Autism and Lack of Empathy

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I know how she feels.

You saying to your mum that you hate her (and the other way around) is the example of using one idea to obscure your true feeling/statement, to achieve a given purpose. You wanted to hurt her, so you've made a decision to say it. The fact that you love her doesn't erase your action. It doesn't mean if these words came from actual feeling of hate or just your inner need to hurt her with words. The outcome is the same - you've made a decision to say it. Words do not just come off from people's mouths on their own, without thought process first. If you wouldn't mean to say it, you simply wouldn't, simple as that.

As for the job, you had a rough day - you hated your job in that given moment. This is the example of one idea replacing another, even if only briefly.

So you're saying me and my mum hated each other.

Nope, I'm not saying that. I'll try to rephrase it as clear as I can.

There are three possibilities, but only one of them can be true because they are not compatible when it comes to logic, even though they lead to the same outcome:

1. That you indeed hated each other as a "default state of matters" and saying that was expressing your true feelings which you wanted the other person to know about.

2. That you used these word on purpose (that's the important part) to hurt other person's feelings, even though they weren't true and you weren't hating each other.

3) That you truly hated the other person for a brief moment of time, in context of given situation and this feeling was very real for you, overriding good feelings towards the person, like love. Once you calmed down, the feeling was gone.

My point is: words like these do not come from the mouths of people on their own. Saying them is always intentional, based on thoughts you hold in your head and they are said because you want the other person to hear them.

This can really be easily dissected to branching statements (if-then) and all of them will lead to the same outcome - your vocal chords making sounds which form sentence "I hate you".

I am simply debunking an inane idea that words said "in heat of the moment" are somewhat "misspoken". No, they are not. It is not like that, for a while, a person who says them gets disconnected from their brain and someone else takes over only to be mean to others. These actions are conscious, controlled and intentional. "I didn't mean it" is a piss poor excuse to not reflect on the situation and face the ugly side of one's persona: "yeah, I wanted to hurt this person, one way or another and it was my own choice".

I think that you are smart enough to know very well what I am talking about, but just do not want to accept it. Why? Most likely to still feel good about yourself. Not thinking about the possibility that a person as empathic as you claim to be, could ever intentionally hurt other human being. Facing the truth that you, in specific, could intentionally hurt another human being and actually did it.

And yes, I mean that. Shadow on the wall corresponds to what is in the box, no trickery.

^
Isn't that all assuming that everybody has perfect anger management?

I meant that you shared with us the fact that the worker smirked. I am the factual, literal ASD person. Your interpretation (that you smirked) didn't even occur to me. I assumed you were as disgusted as I am. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

I was thinking about my response as soon as I posted. The "pain" I feel is my powerlessness. I know exactly how I would want to handle ignorant or malicious behavior. However, based on "feedback" I suppressed my impulses. Now I want to learn to follow my instinct as appropriately as I can. Complete suppression was "deadness" inside, awareness is "painful" and the next step is to own my power and way of being. The moments I can manage that will be blissful.

Oh, BTW ---- my mom did hypnotherapy to turn her "on" and I recently I did EMDR to help move me from the painful "on" stage to the powerful stage. It's still a work in progress, but we are progressing.

Yep, that's this household. Facts make me happy. When things are out of my control, set my expectations or give me some odds and I will run off happy. When my dad was diagnosed with heart failure I reviewed the expected survival rate tables with him --- I don't know that it provided as much comfort to him as it did to me. Years later, when I found out I had ASD, I had to explain to my NT dad that the more research and facts I give him the more I care about him or the issue. Wouldn't that be obvious? When my ASD daughter got her guinea pig she'd already calculated when it would die. Because she cares. She needs to prepare. My daughter has come out with "When is grandma going to die? I want her phone." And then last year on Mother's Day I asked what she was thinking about and she asked deadpan "What will happen to us when you die?" I thanked her for caring and explained various situations (old age, accident, etc.). Like me, my daughter prefers not to hurt people, but she has to learn what hurts people (esp. those sensitive NT people). So I approach it all with patient instruction (like you suggested: skills). However, if someone is threatening her or she is hurt by someone which crosses that line, she's also like her momma, watch out! In that case, we need to adjust the line and regulate so it's not always at the kick-butt threshold.

I had my daughter evaluated at age 9 but she was not diagnosed with ASD (just sensory, executive function, expressive language disorder, etc). Probably b/c I understand her so well and have instructed her so well - provided lots of support and scaffolding already --- but as we know, it only goes so far. [Bleep] diagnostic criteria for intelligent girls. Good luck with the evaluation for your daughter! Teasing: Who clearly didn't get her intelligence from that grandmother. ---I am hopeful my daughter's ASD is now apparent at age 10½ (when just that bit more is expected) so she can be correctly diagnosed to get professional support not just a jaded ASD momma's version.

