Im confused, isnt empathy just considering how other beings would feel if you& did/said something? Or understanding why certain words/actions could upset someone??? Is that what you& are talking about being repulsed by or is it something else?
The way at least that we& understand it is that empathy is feeling what the other person feels, sympathy is feeling concern or sorrow for the other person, and compassion is feeling care and warmth for the other person. "I feel what you feel", "I know how you feel", and "what can I do to help?"
That said. While we& don't at all experience that thing of feeling what someone else feels, we also don't get very much of that considering-how-others-would-feel either. We&'re low on cognitive empathy as well, it's something we struggle a lot with, and while we do primarily mean that emotional empathy when we say empathy-repulsed, we do mean cognitive empathy also
While we don't try to upset people, and do go out of our way to try and avoid upsetting people, we consistently struggle with understanding how people may feel or be impacted by our actions. It's something we have to actively sit down and think about, and even when doing so we don't really manage to succeed. So we try instead to follow the social rules made explicit to us: don't laugh when someone nearby is upset (regardless of what we're laughing at), ask questions when people are talking about their interests (even if we don't really care), when someone is upset let them talk more than we do. These aren't pan-applicable, but they're some of the guidelines we try to follow. Part of why we& love hearing about others' experiences so much is because of this struggle we have with cognitive empathy. Listening to them talk about how their mind works helps us to better understand, well, how others' minds work. When we&'ve upset someone, we usually need to be told exactly what it was that we did wrong, since even if it makes sense to us once laid out clearly, we'll rarely on our own be able to understand how it was upsetting
And to pull that back to being empathy-repulsed... we're repulsed by the idea that we should be able to just... know, how it is that others feel, or why they're upset by things. It makes us feel like we're expected to read minds, it frustrates us to be told we've done wrong but punished for asking what it was we did wrong (the idea that we should "just know", and the commonly-paired idea that we& don't actually care if we can't figure it out on our own, frustrates us so much because we& do care a lot!! And caring a lot is why we try to figure out what we did wrong even when we're so baffled by it), and it feels really invasive to us when people try to, on their own, figure out why we& may feel a particular way (especially as it often leads to them misunderstanding our emotions, or trying to assign a feeling to us that we aren't feeling. We know our emotions don't work the way they're expected to, and people trying to be cognitively empathetic to us just reminds us of that and makes us feel acutely alienated and lonely)
We& try to ask people ahead of time, these questions about how their mind works and what and why things upset them, so we can avoid ending up in these positions that particularly trigger that empathy repulsion. We try to make our hypoempathy clear and to emphasize that we& need clear communication during conflicts that doesn't expect that we& can make the same emotional connections that others can. It's not an easy position but I suppose that's part of the whole disability aspect haha
