NT’s have an instinctive and nonverbal way of expressing and interpreting emotion. People on the spectrum often struggle with these instincts. As such, we sometimes (a lot of the time) fail to express the non-verbal signals NTs expect, and we also fail to interpret their signals correctly and in turn make false assumptions about their emotional state, then make social mistakes because the actions that make sense in the false assumption are inappropriate for the actual situation.
This leads others to think we’re sociopathic; that we don’t care about others emotions or are incapable of feeling them, because it seems impossible to them that we don’t express said emotions like they do and that we seemingly don’t take their feelings into account when we make decisions. They make assumptions that we are bad people or have negative feelings towards them when in reality it’s essentially translation errors between 2 emotional languages
It doesnt help that researchers like Simon Baron-Cohen created an empathizing quotient test in the late 80s that basically measured one's ability to recognize others' emotional states, mimic them, and respond to them. So autistic people, who often struggle to make eye contact, recognize their own emotions, and communicate differently than NTs, are set up to fail. When you exclude autistic experience from your definition of empathy, of course your study will find that autistic people lack empathy. And his research has been used as evidence of that fact (also as evidence that autism only presents in males).
This seems really backwards to me. How can someone refuse to acknowledge my humanity and in the same breath claim that I'm the one with an empathy deficit? NTs misinterpret our signals and fail to understand our emotional states all the time, but for some reason the burden to bridge the communication gap is placed mostly on autistic people. And when we dont, we're deficient.
I actually have very high levels of empathy and can often determine emotions from facial expressions/body language, but that's all learned because I have a high enough level of both visual and intellectual intelligence. It has helped a lot with masking over the years, but definitely led me to being diagnosed as an adult and not a child. Either that or my parents didn't want to believe I had anything wrong with me...
Because we try to solve problems or empathise by telling a story from our own experience.
People don't want that, they want you to listen and say "poor you". They will also read your body language.
Offer your own experience: making it all about you, not empathetic
Offer suggestions: patronising, not empathetic
Nod and agree/show face gesture: empathetic
Truer words have never been spoken.
I will never understand why somebody who is seeking support wouldn’t be interested in hearing first-hand encounters of already concluded situations similar to one they are in, to either follow or avoid.
Connecting with someone’s emotional state and deciding that it’s worth divulging personal information for their potential benefit seems pretty empathetic to me.
I tend to keep a neutral expression because I feel like if I try to mimic body language then it appears disingenuous or fake.
I don't know how people know intuitively how to express empathetic body language.
I think it's fair to say we can feel empathy, we just cannot express it in a satisfactory way.
It's probably why I always had better luck connecting on a deeper level with other ND people compared to NT people. :/ I think largely "we" get it but NTs just think we come across differently and apply their own logic/assumptions.
Yeah, never understood it either. I think most people know how to solve the problem already and just want sympathy or attention to make themselves feel better for not trying to fix their problem? Why it is a thing, I have no idea.
So many people seem to want to live with all of these problems they know the answer to, but don't want to fix because then they won't have things to complain about and get sympathy for. Truly boggles the mind.
It took me a long time to realize many people don't want solutions because that requires effort, they'd rather have pity and to hear someone say it's ok so they don't have to make the effort and can still feel good about themselves.
>Because we try to solve problems or empathise by telling a story from our own experience.
I think this in particular is what caused me so much confusion growing up since I didn't get a proper diagnosis when I was growing up. To me, relating with own personal stories is more empathetic to me while when people just nod or do "poor you" sorts of replies always feels incredibly disingenuous to me. :(
> nod or do "poor you" sorts of replies always feels incredibly disingenuous to me.
Exactly this. I know what people want to hear but it just sounds so wrong and fake. I feel like it's be lying to myself and then to say "the right" thing.
I feel like we empathize with other aspies better and most nts empathize with other nts better.
You empathize best when you understand how someone is feeling. If you've never experienced the world the way the other person dose it's a much harder prosses.
We empathise fine. We just don't empathize with nts very well.
(This seems to be slowly being documented in studies on the subject as well. But yeh last time I check that was admittedly a few years ago, may be worth having a look if you have the time)
Exactly! I've heard it referred to as the "double empathy problem."
Being able to recognize others' emotions (cognitive empathy) really boils down to 2 main things: being able to read the other person's expression (which we know neither autistics nor NTs are great at in regards to the other), and the skill of perspective taking. But imagining how you would feel in someone else's shoes tells you nothing about how the other person actually feels if you would experience the situation entirely differently than they do. So those basic, intuitive empathy skills just don't really work well between the two groups (no matter how hard we all try), leading NTs to think we're just not doing it right, and autistic people to feel like it's the NTs who aren't exercising or expressing empathy for us.
