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Super Important Revelation Regarding the Nature of WP.net

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For those who give advice to people on WP.com: would you describe yourself as lacking empathy?
Yes 32%  32%  [ 19 ]
No 68%  68%  [ 40 ]
Total votes : 59

skeeterhawk
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25 Apr 2008, 11:38 am

Anbuend is right on the money! It is so frustrating that this information and viewpoint are available and have been for years and yet the world stays stuck in the "no empathy" rut!

Many years before I had discovered the framework of autism as a way to describe my personality and consciousness, I had developed an approach to this sort of thing. I had gotten really put out with people saying something about "So and so happened and OF COURSE I felt sad, (or mad, or frightened or whatever). In such a large proportion of those experiences, I had NOT felt the emotion that was offered, but a different on. A person might have expressed an opinion and while my associate felt angry or insulted, I felt curious or mystified.

I began to tell people that they should leave out the "OF COURSE" since not everyone feels the same way about everything. This seemed like a very conservative conclusion. To my surprise, most of my friends thought I was being arrogant or stubborn or something like that since I clearly was not admitting to feeling what HAD to be my innermost feelings!

At least now I have a framework for understanding this little set of twists in life. WP and folks like Anbuend help deepen my familiarity with that source of support and strength.



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25 Apr 2008, 11:56 am

Depends on how you define empathy :S


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EvilKimEvil
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25 Apr 2008, 12:39 pm

I think that expressing empathy is often a bigger issue than experiencing empathy. The problem is that the descriptions of AS are based on observations of us, not conversations with us.



Gabbaruchi
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25 Apr 2008, 12:49 pm

A total lack of empathy is a diagnostic criterion for antisocial personality disorder (the most recent euphemism for psychopaths and sociopaths). APD is devastating and dangerous to the individual and everyone around them. It's also almost totally untreatable. That's not an image that aspies/autistics want to be associated with.

"Lack of empathy" is not a term to be applied to ANY disorder lightly. Autistic people are aware that others can feel emotion, they just have a hard time guessing what that emotion is at any given time.



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25 Apr 2008, 1:02 pm

Yeah.

Almost the inverse of autism.

Autistic people often have typical reading non-autistic people, but we have a conscience.

The people you're describing generally find it easy to read people, but lack a conscience so don't care if they hurt people.


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25 Apr 2008, 2:53 pm

Pundit23 wrote:
Okay, as plenty of people know, I'm new here. Diagnosed around 4 weeks ago, I'm still wet behind the ears as far as the truth and fiction of Asperger's Reference books go.

In every piece of literature I've come across, one of the key social problems Aspies face is the inability to summarily "put themselves in other people's shoes." Often called the Theory of Mind, this trait that we are believed to lack so heavily contributes to the further description that we have no empathy: a description that puts us in the public eye's on the same level as a robot, or Hitler.

So the irony I've observed is that we're trying to do just that on this site between our fellow Aspies. Besides talking about the mundane, we (I frequently) both ask and try to solve social problems. But theoretically isn't our inability to relate to others part of the reason we have social problems in the first place...?

This amused me to no end, and I'd like to hear the community nice and loud on this one. Does the existence and popularity of this site at least dent the credibility of the diagnostic trait regarding the lack of empathy?

I'm in no way trying to troll semantics or minimize our misfortunes. I either want to get a more accurate description of the particular empathy we lack, or get people to realize how amusing this possible misconception is. The credibility and usefulness of this site stands for itself, so one of the aforementioned must be flawed.

(I have kept this carefully pun and rhyme free, because such a topic needs no convoluting to incite entertainment.)



If anything, I'm TOO empathetic. I can't do anything without thinking about other people and how they'll feel... everything I do, my job, my personal life, everything, revolves around helping others.

So I guess that theory doesn't always hold true. :)


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