Lack of empathy?

Post Reply New Topic

In that sense, yes, our empathy is impaired, but I think every Aspie can get drastically better at recognizing other people's feelings(maybe with some coaching from a friend). I'm really careful not to bore or upset people when I talk, and I pay close attention to all the cues I've learned over time, and I've seen massive improvements from that.

Unsettling to them, maybe, but not the same thing as being a sociopath. Your desires and actions are what really make empathy; not your emotions. You comfort people after their cat dies because you want them to feel better. Your wanting to help those people is the critical factor--not whether you experience emotional contagion. That sort of detachment may even be beneficial in a truly overwhelming situation like a natural disaster; you might be able to keep your head in the middle of the tragedy and help more people than you could if you were emotionally overwhelmed yourself. Don't feel ashamed for not catching people's emotions. Your decision to help, regardless of whether you yourself feel anything, is what determines your character.

If I see someone cowering in a corner or crying or screaming and swearing, I know how they feel, and I usually feel something similar myself. I just can't figure out subtle emotions. The Wiki page on empathy says "Someone may need to have a certain amount of empathy before they are able to feel compassion", which shows you just how much we're being demonized when we're referred to as lacking empathy: it does imply we lack compassion as well. If you entirely lacked empathy, presumably you could sit buy and watch someone in absolute agony without being bothered at all by it.
It often seems to me NTs lack empathy for the obvious cases: someone being abused, bullied or discriminated against, for instance - while making a big display of it over minor things (provided those things happen to someone with high social status). Oh noes, my richest friend is slightly bored, how terrible! Selective sounds about right. If they had such excellent empathy, they wouldn't call us "puzzles", would they?

You don't have to have empathy at all to have compassion.

To have compassion, you need just two things:
1. The knowledge of what feelings are.
2. The knowledge that other people have feelings.

So if you know that it is possible for people to feel bad, you can desire to have them feel better. It's as simple as that. Once you know the concepts of "hurt" and "someone else", you can experience compassion. You don't need to receive the information about their mental state by way of your own emotional response.

Unfortunately, they're right to a large extent, even if not about the root cause, but about the effects. I've sat next to someone in total agony without noticing it, because I don't have empathy. And my lack of compassion when I'm not told with words what someone's state of mind is, is almost total. So they're right in that we're highly unreliable in regard to being compassionate, because we don't readily get the need for compassion unless told. This is one of the major reasons I experience massive rejection from people - they don't know that I need to be told with words, so they assume I have no feelings for others.

Most examples people are giving on this thread are about pain, but the massive rejection is no less when I fail to recognize someone's (fleeting) insecurity, elation, shyness, etc. I can spoil someone's happy state of mind, step on their insecurities when trying to comfort them, etc. We can be pretty much like a bull in a china store regarding others' feelings, emotions and overall state of mind. In that sense, we're a risk, yes.



You're mixing several issues here, it's more complex than you say. You're talking about selective moves based on self-interest, not about empathy. They detect the state of mind in everyone, and choose to act compassionately only in the cases where sycophancy will get them something.

Last edited by Moondust on 24 Jul 2012, 11:42 pm, edited 3 times in total.

You forgot an important qualifier... Empathy is putting yourself in another person's shoes, imagining how it must feel for that person, and simultaneously realizing at more than a theoretical, abstract level that you are NOT that person, their feelings are likely to differ from the feelings you'd have, and having the slightest clue how his likely feelings might differ from yours.

Empathy is knowing that a distraught friend who just lost a parent & mentions how overwhelming it is to pick a suitable headstone doesn't want you to suggest appropriate fonts for the epitaph, and probably won't appreciate a text message with the URL of a company that sells discount headstones online you found via Google later that afternoon. Not even if they can laser-etch photographs for all eternity and cost half as much as the cheapest one available from the funeral home. Well... not unless your friend is an aspie, too. Then, it might become a mutual perseverative special interest and turn into a bonding opportunity that strengthens your friendship & gives you both something interesting to talk about at the funeral.

