Empathy/Relating to Others with Aphantasia

Sorry but up in my post I say “I know what I need to do…” just to clarify I meant I know I need to say “are you okay” or “do you need help” etc.

I can relate to having trouble empathizing with others, I often feel the urge to immediately begin problem-solving or reframing their situation when people share their emotional burdens with me. I’ve learned over the years to hold back on the calculated logic when people really just want to be heard, focus on their body language (which helps me better feel their emotions), and slowing transitioning from questions about how they feel to questions regarding what lessons, insights, or gifts they might be able to gain from a situation.

Are you referring to fictional characters within books, shows, movies? Rebecca Keogh and Joel Pearson recently found that visual perceptions and imagery play a critical role in our emotions. So seeing a hard event occur would likely have greater emotional impact than being told. And there is something about reading and writing that engages the brain in a way that generates greater emotional response than just thinking about it. Do you relate with this?

Its not just you, but not sure its connected with aphantasia though.

I can’t empathise with people, I don’t “feel” anything but like you I know what I need/should do but its just a response not a genuine feeling. Now, inanimate objects – cars, machines etc, I feel for and get attached to, and even feel protective towards… and to most people its just weird!

I always felt it was more towards ASD than anything connected to apahntasia

I am not very empathetic at all.  I don’t have the connection with fictional characters that you do, but I do have trouble feeling empathy. 

It may just be that aphantasics have less stimuli, so it is harder to get an emotional response.  Apparently others can “see, hear and smell” related images etc. when interacting with people in an emotional way, which naturally amplifies the emotional response compared to those of us who don’t.

Hey, also an aphant here.

I would say that I sit at the complete other end of the spectrum. There appears to be a bizzare ability to intuitively know exactly how people feel, who they are and what makes them tick even after only a couple minutes together. No idea if this is a consequence of aphantasia however, I’m inclined to think that it is related because when I’m with people I watch and listen intensely with no mental chatter (or imaginings) and just end up getting filled with their feelings, so to speak. Interestingly, the content of the story in inconsequential and is almost always a warped version of the truth. So what people say almost always means nothing and how people say it means everything.

Would love to know more about aphantasia in regards to emotional intelligence – would be very interesting!

Aphant here. I never had genuine empathy. I had to learn to recognize the cues of others’ emotions and how to properly respond to it. So now I have a sort of “learnd” empathy but I don’t feel what others feel. It doesn’t matter if it’s a real Person, if they are close to me or not.

I don’t have aphantasia but learning about it made me reflect on the way my perception and mental processes work.

For me it’s all about feelings. I spend lots of time asking myself why I’m feeling the way I do and which feelings contribute to an emotion. For example when I’m feeling not well l really try hard to find the cause – like is it anger, frustration, sadness, fear, uncertainty, loneliness, boredom… (mostly it’s a combination)

Those feelings are to me the building blocks of emotions and by taking my own emotions apart I kind of started recognising some patterns in the behaviour of others. E.g. if someone yells at me I start thinking: That might not be agression but uncertainty.

It is like the feelings are the pieces of a mosaic. The smaller the pieces the better you can recreate your representation of something you see in someone else.

Your description is very interesting as it seems that you have the mosaic pieces and are able to create complex emotions with them for fictional characters but it is hard for you to do the same with actual people.

A difference could be that with fictional characters you might get a description of their feelings (like in books you find detailed descriptions of the thoughts and feelings of a character). In real life it is more like guesswork and depends on intuition. There is a lot of uncertainty involved and it might be stressful to react to a real situation. You might misjudge the situation or get it right but the other one doesn’t like your reaction. So many things could go wrong!

It would be interesting to find out if it it is perception (not knowing what the other feels) or stress/uncertainty that prevents you from expressing empathy.

If it’s the latter, I found out that people are in general more tolerant towards our actions than we think. If we get it wrong, we get the chance to explain our own uncertainty and no damage is done. This allowes me to experiment with different reactions, get more insights and improve…

I am on this site because this is what I have been wondering about a lot recently. Because of my tendency to bawl my eyes out in the same situations you described (The movie  I am Sam, the book The Kiterunner) I did not consider myself unemotional or unempathetic. As a teacher, my students refer to my generous heart. But a recent repeated episodes with my wife and adult son who are stupefied at my lack of empathy for them, as in I cannot seem to be able to name their emotional, predict their responses, anything beyond what they call highly “robotic” responses. Like you, I know I should be able to do something, but at this stage it appears to wrecking my 30 year marriage.