Emotions mostly don't have much logic. Me and my mum yelling "I hate you!" at each other during an argument is an angry way of saying "I am not happy with you right now, which is why we're having this quarrel", or "this is how frustrated I am!" It doesn't make it a fact. People exaggerate a lot when highly frustrated or exasperated.
It's a way of expressing emotion. You need to educate yourself more on emotions and how they work.

Emotion doesn't always make sense but is very important in social interaction and often dominates the context of what we (humans) are saying.


I don't think I've ever hated my mum for a second, so I suppose number 2 is the nearest possible reason as to why we said it.

No offence taken haha. It was impossible to not notice this smirk. Maybe "smirk" isn't carrying enough magnitude, the look on his face was one step from grinning like a psycho, lol.

Were I disgusted? No. I've not given it that much thought in that very moment. Now, re-evaluating the occurrence, I think that it should be obvious that we can find people who really enjoy killing, working in slaughterhouse. Well, it is better for him to slaughter cows than people, I think.

There are humans who simply crave blood, slaughterhouse is probably the best place for them to be. It is much more worse if they become murderers. It is disastrous if they become politicians or capitalists. A butcher is an OK station for them in my book.

By the way, the rules of running business like slaughterhouse over here dictate that workers should be shuffled between stations every three months, so no one will do the actual killing for more than 3 months in a row, without a break. Of course, no one gives a crap and I've heard of cases where guys were killing cows, 8 hours per day, 5 days a week, for over 20 years without ever being relocated to another station. This surely must affect their minds in some way.

I do not know if it is the same for you, but I've found that using rational thinking to come up with the ways of "maximising overall good" can be effectively reversed and the same mechanism can be used to think up the ways of maximising possible evil. I find it useful sometimes to predict what people who have bad intentions and attitudes towards others can possibly do. But thankfully, most of the time, they fall short of my "expectations" and make "rookie mistakes". Even when I am an object of an attack I quite often find myself not disturbed but more like rolling my eyes and thinking "oh boy, you could play it in so much more efficient way and use so many better points of attachment to hurt me, but somehow failed so miserably".

I couldn't agree more.
I found that physics and engineering was a good profession but management is a totally different subject.
Being a first line supervisor is fine and even enjoyable.
But upper management is absolutely CRAZY.

I couldn't stand giving people orders when I was a team senior - not even manager, just manager's assistant coordinating work of others on ad-hoc basis. I was explaining them use of tools, changes in the process, a told them how to handle certain situations - well, no matter how hard I tried to make instructions and guidelines (actually spent time to write them step-by-step instructions) idiot-proof, someone ALWAYS messed up. No matter how hard I've tried, some people's brains worked in a totally moronic way, taking the same data as everyone's else and producing worthless, invalid results. What was even more frustrating is that this seemingly happened at random - even people who were one of the sharpest I worked with sometimes made stupid errors only because they failed to follow instructions.

For example, when I've begun my work with the team, they used a pretty outdated SAP ERP database (as in, with limited functionality and data being a mess, nothing wrong with SAP) to manage records of employees of the client (it was HR/back office business). Every month, they've pulled a report indicating changes to the data to review if there were any adjustments to home address of any employees within last 30 days - as this could impact a level of eligibility to season ticket benefit. Problem was, it wasn't possible to configure the report to pull only data of employees with address change, any change caused the record to be put on the list. So, each month there were couple hundred of those to check.

Much to my horror, they were splitting the records among themselves and manually checking those by entering them one-by-one in database. Some of those people were doing this for years and not a single one of them could think of a better solution. What was even more frustrating, this company actually had a whole, dedicated team to develop technical solutions to other teams. They haven't reach out for help.

So Ive spent one evening to make an Excel file which will automatically check the output using some simple formulas, filter by changes in address doing a cross-check between general database output and the report output, also using conditional formatting to show what exactly has changed and some additional columns with filters allowing for getting more specific details if needed. It was super simple in principle but enough for the job, it wasn't even necessary to use Visual Basic.