Yeah. Differentiating self from other is usually something that is done in very early life, when the baby realizes that Mom and Me are two different people--but some people do this imperfectly. That leads to problems with establishing a stable identity for themselves, and can lead to defining yourself as an extension of others... leading to close, "clingy", usually very tumultuous relationships.

NTs in general don't have a problem that extreme, but they do take mental shortcuts with empathy. Because most people they meet are like themselves, the assumption that others think like they do is usually a relatively close approximation, enough to allow them to function. When they take that shortcut with people who are atypical, or from a different culture, they can make mistakes. Most NTs learn to correct themselves after some exposure to people from a different culture, as they get used to them and create a new framework of more valid shortcuts.

So very true!! THIS is the crucial point!! And I've only started discovering this now, at 50.

I've comforted people profusely on things that they weren't upset about or suffering nearly as much as I would've been in their place if it had happened to me. One of the many things that make me appear weird to people. Conversely, people often feel that I minimize their feelings (because I don't get it that it's something important to them, when it's something not important to me), and think I'm mean.

Eg: when someone tells me their car broke down in the middle of the highway, I suffer for them extremely much, because I imagine them having to deal with all the problems alone, like I always have to do, and with the limitations of being autistic. It usually turns out that, for them, it's no big deal, they just call the husband / brother / dad to come deal with it, while they take a cab to the nearest coffee-shop for a latte and a chat with each friend on the mobile phone to tell them their woe. They're not alone, disabled and penniless like I am, so their "ordeal" is totally different from mine.

Thank you for the reminder, this is one I still have to work on.

Somebody explain to me how come NTs don't have empathy with Aspies?

How come a lot of Aspies can have empathy for each other more?

It's not that we lack empathy. It is just that it's a common human trait in most people to just have empathy for those who have been in similar situations. Even an NT I know has admitted that before. So how come people still say NTs have empathy and Aspies don't? I always thought that the majority of NTs only empathise with what they value, if someone stands out from their social expectations then they mostly would not want to know or understand unless they are educated about it, unless they go out of their way to try and empathise what it's like, which is quite rare. Like when I was about 12 I was out with my mum in a busy shopping place, and I was getting overwhelmed by babies screaming and I wasn't doing anything to annoy others all I was doing was calmly saying, ''I don't think I can be in this place much longer'', and my mum was like, ''oh it's not that bad, what's wrong with ya!'' when she could've just thought, ''well she does have AS, and AS people get unsettled with loud noise so I can understand how she might be feeling, maybe I will let her just wait outside if it is that bad for her.''

It seems that NTs get away with lacking empathy. I wish I were NT so I wouldn't then belong to a group that gets blamed for everything.

This sounds just like me....

This has in fact been explained above. It's not that someone with a 'normal dose' of empathy is unwilling to empathise with an autistic person. It's rather that their attempts at empathising fall on the blind spot of not taking autism into consideration, even some people who have been explained that the person in front of them is autistic. It's the 'neurological incompatibility' mentioned above, where someone who isn't autistic is trying to understand the autistic person through a non-autistic lens. They will be TRYING to empathise, but fail because they are misinterpreting the weird signals we as autistics are sending out into the world. It throws them off!

Bear in mind that this applies to people with standard empathic ability, NOT people who are above-averagely empathic. I've met several people who are above-averagely empathic, all of them 'NT'. I got along with them greatly; one in particular never even learned that I was autistic. She was just very good at responding to my emotional moods pretty much from day one, accepting me as I was- that was very pleasant. Most people have some empathic ability, but nothing out of the ordinary- usually praising those who are . We as autistics, or so the theory goes, are 'empathy-impaired', and that's how some of us come to wonder why, 'NTs' for all their ToM and social skills fail to read and understand us. We're like emus wondering why ducks aren't gliding the skies like eagles.

Meanwhile, I also think that between certain autistic people, there will be an UNDERSTANDING of each other rather than actual empathy. When two autistics meet and strike up a conversation, there may be mutual recognition (though not always). As this phenomenon can only be observed between two people who know they're both autistic, and have probably told each other, this takes away a barrier of insecurity between the two, feeding the mutual understanding.