As I understand it there’s two main kinds of empathy: cognitive and affective.
Cognitive empathy is the ability to perceive and understand the emotional states of others, and affective empathy is actually sharing those emotions yourself.
I do the former, but the latter doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Like, if I see someone being sad, it’s possible that I’ll be sad or angry that they’re in that situation, but those will be my feelings about what’s going on, not theirs.
But for those of you who inherently feel-what-you-see, how does this work with, say, anger?
If you see someone being terribly angry, do you feel angry yourself? If so, who do you feel angry at? If you see a fight going on, do you hate both participants?
If someone is angry at you, are you also angry at you?
I guess this applies to any targeted emotion, but anger is a good example.
I agree wholeheartedly with all you have said. It is especially frustrating when someone else’s emotions prime me to feel that emotion overwhelmingly when the next slightly justifiable situation occurs.
For example, I had a friend who was going through the end of a terrible marriage and we talked about it a lot. She would leave, and then the next thing that came out of someone else’s mouth would often make me snap at them, which would confuse them. I would feel justified in my anger at the time because it felt so real, but later realize it was just carry over from my conversation with my friend.
Luckily, she is divorced now and doing great.