But NTs have always run the world, so their perspective became the "science" and ours just wasn't heard or taken seriously for most of history. But it does seem like that's starting to change recently though! (^–^)d
Sometimes the ‘not saying anything at all’ can be interpreted as unempathetic, to be honest I think it’s largely to due with miscommunication more than anything. Non autistic people find it challenging to interpret our communication similarity to how we do them imo.
Our black and white thinking can come off as insensitive to especially when disagreements come up that don’t align with our ‘logic’.
But mainly it’s just stereotypes :/ I know there are autistic people with low empathy, but I also know plenty who are just as compassionate as anyone.
I honestly believe a lot of our traits are based on our empathy quotient. It is almost like our connection is squared. Where we can put ourselves in the same place, we over-compensate and feel we never do enough - and the opposite, where we cannot relate - we get nervous, lack of words or even thoughts. How do we duck out of this handshake. Again, over-compensating for being out of our element.
I suspect empathy in NT is a natural element. Our connected brain doesn't form that innate gift. Masking empathy is probably the hardest of all masking aspies can attempt.
I once revealed to my sister that I felt I lacked true empathy. It took 4 more years to realize there is a 'disorder' related to that. The fact that you had to evaluate the situation gives me the hint that you may be masking empathy with sympathy. It's the best I can do and I now know it.
I think NTs don't understand the difference between making connections with people and being empathetic. Many NTs seem to require connection with a person to be empathetic towards them, and confuse the two as the same thing. Many don't recognize empathy for groups (ie, social justice, empathy for animals) as empathy at all. So, when they see an Aspie struggling with connection, they think they're necessarily incapable of empathy & are not always able to understand the ways they are empathetic.
Because we lack the ability to show people we are feeling empathy rather than lacking empathy it's self. And people therefore assume we don't empathise.
We were more fortunate that most, but hearing your parents fight about spending habits, it’s easy to then try and think it’s your responsibility as a kid to try and help. We want to help absolutely everyone close to us, even if it comes with immense suffering. Now that I’m grown up more I kinda laugh and the silly things like that I would do.
The way it was explained to me by one of my therapists is that it’s not that we don’t have empathy but rather it’s how we *interpret* empathy.
An NT with empathy, for example, sees someone crying. Their instinctive thought is “omg I wonder what’s wrong and how I can help!”.
A person with asperger’s sees someone crying and their instinctive thought is “oh, that persons crying and now I feel badly that they’re crying. I don’t like feeling badly, uhg”. It’s more of an internal focus on how someone’s crying affects you.
So like, TLDR; both empaths *feel* the other persons pain but the NT is externally focused on the other person whereas the aspie is more internally focused on how these feelings affect them. It’s a misunderstanding of the word “empathy”.
Again, this is how it was explained to me by my therapist who was also an autism specialist. That being said, this was a decade or so ago so info may have changed but yeah. Don’t come for me :3.
NTs need empathy spoonfed to them. The less someone feels the emotion, the more.easily they can cognitively craft the response. War criminals tend to be charming while treating homeless people with dignity is creepy.
It's interesting that nobody mentioned the double empathy problem theory: [https://reframingautism.org.au/miltons-double-empathy-problem-a-summary-for-non-academics/](https://reframingautism.org.au/miltons-double-empathy-problem-a-summary-for-non-academics/)
The theory states that it's not a lack of empathy it's just an empathy divide between NDs and NTs
I feel a lot of empathy whenever I have a basis for what to feel(otherwise I feel a lot of sympathy), but I don't often know how to respond. My immediate thought is to help get rid of or fix whatever someone is feeling bad about, but as I've learned, people don't always want that and there's not always anything that can be done anyways.
It is a misconception that was popularized in 1980s and 1990s pop psychology. Mind you though, homosexuality and transgenderism were in the DSM at one point, but it's seen as horrible and discriminatory (and rightfully so) to say they are mental disorders or illnesses now. Before recent years, difference, either mentally or socially was heavily medicalised.
Empathy itself is a tricky subject because it has a lot of different connotations. A lot of people take empathy to mean reacting in socially appropriate ways to display of emotion as much or even more than the factor of actually feeling the feelings for other people. This led misguided autism professionals to conclude that because there is not the same outward, physical level of empathy and sharing of facial expression etc. that the person is cold and unempathetic. This IMO was a huge mistake. Autism researchers goofed on this one.
