So you have personal experience of understanding what other people are feeling.
No, I have personal experience of people demanding that I experience a certain emotional response when they had no right to demand that of me. They were all empaths or claimed some sort of empathic ability as their reason for their demand. They wanted my emotions and actions/reactions to change in response to their demand. That's what I meant in that context.
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
the ability to emotionally understand what other people feel, see things from their point of view, and imagine yourself in their place.
the ability to sense other people's emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling.
This ability is impossible and does not truly exist. Nobody is truly an empath. They fake it using intellectual calculations and intelligent guesswork.
Most people are easy to read in real life and simply think and feel along with the crowd and the nearest authority figure. They are conformists. Therefore, it creates the illusion that people's emotions and responses can be easily understood, which empaths believe. When you don't have the emotion they think you are feeling, they harass you with a demand to produce that emotion and claim that you are lying about your feelings. It's pretty obvious to me. Most people conform and seek the approval of others in their social group, and extroverts basically have the same thinking as the group anyway, so they just conform to what the "empaths" think they are feeling without thinking about it.
My emotions are controlled, complex, and muted, and I am the authority on what they are - it is simply too complex for an outsider to read. For example, right now I am annoyed because I just wanted to post my opinion in the long post two posts up and leave. However, I believe in the value of intellectual debate, even over subjects that I find to be uncomfortable. This produces the emotion of value, which is why I am still pressing keys when another part of my brain is telling me that I don't want to relive a nightmarish personal experience from 2021. Sometimes bad experiences can lock up cognitive resources, but they can also be instructive. But I know that because I am inside my own head. There's no way someone could read and understand all that from the outside without me directly telling them.
But the intrapersonal clarity that I have just described is not a universal ability. How is everybody supposed to avoid intrapersonal projection when using supposed "empathic" abilities? Dr. Meyer describes the phenomenon of intrapersonal projection in
Don't Let the Jerks Get The Best of You. Answer: they don't. Are some people better able to make better intellectual calculations and intelligent guesswork than me? Yes, some people read facial expressions and make better guesses. Data on psychological patterns is helpful to understand another person's response. There are ways to improve the batting average.
But at the end of the day, there is no biological tunnel in which the biological chemicals of an emotional response can pass from one human to another. Therefore, there is no true empathetic abilities. Emotions must be communicated either verbally or non-verbally from one human being to another directly, and the communication has to be understood enough by the recipient. Once I understood that, it vastly improved my writing abilities because I no longer expected people to understand my internal world without a detailed and sufficient explanation that was true and correct. Misunderstandings led to unproductive reactions; it was better for me to imagine all the ways my writing could be misunderstood by the recipient and adjust my message accordingly.
And then, what will happen in response to that paragraph, I predict that someone will move the empathetic goalposts to claim that communication of emotion is empathy, or at least the ability to understand direct emotional communication. Also, eventually someone might come along who is a raging extravert with an interpersonal IQ of 180 and argue that since I had CPTSD I am totally handicapped in the empathy department, and since I don't have the ability, I assume it doesn't exist, and also that I don't emote properly because of my mental illness. Which I would consider incredibly hurtful and disrespectful because I believe that socialization should be honest and not a performance act like the way most extroverts view it. But just remember, I predicted your arrival and I understand your position, so you don't have a leg to stand on. Also I don't know what your emotions are on reading this, because I'm not you.
At the end of the day, this whole debate largely comes down to personal experience, because empathy doesn't exist. But you can personally experience what you believe to be empathy, and I can personally experience what I believe to be an empathy-less world where people struggle to be understood even when they actually communicate clearly. Both sides can produce convincing arguments - any debate that boils down to personal experience is eternal and not really useful.
