronin82]

i used to feel others' emotions, way too strongly! It overwhelmed me, and I never knew how to process or what to do about it. i felt both the positive and negative emotions. Now, after PTSD has hit, I no longer let myself feel anything. It's much easier that way. I'm learning how to feel without it overwhelming my system, but its not easy!

 

[Mr Allen]

Sometimes I do.

But apparently lack of empathy is a symptom of AS.

 

[Ronin82]

Its not lack of empathy, its lack of IDENTIFIABLE empathy...We empathize, sometimes more than even we expect to I think, but we do so in a way that is either not recognized or not accepted by NT's. It is well-documented that, especially in female aspies, the OVER-empathy issues are just as problematic as not feeling anything. We either have too much, or too little.

This emphasis on no empathy that NT diagnosticians swear by is just BS. In my not-so-humble opinion.

 

[Progster]

I don't pick up on other people's more subtle emotions, but I pick up on more obvious emotions such as anger or sadness or happiness. My difficulty as far as interaction is concerned is knowing what to do with other people's emotions, how to respond to them. I don't know what to do or say. I also don't necessary feel what they are feeling. If someone tells a joke and I understand the joke, then I'll laugh with the joke. But if I don't understand it, and the others do and start laughing, I don't feel like laughing myself just because they are. When I see people crying, I don't feel like crying because they are crying, but can understand that they are sad, though I may not know why.

 

[Cali Cat]

I've learned to tune out most of other people's emotions. I was very empathetic as a child, to my detriment.

I can still tune into the feelings of others if I choose to do so, but processing any unpleasant emotions, mine or those of others, is a difficult task for me. I often have no idea how to respond, so to others I seem cold.

 

[watersprite]

I do not usually know what other people are feeling, though big obvious ones like frown/anger, tears, huge smiles are understood.
I don't know what it is to have a reflective experience - unless you mean when the person explains what they're feeling.
The following are known to me not as what others are feeling but as more or less confusing, sometimes overwhelming "stuff." I cannot usually recognize and label them as such in real-time.

• excited, intense, social, reactive behaviour in other people especially when it is loud
• music with words when I am not in the mood for words
• noisy human venues, rituals which make no logical sense to me
• violence and or unfair (unbalanced) judgements or treatment
• demands that it will be worthwhile &/or fun for me to join in a social system
• needy, aggressive, or manipulator types
----
They are triggers to what my neuropsych said is synesthesia but not the pleasant kind. They cause me to withdraw inward. If I cannot withdraw then I will bolt: physically get away usually by walking fast somewhere anywhere else. Obviously this is in NT point of view disfunctional. In my point of view my behaviour is functional.

Edited to add the diagnosis of HFA, nvld and synesthesia explained and untangled a great deal of my past. Now I can be in and work on the present.
DogwoodTree This got kind of long but hopefully not too off-topic.

 

[Butterfly88]

Yes. And it's annoying because when people are upset I get upset and it only makes things worse.

 

[DogwoodTree]

I don't know what it is to have a reflective experience - unless you mean when the person explains what they're feeling.

The way I used that term in the OP...I don't think we can literally feel someone else's emotions. We have our own emotions in response to someone else's emotions. So on one level, we might notice when someone is feeling an emotion. Like...I might notice that my boss is stressed about a deadline, but I don't necessarily feel that stress for myself. Or, in a reflective experience, my own stress level might start rising because I noticed the stress my boss is feeling.

In that case, the feeling I experience is very similar to what my boss is experiencing. But sometimes, the emotions I experience are decidedly different than what the other person is experiencing, and yet, my emotional experience is in direct response to the other person's emotion.

For example, if my husband is angry about something and not talking about it...so then I'm feeling insecure, like I did something wrong but don't know what it is...there's an immediate emotional response inside me that feels like I have to be extra happy and supportive and nice to make up for whatever the problem is--I don't actually feel happy, I'm just acting happy (which is inauthentic) because of my own anxiety about his anger. It's like I'm trying to manage his anger for him. I might not feel angry, but I feel the disruption of his anger and have an emotional response to try to manage his anger.

If someone near me gets really sad, the reflective experience within me is sometimes to feel shame, because I'm ashamed of my own sadness too--I was never allowed to be sad. Being sad reflected poorly on our family, making it look like there might be something wrong with us (which there was--there was a lot wrong with our family, but no one wanted to talk about it).

What sparked this thread for me was realizing that my reflective emotional experiences from noticing other people's emotions tend to be negative, or at best neutral, even when the other person is having a positive emotion. First, I'm less likely to notice their positive emotions. And if I do notice them, it's more likely to create a negative experience for me rather than a positive one.