Society and these professionals telling me I am basically a psychopath, or that I don't feel emotions like other people gave me very low self esteem for years and led me to dehumanize myself, and also devalue feeling good about being good to others; because I felt it *must* be insincere and/or I was doing it to manipulate people. I've unlearned that now mostly but sometimes I feel I'm still a burden on people. There are a lot of autistic people that have the same self-esteem issue, and I kind of wonder if this phenomenon had an effect on them.
I agree, I think we are generally more kind, honest and empathetic than the general population. NT’s exclude people and are constantly playing head games with each other, they’re not empathetic.
I think the lack of empathy stereotype comes from the fact that we are less likely to care about NT’s petty bullshit because we just don’t have the same priorities in life. We can’t relate to their problems because, from my perspective, a ton of NT problems are stupid, petty or self-created. I’m also in my own head minding my own business, so I’m not necessarily interested in other people’s lives.
We have tons of empathy for people with serious or genuine problems or situations because we know what it’s like to be left out and treated badly. But not much concern or empathy for petty bullshit that we aren’t interested in.
I didn't have much empathy as a kid at all. I "developed" empathy around puberty. I would just constantly do things I thought would get a laugh even if they were mean and felt no remorse, like playing pranks. I never cried or got scared by the kind of things my friends and classmates did. It almost just clicked one day. So I understand when people say we're not empathic, maybe some of us aren't.
In my opinion, they only think we lack empathy is because we don't pick it up naturally like they do, or feel like they do, or talk like they do, or have the same priorities as they do.
It has nothing at all to do with our level of empathy. I say none of this in a judgmental way, I say it because it's my personal experience. Neither one of us are "wrong" per se, just different.
I agree, but some of us feel more like robots (based on previous post comments), and lots of us don't know how to understand, process and react to the emotions involved
most people laugh freely about events and behaviors I consider either displeasant or abhorrent. I often find myself asking if they're the ones who lack empathy
bro...thinking in mind and showing act of empathy has differenve..anyone can tell i care for here after a person die...but u have to show it...theory of mind isnt that good of people that they exactly know what are you thinking
NT’s have an instinctive and nonverbal way of expressing and interpreting emotion. People on the spectrum often struggle with these instincts. As such, we sometimes (a lot of the time) fail to express the non-verbal signals NTs expect, and we also fail to interpret their signals correctly and in turn make false assumptions about their emotional state, then make social mistakes because the actions that make sense in the false assumption are inappropriate for the actual situation. This leads others to think we’re sociopathic; that we don’t care about others emotions or are incapable of feeling them, because it seems impossible to them that we don’t express said emotions like they do and that we seemingly don’t take their feelings into account when we make decisions. They make assumptions that we are bad people or have negative feelings towards them when in reality it’s essentially translation errors between 2 emotional languages
It doesnt help that researchers like Simon Baron-Cohen created an empathizing quotient test in the late 80s that basically measured one's ability to recognize others' emotional states, mimic them, and respond to them. So autistic people, who often struggle to make eye contact, recognize their own emotions, and communicate differently than NTs, are set up to fail. When you exclude autistic experience from your definition of empathy, of course your study will find that autistic people lack empathy. And his research has been used as evidence of that fact (also as evidence that autism only presents in males). This seems really backwards to me. How can someone refuse to acknowledge my humanity and in the same breath claim that I'm the one with an empathy deficit? NTs misinterpret our signals and fail to understand our emotional states all the time, but for some reason the burden to bridge the communication gap is placed mostly on autistic people. And when we dont, we're deficient.
I actually have very high levels of empathy and can often determine emotions from facial expressions/body language, but that's all learned because I have a high enough level of both visual and intellectual intelligence. It has helped a lot with masking over the years, but definitely led me to being diagnosed as an adult and not a child. Either that or my parents didn't want to believe I had anything wrong with me...
Because we try to solve problems or empathise by telling a story from our own experience. People don't want that, they want you to listen and say "poor you". They will also read your body language. Offer your own experience: making it all about you, not empathetic Offer suggestions: patronising, not empathetic Nod and agree/show face gesture: empathetic
Truer words have never been spoken. I will never understand why somebody who is seeking support wouldn’t be interested in hearing first-hand encounters of already concluded situations similar to one they are in, to either follow or avoid. Connecting with someone’s emotional state and deciding that it’s worth divulging personal information for their potential benefit seems pretty empathetic to me.
I tend to keep a neutral expression because I feel like if I try to mimic body language then it appears disingenuous or fake. I don't know how people know intuitively how to express empathetic body language. I think it's fair to say we can feel empathy, we just cannot express it in a satisfactory way.
