Do YOU experience overwhelming empathy?
Part of my personal Autistic experience is that I encounter the world around me (as well as my inner world) intensely from my sensory perception, which heightens how I perceive the world around me to my inner emotional experience (which is also intense).
I have extensive (often overwhelming) feelings that frequently well up in me, catching me off guard.
To me, little things (that other people can ignore) often feel like big things, causing me to react accordingly. I have intense reactions because I have intense experiences.
The Pain of Hyper-Empathy
For me, empathy is one of those feelings (that can be so overwhelming it disables me – causing me to shut down, meltdown, and experience other types of emotional overloads).
There are multiple types of empathy:
Cognitive empathy refers to the ability to identify and understand emotions of others, while emotional empathy (or affective empathy) is the ability to share another person’s feelings.
It is a myth that Autistic People don’t have feelings or empathy.
More accurately, empathy is a spectrum, and Autistic People can be found in all places along that spectrum.
Additionally, our place along that spectrum may not be fixed; for example, as an adult, my empathy has become significantly more overwhelming than it was growing up (possibly because I have more context for the pain and suffering of the world and the creatures living on it).
Sometimes, I have so much empathy it physically hurts or makes me feel sick – this is one reason I can’t watch movies and TV where people or animals are being beaten up, injured, or having medical procedures done to them (even though it is acting) – because I feel their pain as if it were my own.
I didn’t always experience my empathy this way, and not all Autistic People feel this intense, painful empathy.
Some Autistic People have lesser levels of empathy – and much lower emotional experience (like I did growing up), and there’s nothing wrong with that.
In fact, in many ways, I consider my overwhelming empathy to be a disability in the world we live in (because of how frequently I find myself overpowered by this particular emotion).
NOTE: Recommended additional reading on the Double Empathy Problem
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