So then, even if someone expresses positive feelings toward me, I experience confusion and shame instead of warmth and connection. So then I have a really hard time believing that the person actually does like me.

And if I ever let myself believe that a person likes me, I then respond kinda like a man stranded in the desert might respond to the offer of a small sip of water--"More! More! More!" Then I overwhelm the relationship and end up inadvertently pushing the other person away.

 

[Suzanne]

Yes, very much so and even tranfer how I feel in a given situation, to someone who is in that situation, but is ok about it.

If someone is embarrassed, I feel embarrassed for them and so, refuse to look at them. If someone drops something, I want to so much pick it up, to save them embarrassment.

I am in hospital right now and get nurses come in to clean the room and I feel embarrassed just watching them; just want to take the load off their shoulders.

So I feel feelings that are not always being felt.

 

[Suzanne]

The way I used that term in the OP...I don't think we can literally feel someone else's emotions. We have our own emotions in response to someone else's emotions. So on one level, we might notice when someone is feeling an emotion. Like...I might notice that my boss is stressed about a deadline, but I don't necessarily feel that stress for myself. Or, in a reflective experience, my own stress level might start rising because I noticed the stress my boss is feeling.

In that case, the feeling I experience is very similar to what my boss is experiencing. But sometimes, the emotions I experience are decidedly different than what the other person is experiencing, and yet, my emotional experience is in direct response to the other person's emotion.

For example, if my husband is angry about something and not talking about it...so then I'm feeling insecure, like I did something wrong but don't know what it is...there's an immediate emotional response inside me that feels like I have to be extra happy and supportive and nice to make up for whatever the problem is--I don't actually feel happy, I'm just acting happy (which is inauthentic) because of my own anxiety about his anger. It's like I'm trying to manage his anger for him. I might not feel angry, but I feel the disruption of his anger and have an emotional response to try to manage his anger.

If someone near me gets really sad, the reflective experience within me is sometimes to feel shame, because I'm ashamed of my own sadness too--I was never allowed to be sad. Being sad reflected poorly on our family, making it look like there might be something wrong with us (which there was--there was a lot wrong with our family, but no one wanted to talk about it).

What sparked this thread for me was realizing that my reflective emotional experiences from noticing other people's emotions tend to be negative, or at best neutral, even when the other person is having a positive emotion. First, I'm less likely to notice their positive emotions. And if I do notice them, it's more likely to create a negative experience for me rather than a positive one.

So then, even if someone expresses positive feelings toward me, I experience confusion and shame instead of warmth and connection. So then I have a really hard time believing that the person actually does like me.

And if I ever let myself believe that a person likes me, I then respond kinda like a man stranded in the desert might respond to the offer of a small sip of water--"More! More! More!" Then I overwhelm the relationship and end up inadvertently pushing the other person away.

Oh wow, you have to described me so much!

 

[Warmheart]

Yes, extreme empathy. I am sensitive, and often pick up emotional vibes. This can be a blessing, or sometimes too intense and scary. My heart seems very sensitive to feelings of others.

There are situations in which I am clueless, and need someone to be clear about feelings/intentions, though. I'm not good at those unwritten rules.

Like many on the spectrum, I am challenged with *cognitive empathy*, which refers to the ability to know how people are feeling by facial expressions, body language, and big-picture situational contexts. This type of empathy is challenged, though not missing entirely, in me.

Also like many on the spectrum, I am extremely good at *affective empathy*, meaning that once I do know how you feel, I am feeling your feelings right along with you, and full of strong compassion.

Powerful empathy is due to a type of amplified sensory sensitivities I believe.

People in relationships with me, however, can help by saying exactly what they mean, ditching hidden agendas, forgetting sarcasm or subtlety, and telling me how they feel directly.

 

[watersprite]

People in relationships with me, however, can help by saying exactly what they mean, ditching hidden agendas, forgetting sarcasm or subtlety, and telling me how they feel directly.

Yes. This is so important, without doing this relationships develop into troubled exchanges and fall apart.

So then, even if someone expresses positive feelings toward me, I experience confusion and shame instead of warmth and connection. So then I have a really hard time believing that the person actually does like me.

I tend to fall into this - like a trapline of old (mental/emotional) tapes, whenever I have worn myself out not being authentic or validating my needs & wearing masks. It's something I'm working to evict. Presently, it is vigorous exercise that can conquer it when it has gotten ahold of me.*
Edited to add: * & a patient, supportive partner who I trust.