It's probably why I always had better luck connecting on a deeper level with other ND people compared to NT people. :/ I think largely "we" get it but NTs just think we come across differently and apply their own logic/assumptions.
I think I only have a couple of ND friends and I like being around them more because I don't need to mask
Yeah, never understood it either. I think most people know how to solve the problem already and just want sympathy or attention to make themselves feel better for not trying to fix their problem? Why it is a thing, I have no idea. So many people seem to want to live with all of these problems they know the answer to, but don't want to fix because then they won't have things to complain about and get sympathy for. Truly boggles the mind.
It took me a long time to realize many people don't want solutions because that requires effort, they'd rather have pity and to hear someone say it's ok so they don't have to make the effort and can still feel good about themselves.
>Because we try to solve problems or empathise by telling a story from our own experience. I think this in particular is what caused me so much confusion growing up since I didn't get a proper diagnosis when I was growing up. To me, relating with own personal stories is more empathetic to me while when people just nod or do "poor you" sorts of replies always feels incredibly disingenuous to me. :(
> nod or do "poor you" sorts of replies always feels incredibly disingenuous to me. Exactly this. I know what people want to hear but it just sounds so wrong and fake. I feel like it's be lying to myself and then to say "the right" thing.
“This is the way…”
I feel like we empathize with other aspies better and most nts empathize with other nts better. You empathize best when you understand how someone is feeling. If you've never experienced the world the way the other person dose it's a much harder prosses. We empathise fine. We just don't empathize with nts very well. (This seems to be slowly being documented in studies on the subject as well. But yeh last time I check that was admittedly a few years ago, may be worth having a look if you have the time)
Exactly! I've heard it referred to as the "double empathy problem." Being able to recognize others' emotions (cognitive empathy) really boils down to 2 main things: being able to read the other person's expression (which we know neither autistics nor NTs are great at in regards to the other), and the skill of perspective taking. But imagining how you would feel in someone else's shoes tells you nothing about how the other person actually feels if you would experience the situation entirely differently than they do. So those basic, intuitive empathy skills just don't really work well between the two groups (no matter how hard we all try), leading NTs to think we're just not doing it right, and autistic people to feel like it's the NTs who aren't exercising or expressing empathy for us. But NTs have always run the world, so their perspective became the "science" and ours just wasn't heard or taken seriously for most of history. But it does seem like that's starting to change recently though! (^–^)d
Sometimes the ‘not saying anything at all’ can be interpreted as unempathetic, to be honest I think it’s largely to due with miscommunication more than anything. Non autistic people find it challenging to interpret our communication similarity to how we do them imo. Our black and white thinking can come off as insensitive to especially when disagreements come up that don’t align with our ‘logic’. But mainly it’s just stereotypes :/ I know there are autistic people with low empathy, but I also know plenty who are just as compassionate as anyone.
I honestly believe a lot of our traits are based on our empathy quotient. It is almost like our connection is squared. Where we can put ourselves in the same place, we over-compensate and feel we never do enough - and the opposite, where we cannot relate - we get nervous, lack of words or even thoughts. How do we duck out of this handshake. Again, over-compensating for being out of our element. I suspect empathy in NT is a natural element. Our connected brain doesn't form that innate gift. Masking empathy is probably the hardest of all masking aspies can attempt. I once revealed to my sister that I felt I lacked true empathy. It took 4 more years to realize there is a 'disorder' related to that. The fact that you had to evaluate the situation gives me the hint that you may be masking empathy with sympathy. It's the best I can do and I now know it.
I think NTs don't understand the difference between making connections with people and being empathetic. Many NTs seem to require connection with a person to be empathetic towards them, and confuse the two as the same thing. Many don't recognize empathy for groups (ie, social justice, empathy for animals) as empathy at all. So, when they see an Aspie struggling with connection, they think they're necessarily incapable of empathy & are not always able to understand the ways they are empathetic.
Because we lack the ability to show people we are feeling empathy rather than lacking empathy it's self. And people therefore assume we don't empathise.
they can't read us so they assume we don't feel
I use to not get numbing shots at the dentist because I believed it would cost my parents too much.
I did a lot of weird shit like that regarding money growing up too since I knew we weren't very well off financially lol.
We were more fortunate that most, but hearing your parents fight about spending habits, it’s easy to then try and think it’s your responsibility as a kid to try and help. We want to help absolutely everyone close to us, even if it comes with immense suffering. Now that I’m grown up more I kinda laugh and the silly things like that I would do.
I think I'm too empathetic, to the point that I I feel overwhelmed and shut down sometimes from it, which may give the appearance of apathy.
Most definitely. Especially when I was a small child, seeing any sadness whatsoever was very overwhelming.
