Is the ability to feel empathy type related

[Wittmont]

I understand how people are feeling - I rarely "feel" or "experience" how other people are feeling. I can and do put myself in other people's shoes, but it's not something I do instinctively, whereas understanding how people feel and where they are coming from is. That being said, I don't think I'm overly sympathetic. I definitely have the capacity for great sympathy, I'm just... less likely to give it to just anyone? Lol, and I don't mean to sound like I'm stingy with my sympathy. This sounds terrible - I'm really not sure how to put it.

That being said, I don't think empathy is highly type related. Any healthy individual has the capacity for empathy and tbh I don't see the point in over-analyzing it.

To explain it a bit further : A problem in this, is that at times, I don't manage AT ALL to separate MY OWN WANTS from what OTHERS want. Again and again, I have to ask myself what *I* want to do in a situation, to avoid me doing things others want me to do. I have been hurt by my empathy a lot of times, for example feeling that others want to date me so strongly that I've thought for a while they were my feelings. That really complicates things... It's not all "cool". I really, really think this is a problem IEIs can have and that SLEs, for example, would laugh at. And it's tied to strong empathy, according to definitions. (and it illustrates that I don't mean strong empathy is only positive)

How is this empathy? Understanding and "feeling" how someone else is feeling is empathy. Adopting their feelings as your own is not empathy, lol. If anything it shows a weak understanding of your own feelings and and an inability to be assert them when necessary.
I think you are taking this whole being empathetic thing a little too far.

Jung distinguished between passive projection and active projection. Passive projection is completely automatic and unintentional, like falling in love. The less we know about another person, the easier it is to passively project unconscious aspects of ourselves onto them.
Active projection is better known as empathy - we "feel ourselves into the other's shoes". Empathy that extends to the point where we lose our own standpoint becomes identification.
So having too strong empathy can become a problem as Mimosa is saying.

Another aspect of this is the phenomena of "participation mystique" where the subject (you) cannot clearly distinguish yourself from the object (the other person) but is bound to him/her by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity. This is a highly unconscious attitude.

Empathy starts with an unconscious subjective projection onto another person (object), we then introject from the other person into ourselves.

These are all Jungian ideas. See this link for Empathy, Identification and Participation mystique.

The Jung Lexicon by Jungian analyst, Daryl Sharp, Toronto

I have to say I have at times similar problems. I see myself as highly empathic to the point where if I am asked to make a decision on behalf of the other person I at times find myself "lost" where my own will and wants are.

I do wonder if it IS an IEI problem that we are so in tune with other people we lose our own direction at times. Maybe that is part of the reason why SLE's are seen as a good fit for us? I have discussed it with friends before, and then we talked about this as a problem of "boundaries" - that we allow people get too deeply into us in a way ie. we are too identified with them (this was before this interesting discussion, I didn't think of it as related to empathy back then).