Do you lack empathy?

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That's exactly what I mean by a failed attempt of emotional manipulation.
Accusing one of being heartless or lacking empathy is the next step.

That does make sense! I don't know how it works exactly, but yes i know i do feel for people especially lonely or damaged people

Exactly!

Either fortunately or unfortunately, my ASD grants me the ability to see emotional manipulation for what it is and with it, comes the attempt by people to "guilt others" into compliance by playing on their perceived emotional insecurities...but when somebody doesn't have any of these (like myself) that whole playing field changes.

I was a member of this forum about 8 years ago and let my membership lapse...but something happened today, causing me to rejoin.

I was out shopping with my mother...she was taking her sweet time looking at gardening pots... deciding which ones to buy.

Now, another shopper approached us with an "excuse me"...because she wanted to stand in the exact same spot we were standing in...to look at exactly the same things we were looking at...in other words, pushing in and hoping an "excuse me" would be the 'magic words' allowing herself to do just that...but I was prepared to stand my ground...because I had arrived at that location first and I was not about to condone the impatience and/or greed of my fellow human being...so I simply said "just wait your turn or come back later please".

With that, my mother turns to me and goes "let the nice lady through dear (turns to lady)...I am sorry for my daughter...she is Autistic...You must excuse HER".

I saw red! There is a difference between being Autistic and being assertive because you KNOW what you want, which may be totally different to what everybody else around you wants...but you refuse to let them "win" always because it makes you totally miserable...A doormat...(not to mention weak and pathetic).

With that, The lady turns to me and goes "I am really in a hurry..do you understand?" To wit and which I said "so am I...and if my mother wasn't so fussy over which pots she wanted to purchase, I would have vacated this position long before your arrival".

Of course, both women then proceeded to tell me how cold, callous and heartless I was being...

Which leads me to the understanding that it is "everybody ELSE" who has severe mental problems and NOT me...so how the heck can I ever be empathetic?

@So Misunderstood
You were simply logical... yes, people are often illogical and sometimes they even attribute a moral value to it. I don't get it but whatever.

@AprilR
Good you work with a psych. Empathy is valued as a motivation to help others but I've seen how too much empathy works: one gets exactly as suffering, overwhelmed and helpless as the one they empathize with, thus unable to help. I've seen it when my husband couldn't process everyday distresses of his toddler daughter.
Improving your boundaries is likely to help not to burden yourself with more than you can carry.

Being autistic means you lose most situations, whether you're doing the ''right'' thing or not, then you get a lecture about empathy and s**t. I mean, if you was the lady who was in a hurry and said ''excuse me'' to other shoppers who were standing where you needed to go, I bet your mother would still lecture you and say, ''that is very rude of you, this lady was there first, wait your turn.'' So in either situation you just cannot win.

The lecture what makes me laugh (laugh in despair) is this one:-
Aspie is having a bad day and is also in a hurry.
A salesman in the town tries to sell the Aspie something but the Aspie ignores him. The salesman feels upset because of the way the Aspie ignored him. An NT who is with the Aspie says, ''that salesman looked upset, that was very rude of you to ignore him. You could have just said 'no thank you, I'm in a hurry' or something!''

Now turn the situation around:-
An NT is having a bad day and is also in a hurry.
An Aspie salesman in the town tries to sell the passing NT something but the NT ignores him. The Aspie feels upset because of the way the person ignored him. An NT who is selling stuff with the Aspie notices he is upset and says to the Aspie, ''I know that person ignored you but he wasn't being rude, just not everybody feels like being stopped by salespeople and he might have been in a hurry or was having a bad day or something. You should know that.''

So basically NTs are allowed to act out their emotions and Aspies just have to take it and consider their feelings and thoughts all the time, but if Aspies act out our emotions NTs are allowed to take it all personally and we get a lecture that we are being rude and thoughtless. The lecture to an Aspie is: ''You should think about what could be going on inside other people's heads'', but the lecture to an Aspie is also: ''You can't expect other people to think about what's going on inside your head, they don't know you.''