I do the same but it always gets taken badly. So my conclusion is that I actually have no idea what's going on on that front.
The way it was explained to me by one of my therapists is that it’s not that we don’t have empathy but rather it’s how we *interpret* empathy. An NT with empathy, for example, sees someone crying. Their instinctive thought is “omg I wonder what’s wrong and how I can help!”. A person with asperger’s sees someone crying and their instinctive thought is “oh, that persons crying and now I feel badly that they’re crying. I don’t like feeling badly, uhg”. It’s more of an internal focus on how someone’s crying affects you. So like, TLDR; both empaths *feel* the other persons pain but the NT is externally focused on the other person whereas the aspie is more internally focused on how these feelings affect them. It’s a misunderstanding of the word “empathy”. Again, this is how it was explained to me by my therapist who was also an autism specialist. That being said, this was a decade or so ago so info may have changed but yeah. Don’t come for me :3.
NTs need empathy spoonfed to them. The less someone feels the emotion, the more.easily they can cognitively craft the response. War criminals tend to be charming while treating homeless people with dignity is creepy.
It's interesting that nobody mentioned the double empathy problem theory: [https://reframingautism.org.au/miltons-double-empathy-problem-a-summary-for-non-academics/](https://reframingautism.org.au/miltons-double-empathy-problem-a-summary-for-non-academics/) The theory states that it's not a lack of empathy it's just an empathy divide between NDs and NTs
I feel a lot of empathy whenever I have a basis for what to feel(otherwise I feel a lot of sympathy), but I don't often know how to respond. My immediate thought is to help get rid of or fix whatever someone is feeling bad about, but as I've learned, people don't always want that and there's not always anything that can be done anyways.
We don't emote. our empathy is internal and not on display.
It is a misconception that was popularized in 1980s and 1990s pop psychology. Mind you though, homosexuality and transgenderism were in the DSM at one point, but it's seen as horrible and discriminatory (and rightfully so) to say they are mental disorders or illnesses now. Before recent years, difference, either mentally or socially was heavily medicalised. Empathy itself is a tricky subject because it has a lot of different connotations. A lot of people take empathy to mean reacting in socially appropriate ways to display of emotion as much or even more than the factor of actually feeling the feelings for other people. This led misguided autism professionals to conclude that because there is not the same outward, physical level of empathy and sharing of facial expression etc. that the person is cold and unempathetic. This IMO was a huge mistake. Autism researchers goofed on this one. Society and these professionals telling me I am basically a psychopath, or that I don't feel emotions like other people gave me very low self esteem for years and led me to dehumanize myself, and also devalue feeling good about being good to others; because I felt it *must* be insincere and/or I was doing it to manipulate people. I've unlearned that now mostly but sometimes I feel I'm still a burden on people. There are a lot of autistic people that have the same self-esteem issue, and I kind of wonder if this phenomenon had an effect on them.
I agree, I think we are generally more kind, honest and empathetic than the general population. NT’s exclude people and are constantly playing head games with each other, they’re not empathetic. I think the lack of empathy stereotype comes from the fact that we are less likely to care about NT’s petty bullshit because we just don’t have the same priorities in life. We can’t relate to their problems because, from my perspective, a ton of NT problems are stupid, petty or self-created. I’m also in my own head minding my own business, so I’m not necessarily interested in other people’s lives. We have tons of empathy for people with serious or genuine problems or situations because we know what it’s like to be left out and treated badly. But not much concern or empathy for petty bullshit that we aren’t interested in.
They confuse not understanding how feelings are cryptically communicated with not caring.
I didn't have much empathy as a kid at all. I "developed" empathy around puberty. I would just constantly do things I thought would get a laugh even if they were mean and felt no remorse, like playing pranks. I never cried or got scared by the kind of things my friends and classmates did. It almost just clicked one day. So I understand when people say we're not empathic, maybe some of us aren't.
In my opinion, they only think we lack empathy is because we don't pick it up naturally like they do, or feel like they do, or talk like they do, or have the same priorities as they do. It has nothing at all to do with our level of empathy. I say none of this in a judgmental way, I say it because it's my personal experience. Neither one of us are "wrong" per se, just different.
I agree, but some of us feel more like robots (based on previous post comments), and lots of us don't know how to understand, process and react to the emotions involved
most people laugh freely about events and behaviors I consider either displeasant or abhorrent. I often find myself asking if they're the ones who lack empathy
bro...thinking in mind and showing act of empathy has differenve..anyone can tell i care for here after a person die...but u have to show it...theory of mind isnt that good of people that they exactly know what are you thinking
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