All the user had to do was:

-Pulling a general population report with a date range covering previous month out of SAP
-Pulling a personal data change report with data range for current month out of SAP
-Paste general population report into a sheet named "General" in file I've created, while having cell A1 selected
-Paste personal data change report into a sheet named "Changes" in file I've created, while having cell A1 selected
-Go to sheet named "Comparison" to see the results and if needed, review the changes (sometimes only house number got changed, which didn't impact benefit eligibility, for example)

This is not even a "how to make a tomato soup recipe" level of complexity. It allowed to process all of this in timespan of 30 minutes (with a 5 minute break for a tea in meantime) by one person, instead of taking a whole day and involving a whole team.

I've gave them a briefing on how to use this tool, explained in depth which formulas I've used and what they do, how conditional formatting work. After that, gave them a "homework" - supplied them with data files I've randomised to some degree and asked to use Excel template to check for changes, then came back to me with the results.

Only 3 people out of 7 has managed to complete the task. One guy managed to somehow break the formulas, like two girls didn't understood the "A1 cell" part etc. But worst of all was a lady 5 years older than me who told me that she "doesn't trust formulas and rather check these details by herself". So, there she was, checking FALSE records against database, wasting time, even though this wasn't even a purpose of the exercise.

I had to spend many hours training them how to use such simple template and even then, each month I've done an audit if they didn't f*** something up.

This is just one example, but in general, that team had massive problems with adapting to positive changes that make the work more efficient. Like when they had to add text into a document scanned and sent us by employee, they used "Paint" and if they've made a typo, they started all over again, from scratch because obviously you cannot edit what became a raster graphic. We had Adobe Acrobat licenses on our work PCs, so I've taught them how to use that instead, as it was better suited for the job - some still wanted to use Paint. Sometimes there was a need to sent out fax, so what they did? Printed the document on multifunctional printer, then proceeded and scanning it to send a fax through the same device. I've showed them how to sent a fax directly from their PCs and they still preferred to waste paper.

People are nightmare to work with.

I couldn't be a supervisor because of my poor organisation skills (ADHD). I know this, because I have a supervisor with poor organisation skills and it makes him a rather incompetent supervisor. I know I'd pretty much be the same, if not worse. Also I'm a people pleaser, so I'd probably let my staff get away with murder because I'm too loyal.

I'm not bad at communication with colleagues but I am with the public. Again this comes from being too sensitive to their emotions and being too loyal. If I worked in a supermarket I'd probably put the store out of business because of letting customers have things for free or something. I could just imagine what I'd be like as a security guard, I'd probably see burglars trying to break in and say, "it's OK, I'll let you break in if that's what you want to do." That, or I'd approach them timidly and in a weak tone of voice "what are you doing? Please go away."

In short, I'm a serious people pleaser and afraid of showing authority.

I can kind of understand what you have experienced.
When I was working as an engineer, I performed very well, even exceptionally well.
But the problem was that as a result I was given more work and more work and then more work, until there wasn't enough hours in the day to do the job right.

As a result I moved into first line management. I was even given the power to hire more workers to fill in behind me.
But this was more difficult and very complex undertaking.
Eventually I was able to succeed in a very dramatic way. I used my skills to predict future opportunities and was able to hire around 20 engineers all at one time. I only need around 5 people, so the rest of the new hires were distributed to others in my department.

Now comes the interesting part.
The other managers would steal my best workers and pass on their rejects.

But here is the interesting part.
Their rejects were not rejects at all. I suspect (looking back in time) that many of these people were Aspies. They were all different. They all had a very wide range of different skills. Together we formed a powerhouse.

Good point.

My disgust is a mental note not to allow my children (or myself) around that guy alone until I know more. I inadvertently befriended a fugitive past murderer; he seemed gruff but not disgusting.


I'd like to say so, but I'm pretty (willfully?) naive. Sometimes I have thoughts similar to what you mention, but I push them aside. Throwing out the baby with that dirty water, oops. Although like I said, I can be ruthless, but it's reactive rather than contemplated.

Good to "chat". Catch ya around WP town.

Same for me, it's a fine line between the two.

These folks were lucky to have you as their supervisor. I think that there's a significantly higher chance to find people with AS in fields like engineering, programming, architecture, design and arts - basically, everything what requires a solitary pursuit to become good at. The problem is that NT management staff doesn't know how tu use skills of these people and is focused on things irrelevant to doing an actual job.

Most people I've ever worked were ones who has been studying things like linguistics, philosophy, journalism, psychology and so on. Basically HR/Back office/payroll outsourcing is like a default option for them over here if they won't find employment in field of their studies. I found that they are more focused on networking and socialising. They wasted a lot of time sitting in a cafeteria and chatting. All of them, including management. Then there was a talk "we need to be more competitive as a company". Pffft, you could be, if you wouldn't sit on your asses gossiping and would actually try to implement some more efficient procedures and solutions