This is one of the many reasons why I dislike being on the sh***y autism spectrum. This lack of empathy thing confuses everybody, and gets overused. Just like the word ''racism'' gets overused these days (but that's a different topic).

For me both boil to: the NT that is with the Aspie feels entitled to lecture the Aspie and exercise their own feeling of superiority over the "poor disabled" comrade.

That is a very astute observation and illustrates what I am talking about with great clarity.

The incident at the garden centre came on the heels of an incident at the checkout counter of a grocery store, where a woman with a screaming child wanted me to let her in before myself because her son's diaper needed changing and she had a whole trolley full of items...I had only six items and the extra 5 minute wait time for the processing of my own trolley would have made little difference to either herself OR the child, so when I said "no", the abuse I copped was horrendous and I just stood there laughing at her as my items were being scanned.

My mother wonders why I haven't been beaten up or stabbed already by a disgruntled person I have said "no" to previously.

Which leads me to ponder...how much is this empathy thing "fear based"? Is it like a trait we see in meerkats? some leftover "safety in numbers" thing from our prehistoric past lest we be eaten by a ravenous tiger?

Of course, I am also a creature of pure logic and have problems with NTs acting all illogical and assigning moral values to it. In such cases, I usually let them believe whatever they do because they will anyway! viz:

'Yes, I totally lack empathy...so instead of sitting there, flapping your lips, what are you going to DO about it?...oh, you can do NOTHING...You don't get to control me through your anal retentive diatribe...what a shame that is...'

People usually take off at light speed in the opposite direction when they see what they are dealing with..at first, this used to really bother me...now I realise that the trade-off of having no friends is totally worth it.

I don't actually agree with you. You could have stepped aside for a couple of minutes rather than hogging the spot.

There's a difference between being assertive and being rude.

This wasn't a hill you needed to die on.

I respect your disagreement....however, this was a hill that I wanted to raise my flag on...not perish on.

Maybe it is a symptom of my Aspies..or something else, but I notice that whenever I am walking or driving anywhere and it is crowded, it is always myself who has to move out of the way of other people when they could just as easily walk around or move around me!

If I want/decide to walk in a straight line...and I have conducted social experiments in crowded shopping malls where I want to walk say 50 meters from 'point a' to 'point b' in a straight line, I notice that nobody will move out of their way for ME and a "Mexican Standoff" ensues for about 5-10 seconds before I growl at them and they eventually sidestep...looking at me like an alien in the process.

It is actually quite intriguing and we don't realise how much we accommodate strangers in our lives...when if the shoe was on the other foot, other people would never do the same for me...yet I am expected to do it for them! Strange...

For many, all of this does not bother them...yourself included.
For a few of us, it does... myself included.

Two cars come face to face on a single lane bridge...which car should be the one to back up to let the other car pass? Why, the one who receives $10 from the driver of the other car to do so...of course.

Now, what if...Up until now, you have always been the one to back away or give way because it was the "right thing to do?" But wouldn't the "right thing to do" also apply to the other person, not just you? Who was more rude? The woman who was pushing in...or myself for not letting her?

Now, when one goes into all of the reasons and excuses as to why other people behave in all the stupid ways they do (which may/not be the actual case) and make allowances for this based upon similar experiences they, themselves have experienced in the past...THIS is empathy!

However, to do all of that requires a "Theory of Mind".

Most people (including myself) on the Autism Spectrum lack a Theory of Mind and those without a Theory of Mind are not able to feel or understand empathy (including myself).

I don't really care that I cannot feel it, however, because it sorts out all the NTs into "who can accept me for who/what I am" and "who cannot accept me and are best avoided" categories for quick reference...I see it as a blessing in disguise.

Definitely very relatable for me. The strange thing is sometimes these very people are just as "callous" towards me, but somehow their callousness is a different kind according to them.

