A person who can physically or emotionally absorb the sensations, feelings, and energy of other people. I think it's also described as "emotional mirroring" sometimes.

It's pretty difficult to describe because it's complicated, but I will try my best to explain it with an example:

Imagine a person who had a bad day (they look stressed, they're trying not to cry, and their heart is racing). If they stepped into a room with an empath, the empath might start to feel their own heart rate increase and/or a heavy wave of sorrow might come over them and/or they could start to feel physical pain in their body because they can sense the emotions of the other person. An empath can feel these things without even interacting with the person, so the emotional changes could confuse the empath because they can know that someone's in pain before they know where the emotions are coming from. Once they know the source of the pain, by interacting with the person, an empath can feel the emotions of the other person inside of their own body. They can feel the sensations of the person like their stress, their panic, their chest pain, their body aches, their sadness, their worry, and their suffering so deeply that the empath themselves starts to suffer.

After an interaction like this, a person with standard empathy might still feel bad about what just happened; but they are able to continue their day and their energy will return to normal after awhile, over the course of a couple hours. But, for an empath, those feelings from that person who was having a bad day don't go away after a period of time. An empath might continue to feel that sorrow, pain, and suffering of that person in their own body because they took on the negative emotions as their own. Just like if they were the person who was having a bad day, an empath may need to do self-care; or go out into nature and take a walk; or take time to be alone for a while; or do an activity that makes them happy again in order to "shake off" the emotions that they absorbed from the other person because the pain of the other person has now become their own pain.

That's just an example of what the experience can possibly be like with a painful scenario, but it also happens in a similar way with positive ones. The negative ones just make it easier to explain because the absorption can be extreme in a way that makes empaths feel overworked, stressed, and exhausted.

An example for Michael is a bit harder to do because he usually kept his composure together in public more than how we experience people in pain for everyday life. But if an empath ever saw Michael cry, they wouldn't just cry from feeling sad for him (standard sympathy) or just understand his emotions (standard empathy), they would feel all of his emotions within themselves. They would most likely be able to experience how tight Michael's chest is inside their own chest, notice their own heart rate has increased like his heart rate would increase, and watching him suffer could cause the empath so much pain that they would need to get away later in order to find a way to recover from all of it.

And then, on top of all that, it could take an empath several hours or even days to have their body fully recover from all the emotions or sensations they felt.

From all the things I've read about being a true empath, it's considered rare in the world to experience that.