I can’t watch awkward-situation comedy because of this. There are a lot of movies I’ve had to just either skip scenes or not watch entirely. Second hand embarrassment goes brrr

There’s reading emotions and then there’s claiming you entirely feel other people’s emotions and are so confident in it that you insist the other person is lying about their feelings.

Reading emotional cues is a basic human sense. Otherwise we would not be naturally tribal. If you discovered you could read emotions past the age of 5, there is likely something atypical about you neurologically.

Excuse me but I am perfectly capable of telling when I’m being thrown out of a restaurant or orgy.

People can sometimes tell how they themselves feel by observing others while injecting wild assumptions born from severe anxiety where they imagine scenarios.

Meet one of my exes. he decided my agency didn’t count in any of the decisions he imposed on me.

He called it empathic. I called it abusive. He later called it anxiety. It was abusive.

basic communication using good old fashion sounds coming out of the mouth and forming words to clear the air like an adult capable of respect for another adult is heavily underrated.

People that are good at reading emotions are wrong about the reason/cause a significant portion of the time. Like noticing someone is uncomfortable doesn’t make the reason for being uncomfortable obvious.

I associate it deeply with BPD style emotional abuse. Everyone who’s done that form of abuse to me has called themselves an empath. But inevitably, nope, it’s just hypervigilance and projection and don’t I dare correct them on how I’m feeling.

Incidentally I have a cptsd response where I often mask discomfort and fear so it’s especially things like me saying “no” and “I don’t want that” that get disbelieved by these “empaths”

What they think it means: I have empathy with the struggles of others and can put myself in their shoes to try and understand them.

What it actually means: I’m an insufferable arse who refuses to acknowledge or respect another person’s point of view.

I’ve seen it with some crystal-healers and alt woo woo types.

I think they mean well… shrug

they seem much much less judgemental and hung up on dogma than the “bless your heart” and “I’ll pray for you” types.

YMMV

Your algorithms must be very different than mine, because I have only seen this type of shit being uttered by bored women who are either stay at home or into the spiritual bs like basing their life decisions on zodiac signs or taking every personality test online and taking their results way too seriously. Have also seen it uttered by manipulative new age men who want puss, but mostly its something that goes on in those very stereotypical woman spaces where you’re either a sex and the city-woman or a new age hippie/influencer type.

It’s a very specific segment of the female population and weirdly enough, they can be anything from super left wing to super right wing to completely apolitical. The vibe is the same across the board, though, and it always gives me the ick when I run into people who have this über performative personality.

I had zodiacs entirely ruined for me because of these types of women. Used to think it was a bit stupid fun to read horoscopes and shit, until I ran into a few people irl who talked like this: “that’s so Leo of me. I can only talk to X because they are a Virgo and my sun is setting over my moon blah blah blah” and they were 100% serious. Those people will also walk around talking about being empaths without a hint of humor, and everytime I hear someone talk like that I remove myself from their orbit immediately.

Half-Betazoid.

“Empath” is a colloquial rather than clinical term, but it is useful. For people who grew up in an abusive household with unsafe parents, being hyper-attuned to their parent’s emotions was an important survival skill, as being able to make yourself scarce at appropriate times can save you a beating. People give off all sorts of cues to their emotional state, including facial microexpressions, vocal tonality, body language, etc., and children raised in these environments have honed their ability to inutit emotional states from scant external cues, usually without realizing that they’re even doing it. Unfortunately, most tend to disregard the “gut” feeling they get when doing it, because their abuse profile also typically includes emotional invalidation, which has taught them that their emotions are “wrong”. So the cruel irony is that most “Empaths” don’t trust their intuition, and tend to associate with abusive people like their parents, which feels comfortably like “home”.

Not necessarily. It usually means somewhat selflessly feeling or understanding how they might feel enough to care about their wellbeing & treat them compassionately.

If you’re selective about the recipients of your empathy (eg, only those you care about or near you), then you’re not really an empath or a good one. Buddhists had empathy & compassion figured out. Jesus stated it, too, with love your enemies. I’ve frequently seen people try to wield empathy as a cudgel and miss the point.