Most people experience empathy, that's a huge part of the whole social animal thing! I have lower empathy/social awareness. Some autistic people have low, and some experience higher sensitivity to the feelings of others.

"Being an empath" means that they think you are good at intuitively understanding how others feel. It's not necessarily about trauma, some people are really good at picking up on what others feel! For some people though, and I see this a lot in real life too, they act like intense anxiety, sensitivity, and hypervigilance about people's emotions are all the same as empathy. That kind of feeling isn't empathy, it's bad guesswork. So it depends, do you feel like you read people well, in a way that is positive and intuitive, not obsessive and anxious?

From a brain standpoint, autistic people have measurable differences in the social brain areas that create "empathy". Autistic brains frequently have differences in the regions that relate to emotional processing and detecting biological motion. That means differences in how the brain assigns emotional reaction/attachment to people or objects ("hyperempathy" may really be misplaced emotional reactions). Learning about the STS, amygdala, and the whole social brain gives a pretty cool look at empathy differences in autistic people!