Body Language or Empathy?

[TC]

I wanted to know where everyone stands in terms of this debate.

There are some of us who really are natural born empaths, or people who have a knack for empathy. But lately, it seems the trend is to tell people that you're naturally an empath. Don't get me wrong, there are some people that I know, or at least believe that are naturally gifted with empathy, mostly because they have true stories behind it.

But do you think that a lot of the time, other people misinterpret body language with empathic projection. I know that I'm quite good at reading body languge, and I also believe that I'm fairly good at empathy. My question is do people understand the difference and can they recognize when they are performing empathy and when they're just reading someone's body language or tone of voice.

~TC

[confuded]

I don't want to jump into wild fire, but a simple test can be conducted. Whether you can perceive a persons emotion or feelings on a distance or not. At a distance, meaning no visual or physical contact. Am I correct?

~confuded

[The Devil's Advocate]

That's not as easy as it sounds, Confuded. Unless very strong emotion is involved or someone I am 'keyed' to, I have trouble telling specific emotions of individual people. It gets 'drowned out' in the 'background noise' of the other emotions. Mostly I pick up a surge of INTENSITY, and can associate it with something positive or negative. But picking up 'this person is angry' takes a bit of proximity, or as mentioned, a 'key' either to the person or situation either by familiarity by a very crystal clear and very intense projection. (Or if I've gone actually LOOKING, but that means I'm usually 'keyed in' to someone specific.)

In my experience, Empathy gives an extra 'depth' to the reading of body language. As someone who spent years explaining away empathy as being 'good at reading people' which includes body language, it is sometimes VERY difficult to distinguish the two. Complicated by the fact I can't remember any time in my life (at least not clearly) that I was NOT an Empath, so I can't compare to how a non-empath views body language.

My own body language is very confusing to many people (or at least was when I was growing up) and I had trouble reading other people's tone and body language. Why? Because my parents grew up overseas and I absorbed so much of /that/ body language that it conflicted with that of everyone around me. Yet, it also set up several situations where body language and empathy conflicted. Empathic input was usually right, and once I started to be able to understand what I was doing with body language I could use it to /refine/ the empathic data. So the two, for me work hand in hand.

Now how I differentiate the two: Body language does not tend to evoke the same /urgency/ that high empathic stress does. Body language and tone indicate sarcasm, double entendre, etc. Empathy tends to be a little more out of the blue (for me), and things that leave you going "now where did I get THAT from?" It's not a concrete system, but I'm not sure we have a concrete system yet.

~The Devil's Advocate

[leodragon]

Jun 3, 2008 12:18:08 GMT -5 The Devil's Advocate said:

In my experience, Empathy gives an extra 'depth' to the reading of body language. As someone who spent years explaining away empathy as being 'good at reading people' which includes body language, it is sometimes VERY difficult to distinguish the two. Complicated by the fact I can't remember any time in my life (at least not clearly) that I was NOT an Empath, so I can't compare to how a non-empath views body language.

It is the reverse for me. I can't read body language. If I can't sense what is behind the words a person says, then I can't understand it very well. I kind of percieve the world through my mental senses.

I don't think my empathy is connected so much to body language, due to the fact that I can't read it for crap, and due to the fact that I can sense emotions from a distance very easily. It is normally centered around where my thoughts are, Don't ask me how, because I don't understand the dynamics, but say I think of a certain area passively, my mind will instantly hone in on that area. I will get a background of empathic noise. If I think of a person, the same thing will happen. If a person is "feeling" at me, I will feel it from a distance. I don't quite understand it, but if a person feels something about me VERY hard, I will pick it up.

A person can be speaking to me calmly, but their thoughts and emotions are racing so fast that it gives me such a headache that I want to scream shut up. I don't think, for me at least, that it is so much tied to body language due to the fact that I can pick things up at a distance without ever seeing or hearing or even knowing the person.

If I think let's say Cali, my mind will be honed into Cali's "mental radio". If I feel let's say x emotion from x person, I can hone into x person and just receive from that person, without ever having known or met the person. I can easily filter out what I pick up. I just aim all my concentration onto that one thing. The narrowing of it narrows my scope.

I differentiate the two, by the fact that I can't read body language for one, LOL. Empathy, for me comes with a weird sensation and it has a weird pitch. Like... it is hard to explain, but like it will come through in a kind of warpy watery way and has a specific tone. Like it is an actual sound or an actual feel. Strong emotions are akin to someone screaming in my ear.

[Cullen]

I feel like I should leave a large comment here, as one who has spent considerable time thinking about this very issue, but it is late, and I will keeep my remarks short.

Similarities I've noticed:
Both tend to result in focusing your attention on someone (usually near you)
Both will tend to insite a shared emotion in the observer. (If you see someone crying, you start to feel sad)

Differences:
Level of emotion. If i'm completly shielding out all empathic data (other than feeling blind), I also don't feel what others feel as much. If I see someone crying and sobbing, I feel slightly sad for them, but nothing major. On the othe hand, if i'm unsheilded, it takes all my mental force to stop myself from bursting into tears for a reason that I have no clue what it is.
Range: with body language, it tends to be this: I look over, see someone is feeling something, and read their emotions from their movements.
with empathy: I feel something, turn in a different direction, and use both their motions and the feelings in my head to figure out what is going on, and possible root causes for the action.

I very much agree with DA, in that the two tend to go hand in hand. Sperating out one from the other is difficult, which also might color my own views on the matter.

I personal have felt that I've been making myself perfectly clear on how i'm feeling, and yet I've had other people tell me later that I seemed to just be a blank slate, they couldn't read anything into my emotion from my body language.

Just a few thoughts,
~Cullen