Ah yes, reminded me of an ex. Also had severe anxiety. Which was why he broke it off. Also wanted to get back together to see if ‘he made the right choice’ because apparently I don’t count in any of the decisions he makes for me.
My answer was nope!
Is empath some sort of dogwhistle? The only time I’ve seen the phrase “I’m an empath” was in between conservative misinformation on Facebook.
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.
Yes, people can sometimes tell how you are feeling by observing you. I get that it’s an uncomfortable idea, but it isn’t always just “a guess that makes them feel good”. It is possible to have an actual skill or talent for reading other people’s current mental state or emotions, just not if you’re a Lemmy user.
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.
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.
well the buffet at the orgy is always on point so just skip the restaurant next time is my advice.
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.
People misread social cues, emotional states, intent, incorrectly ascribe causality of these things, etc., all the time, every single day, constantly, for a wide array of reasons.
https://mindorigins.com/mind-reading-or-mammalian-instinct-why-we-misinterpret-social-cues/
People with low self awareness or high overconfidence just don’t realize that they are.
You actually have to have a significant amount of humility in order to have “high eq”.
People who make an entire personality or significant personality trait out of their infallible ability to read people?
Who will outright tell people: “I know you better than you know you”?
Vast majority of the time, in the vast majority of contexts, such a person is a delusional manipulative narcissist, a cult leader / grifter scam artist type personality.
It’s like I have ESPN or something. My boobs can always tell when it’s going to rain.
Does understanding basic emotions make you an empath
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.
There is a scriptural example of qualified empathy in Christ’s mission statement. When his followers mentioned the people that had been crushed by the tower of Siloam, and those whose blood Herod had used to mix in his wine, Jesus responded with a notable lack of concern. His answer more or less being “if you think such things are happening to those which don’t have it coming to them then your perception, and conceptions, of good and evil are not accurate” and to check their own behaviours to see if they themselves are even worthy of escaping such a fate or worse.
Paul as well describes “terrible times”(2 Tim 3)where many will have devolved to a level of degeneracy which even animals are unable to sink to, and not to have anything to do with such people personally even if one must encounter them on a daily basis. In another verse(1Cor 5 :10) he states that one would have to leave the world entirely to even avoid the moderately immoral people which are only greedy, cheats, or motivated by lust.
I guess the inference is that to have empathy and care for those which suffer for being truly innocent in a guilty world is a sign of love, but even love doesn’t empathize with the vicious(slaves of vice) or evil intentioned people that are merely homo sapiens but not humans. Because it takes a lot more to graduate to human-hood than just liking to say or believe one is a human. Whereas homo sapien-hood is the default animal state we all get born into from the start, due to the unchecked monkey-lust of every one of our ancestors that resulted in our being born in the first place. Being good is not so easy as some like to claim, for “the way is steep and narrow and few are they that find it”
Joke’s on you! I’m a Betazoid. Captain, I feel… Intense… Scrolling.
Half-Betazoid.
🎶borderline personalityyyyyyyy🎶
I think people on the spectrum when they finally understand their fellow human beings for even a moment just shock themselves and that’s how the term came about, lol.
“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”.
I grew up in an environment like this and developed these skills. I certainly don’t consider myself an “empath,” but didn’t even realize I had these traits until I met my wife who was working on her Masters in clinical counseling.
You just described abilities within the normal range of interpersonal skills: reading emotions. That doesn’t imply feeling them.
OP was ridiculing the projection of emotions people don’t necessarily have but that the subject arrogantly assumes they do.
You may technically be “reading” emotions, but you’re not doing it on a conscious level, and the way it tends to surface in you is through emotional mirroring - i.e., you feel the emotion the other person is feeling.
To illustrate, someone I know has significant social anxiety, and I saw her in a social situation standing alone. Her facial expression and body language immediately kicked in my own discomfort, so I went over and talked with her and her face lit up. I could feel her relief as plain as I could feel her discomfort before. It’s easier with people you know, as you have a lot of baseline data, but even total strangers give off the cues you pick up subconsciously. What is interesting is that I’ve found that some highly manipulative people are fairly adept at masking their external emotional cues, especially facial microexpressions. I would guess that professional poker players are highly adept at not only intuitively reading microexpressions, but also at concealing their own.
That’s still pretty normal. People (think they) feel how others do. It takes effort & practice to dissociate and try not to feel.
You can just work in clinical psych, social work, or be an ER doc to eventually not be able to feel.
Great, now I want to replay Disco Elysium
Needs text alternative.
Images of text break much that text alternatives do not. Losses due to image of text lacking alternative:
- usability
- we can’t quote the text without pointless bullshit like retyping it or OCR
- text search is unavailable
- the system can’t
- reflow text to varied screen sizes
- vary presentation (size, contrast)
- vary modality (audio, braille)
- accessibility
- lacks semantic structure (tags for titles, heading levels, sections, paragraphs, lists, emphasis, code, links, accessibility features, etc)
- some users can’t read this due to lack of alt text
- users can’t adapt the text for dyslexia or vision impairments
- systems can’t read the text to them or send it to braille devices
- searchability: the “text” isn’t indexable by search engine in a meaningful way
- fault tolerance: no text fallback if
- image breaks
- image host is geoblocked due to insane regulations.
Contrary to age & humble appearance, text is an advanced technology that provides all these capabilities absent from images.
Yep, they’re special.
- usability