A lot of times where I've defended myself, I have suddenly become labeled an as*hole despite the fact that I've observed people doing the exact same thing throughout their entire lives. It's like I am simply not allowed to defend myself, while others have all the right in the world to say and do what they want, as long as they follow the "unwritten/unspoken" rules which they would never disclose to me.

Also, people set a lot of traps and use a lot of facial cues to manipulate. A lot of them don't work on me but the ones that do confuse me so I don't know how to fight back and I'm caught off guard. A lot of times when a particularly hostile NT (my sibling) and I are in an argument, they will throw me a strange look where they scrunch up their mouth an squint their eyes, with a very slight curvature that I can only assume is a smile, something which I can describe verbally as being a "smug" and "confused" facial expression put together.

A lot of facial cues, especially the nastier ones, use this. On the other hand, when I've occasionally been in an argument with an Aspie, most of our argument doesn't use complex facial and hand gestures but is entirely composed of words and cues that are obvious or directly conveying our point.

I went on a bit of a rant but in short NT's are like aggressive strategists, conversation is often a battleground where unusual and ambiguous expressions are thrown back and fourth, massive, hollow, and empty points are expected to make landings where my brain has no "landing pad" supposedly, and I miss these.

I have an impression that NTs sometimes confuse empathy with conforming to unspoken social rules.

That is right. One of the rules is to be nice as long as it doesn't really hurts you and as long as the others are nice to you too. For this it might have been right of "So Misunderstood" to let the lady just take a pot.

But empathy is a bit more than that. It causes you to understand others emotionally and for this also causes you to be less judging. Of course there are not even few people - especially women - who count on the empathy of others for causing them just to do what they want. Many NTs are also much more whiny than aspies who lack empathy just because they count on empathy of other people towards people who are crying.

I'm lacking the feeling of empathy but I'm not as bad once it comes to cognitive empathy and to read facial expressions. For this I'm immune to manipulation and see through the masks. But the feeling of empathy would be a really good thing for getting the positive emotions of people right. Because of this I want to improve with it.

Last edited by quite an extreme on 12 May 2019, 1:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This is profoundly true. Aspies lack the falsity that NT's seem to excel in. If I don't like someone, I will not pretend otherwise, because that is dishonest. We do not confirm to most accepted social rules. I cannot feign interest in standard NT prattling about nothing much (they seem to love to do this). Aspies are logical and, therefore, in the eyes of NT's, cold. We are not of course, cold. We simply do not pretend all the time.

I pretend, just to be polite. I hate hostility or animosity. I wouldn't just go up to a co-worker and say, "you look stupid in that shirt". I'd rather say nothing at all, or if they ask I just pretend to like it. I do automatically know what to say and what not to say to people.

I know how to lie to save people's feelings. But I can be honest in other ways, like saying pointless things that make me sound stupid or annoying. But it's like an impulsive urge, and I'm aware that some things are pointless to say but I say anyway and hope people will accept me as that way.

If someone shows you a photo of their newborn, no matter how much it looks like a potato, you always must say that he or she is beautiful or cute or sweet or whatever. And if they say what their name is, and you dislike that name, you don't say "oh I don't like that name". You just say, "aww, that's a nice name" or something. People seem to get offended if you say you dislike what they chose to name their kid.
One time a co-worker showed me a picture of his dog that he loves, but it's the type of dog I hate; one of those little yippy loud things that aren't very smart. Inside I scowled and thought, "how can you bond with that, it looks vicious and dumb", but I didn't say what I was thinking. I just said, "aww, he's cute".

I have never been affected by other people feelings I am brutally honest and I say what I think and I am nearly 47 years old but I am still clueless about what to say to save peoples feelings

Not many people like me but I dont care at all
Im a bus driver and there are some elderly ladies and gents that like me and know im autistic
Being autistic doesnt stop me being a bus driver though.. I live for my job.

Yes and no. If the situation is one that I have faced, then yes. But it is overwhelming to me so I suppress it. If it is a situation that is foreign to me, I can not wrap my head around it. In this case I just keep quiet and do not risk a brutally honest response, and confrontation.