I'm not as empathetic as I thought (but I'll get there)
Being in a relationship, I've recently encountered a new thing about myself: I'm not actually all that empathetic!
That sounds more damning than it is, depending on your definition of an "empathetic person," so I'll elaborate on mine. In a way, I am empathetic to a fault: I absorb others' emotions quickly. It feels bodily, the way I adopt the same emotional state as whomever I'm with. I also believe I'm a compassionate person; my drive to understand people and belief that no one thinks themselves evil makes me sympathetic to almost everyone. However, in the times where empathy matters, I often find that my thoughts are not naturally directed towards similar or shared experiences with others, nor do I act with empathy, solving problems and emotions presented to me, instead of starting with (if true), "Hey, I've been there," or, "I know how you feel."
I realised this in two parts: The first was when my partner came to me with a lot of big feelings, and the second was when I journaled the next day.
My first instinct as he shared his feelings was to be annoyed. A lot of the problems he was stressing out about were in part his fault, and his emotions didn't seem to match the severity of the situation at hand. I felt tense too, absorbing his emotions but not resonating with their source. I put on a placid smile and soothing voice, and tried to explain why everything was going to be fine, and even sat down at his computer and solved some of the problems right there.
I think I have difficulties understanding the emotional core of statements. So when someone tells me they feel like they're being watched, I default to asking for evidence of that reality, and my efforts to assuage the feeling are largely disproving it, rather than recognising that the declaration may be an imperfect translation of an emotional experience to language. I wrote it in my diary the next day, that I felt like I was being watched, and even though I knew no one really was watching or judging me that much, it didn't mean that I wasn't experiencing that feeling. I'd completely missed that in my conversation the day before. I went back to my partner to share the realisation that I could empathise with him, along with an apology for depriving him of that, and he gave me a "thanks, honey," and a tight hug.
This is a skill I want to work on more. In conversation, I often suspect I'm kind of missing half of what others put out, and that I'm probably accidentally signalling gibberish in this secondary language I don't natively speak1. But more than that, I feel like there's an enticing potential for me to inhabit the same emotional "space" as someone when I can pay more attention on this plane and look specifically through the lens of empathy to figure out where we have a shared experience. I felt this closeness when I made a point to share my own experience with my partner and it's a sense I'd like to cultivate more. It's not yet automatic (I still have to remind myself that my role is not always to remove problems from others' lives, but to just be in their life with them), but I'm glad to be catching on.
Today's thingy: a GIF of a flipbook animated spinning rat I found on Discord:
Yes, the autism thing has been floated by me. No, I'm not getting assessed.↩