offically at war with my diagnosis.

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today my "Asperger's lacks empathy" ass walked down to the grocery mart to send 100 dolars to a friiend who is going thru a hard time. I would call it a labor of love but I Realize that's taking the term too literaly. I'm offically at war with my diagnosis. If anything i am MORE empathetic than the general populace. I was told on the phone "They say you lack empathy? if anything you have more empathy than a man. You're like a woman." I was just like "Thank you for the compliment" as I pulled out of the store.

I think lack empathy is a stereotype of AS IMO I think all disorders physical and psychological or whatever tend to have a h that people associate with it for AS it's lack of empathy. Sure people with certain disorders don't strictly fit the stereotype but people automatcially think of that stereotype unfourtunently.

You are confusing empathy with sympathy.

Empathy is the ability to determine another person's thought process or feelings without direct information. For example, determining somebody's mood via the tone of their voice or their body language.

Sympathy is carring for another person, and helping them out when they are in trouble.

What you displayed today was not empathy, but sympathy, and that is in no way conflicting with the diagnostic criteria.

There was a post on this site about a study that said we had a little more empathy for personal distress and suffering. The word empathy in the stereotype is being applied to the one on one non-verbal communication. You are using empathy meaning compassion to others suffering.

Empathy is a very complicated subject. Just do a search for "empathy" on this site and you'll see what I mean.

There is more than one type of empathy. Cognitive empathy plays more into the theory of mind space, but affective empathy less so. It's been said that autistics have higher levels of affective empathy than the general population.

Maybe apies & auties have to learn empathy. I learned how to read a few friends (over an extended period of time) so I could figure out how they are feeling, eventually. Now comforting them, I can try but not good at it for sure (don't know what to do unless I really get the person/rare as in only 1-3 times). The three friends whose faces I learned to read, I was able to memorize their forms of expression, pitch, body language, etc. & if I see something similar I go w/ assuming the new person in question is going through the same thing or something similar.

QFT

To further illucidate... according to Webster's...
empathy: 1. the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object [or person] so that the object appears to be infused with it. 2. the capacity for participation in another's feelings or ideas.

As in "I feel your pain." Apparently NTs really do.

In direct interaction I rarely 'get' on an emotional level what another is feeling; I can respond from my intellect appropriately, but that's a far cry from an emotional response.

Later, if I sit and cogitate a bit, I can imaginatively put myself "in another's shoes" and develop an emotional sympathy, based on my own experience. But it's not second nature, it's not automatic in most cases, it's based on knowing the situation rather than intuiting it from non-verbal cues.

If someone tells me of some sort of personal disaster in a flat, unaffected voice, I will take it as factual info and stop there, no empathy or sympathy will develop. Much like reading the paper gives me no emotional toning. I relate to it all intellectually... I know it's a disaster, I know emergency and relief services are chronically underfunded, I send money.

But I don't get depressed or weepy over the hundreds of thousands of orphans, abandoned elderly, and imprisoned mentally ill. Whereas I know NTs who do.

So in that way, I fit the criteria magnificently.

And that is in no wise saying I lack compassion or sympathy for another's plight. I just lack a lot of emotional 'tagging'.

You're not at war with your diagnosis, you're at war with the diagnostic criteria. We all are.

(well, I am at least).

It's written by people who don't have aspergers and based on their observations. They can't really tell us how we feel.

DonkeyBuster wrote-

If I hear about someone's distress it's different than when I see it. If I see someone being publicly humiliated or in any kind of personal distress I feel it too. My body reacts physically like a tightening of my gut.

Is that the difference between cognitive and affective?

Is it possible to have empathy but not sympathy?

IOW, to commiserate and make people feel deeply understood, but not actually care?

I'm starting to wonder how 'real' social empathy really is. Maybe it's about making people feel like they're being understood & related to without necessarily being emotionally involved. Seems there's an assumption that feeling understood and the other person actually caring are the same thing. I think not always.

ASD folk get a bad rap because of trouble getting across an impression of understanding-ness & 'emotional concern.' But that doesn't mean there is no caring/concern.

OTOH, some (not saying all non-ASD people, BTW) seem able to make people feel understood and cared about, but without actually caring (i.e. says nice things but wouldn't do the most trivial thing to 'materially' help). And those folks don't seem to get criticized nearly as much, or get associated with serial killers, and so forth.



(And, of course there are some people who can do the empathizing, and do actually care at the same time.)

Sociopaths, they lack sympathy but not empathy. And they use they're empathy to manipulate peoples.

What the others said.. although I think more "compassion" than "sympathy" for some reason..

The "lacking empathy" is the problem with KNOWING what others are feeling. You might seem to lack empathy if somebody is upset and you don't realize it. It's not that aspies don't care how people feel.. it's that they don't know. I've also been called empathetic-- they were referring to situations in which it was extremely obvious what the person was feeling. If someone is puking so bad that they can't keep down their heart medication and is completely terrified in addition to all the heaving.. I don't need to FIGURE OUT what they're feeling.
The "lacking empathy" is more like when you're talking about something, and it's upsetting somebody. But you don't realize that until they've already decided that you're a horrible person for not caring how they feel about it when you didn't flippin' know in the first place.
People who say that aspies lack empathy tend to be people who never come out and actually say what they mean. They tap-dance around their point, and then say you lack empathy for not getting the point that they didn't actually have the guts to make. THAT'S bull.

I've thought the same thing regarding empathy -- I don't eat any animal products to avoid causing/contributing to the suffering of other creatures because (apart from logical moral reasons), the idea of doing so causes the same sorts of emotions, sickness/feelings in my stomach, etc. as described above.

This has confused me, because I took it as an indication that my empathy is unusually acute/intense. I only very recently began thinking seriously about how well I meet the diagnostic criteria for Asperger's (currently in process of arranging for a professional assessment), and this was something that made me think I may not be an aspie, despite thoroughly meeting other core criteria.

Thanks for clarifying the distinction between empathy and sympathy/compassion. If empathy is defined as sympathy prompted by "knowing" others' inner state/s by unconsciously using innate social skills to read various cues while following implicit rules in social situations (which bewilder me), then that's different to knowing of the suffering of others by other means, and consequently feeling for them.

Story of my life!
Except you forgot the part where they start yelling at you...

It occurred to me that lack of empathy in the aspie sense also means showing unneeded compassion.. I guess that's what causes the gullibility? If something is going on with someone else, I may behave in a way I think is compassionate, not knowing that they don't actually need compassion, and then get taken advantage of. Like, if somebody asks for something, I'll assume that their circumstances are similar to circumstances under which I would ask for whatever it is they're asking for. "Lack of empathy" would prevent me from seeing that they're not in such a situation. (Like if someone asks me for money, I might think that they need it for, say, food or rent, and in an effort to be empathetic, give it to them. Maybe they actually wanted it for drugs.) So rather than lacking empathy, it could be inaccurate empathy.

I'm not so sure about that, Maggiedoll.

Empathy for NTs is automatic, the same way our minds are wired for detail and we don't have to go looking for it, we automatically see it.

Whereas our empathy is more on the cognitive level, we THINK 'Oh you poor sod' and hand over the money, just like an NT has to THINK about detail to see it.

Also, the lack of empathy is more accurate in youth. We learn to emulate sympathetic responses (well, some of us do anyway) as we grow up and develop skills that help us navigate the wider world.

Not to say that our sympathies aren't misplaced sometimes...
and I have made some very bad guesses in my life.