I mean while the phrasing is cringe I can understand it. I can not watch anything like Parcs and Rec or the Office because that kind of cringe humour where the characters emberass themselves physically hurts.
Parks and rec and the American office don’t bother me but the original office makes me mortified with second hand embarrassment! But then that’s the point.
I’m like that with violent scenes, even though I know it’s fake and no one is getting hurt, I still get highly distressed. I wasn’t always like that, it got to that point more in my late 20s I think. I can play fighting games and such like just fine, although the bit in Witcher 3 when one of the women gets her face slammed on a table made me upset.
OMG, for the longest time I thought I was the only one this happened to.
Like, I don’t even want to go to the cinema anymore because there might be embarrassing scenes in the movie.
That’s me with Psych. The show is beyond uncomfortable humor.
that kind of cringe humour where the characters emberass themselves physically hurts
But that’s what makes it so good
Speaking from a therapist point of view…
Empathy is the ability to understand someone else’s experience, to grasp something of what they’re thinking, feeling, etc.
It doesn’t automatically imply that you care, you can respond to that understanding of someone else’s life with compassion, indifference or anything else.
The colloquial usage of the word empathy to mean “consideration and caring” is problematic as is oftentimes an imagining of how the observer would feel if they were in the difficult situation, rather than the useful version of understanding how the other person feels within that difficult situation.
My understanding is that they refer to different types of empathy.
What’s you’re describing is cognitive empathy and in the OP it’s describing emotional empathy.
https://www.verywellmind.com/cognitive-and-emotional-empathy-4582389
Being completely overwhelmed by empathy is legitimately a symptom of autism and other mental disorders. Most people may have empathy in various degrees; but they’re not debilitated by it like some neurodivergent people are.
Meanwhile my autistic ass is very empathetic but only in very specific cases and not in the ways people expect so I’ve been labeled lacking in empathy.
I’m a lot like that too. An article about a person I never knew dying can leave my heart aching days, weeks or even years later. I see a stranger crying and I start to cry too. And yet other things can leave me feeling nothing. My mum is in severe pain from terminal cancer and there are moments when it gets to me, but other times I feel almost nothing and I can’t tell if it’s because I’m just a heartless cow or I’m doing a really good job blocking it out (schizoid skills ftw).
I think I have that a little bit, my chest tightens and it feels hard to breathe
Being a sociopath seems really goddamn convenient.
I actually hate when people just call it empathy, because feeling like this goes beyond that. Usually your mind shields you from feeling too much empathy. It helps you to cope with all of the awful shit around you, sometimes by just subconsciously ignoring it.
If you constantly feel bad for every bad thing happening around you, it can be pretty debilitating. That homeless guy you walk past on the street? Sad. That bird that just killed itself by flying into a window? Sad. War and famine all over the world, caused by absolute wastes of oxygen in skinsuits? The worst.
I personally know someone who will actually start to cry if they see someone sad on the subway or wherever.