Empathy/communication

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I am reading the book Aspergers in Love, and although I identify strongly with some of the stories in the book, a lot of it I don't identify with at all. The main thing is that a huge percent of the book talks about how most men with AS shut down completely when their wives start talking about feelings. It really gives the impression that almost no AS man has any understanding of feelings or any ability to talk about them at all or to empathize. This is just not the case with me, and I didn't think it was the case with all AS men. I am a good listener, and I really enjoy lending my ear when others are feeling down. I don't know if I give the appropriate facial expressions, but I try to be sensitive. Usually it involves little more than someone saying "I feel really low/scared/whatever because ________" and I hear them out and say in a sensitive voice, "I'm sorry you're feeling this way. I know what you're going through is rough. Maybe you'd feel better if you ______." It really doesn't seem that hard to me. I don't always empathize correctly, but sometimes I am struck by feelings of incredible empathy. I have experienced a lot of mental pain in my life, and I hate seeing others suffering.

Is this why my doctor is hesitant to give me an AS diagnosis? Are there are large number of people with AS like me, or are the vast majority completely out of touch with feelings and how to talk to them as this book seems to suggest? Thanks for the replies.

I empathize deeply, and from what I've read from other posts here, I think many AS do as well. The problem is being able to demonstrate it appropriately. Seems like you may have figured that one out.

im a girl not a boy so i am likely coming from a different place on this, but i think i feel empathy so strongly -- like i pick up feelings in a room -- that i have anxiety panic about it and actively avoid dealing with it.

i am often clueless, but a lot of it is i think a communication problem, receiving signals and giving them. one-on-one i can sometimes be a great confidant. my boyfriend thinks i'm so clueless though. so maybe i'm clueless about how clueless i am. meh.

also, the word empathetic has always bugged me. emPATHETIC? Empathic, or empath, please.
it is like preventive and preventative (i prefer the latter).
i don't know why, but i also feel nausea at words spelled with a K when they should be spelled with a C (Krispy Kreme for instance, or Korn - nothing against the band though)

Karen.

Some people on this board consider the lack of empathy akin to a superpower. A superiority over other humans, and this is so wrong I have no words for it.

"Empathic" is better, I agree. But Deanna Troi's psychic ability as daughter of Betazed is something else entirely. This could cause so many semantic difficulties. What's worse, a simple misspelling of "friend" gives us the word "fiend." Isn't that awful?

I have had the same problem with that. Not expressing my feelings in a way that is clear to people makes them tend to think that I don't care. This occurs because of my avoidance of eye contact. I guess people only believe things if they have visual evidence in front of them. Not looking directly at them gives a message of apathy.

It's more about what you say and how you say it.

Also what you do & how you do it.

I don't even know if I'm properly empathetic or not. All I know is that I have strong feelings of my own and strong feelings of empathy and that I don't at all mind talking about feelings one-on-one. The book just made me feel like if you can talk about feelings, you don't have AS, and that really threw me off.

The whole reason I posted this thread is that I'm in the middle of the diagnostic process, and after filling out lots of paperwork, the initial two hour exam, and a follow up appointment a week later, I still don't have an answer. She's hesitating, and she once said she's not sure if I'm socially impaired enough to warrant an AS diagnosis. We have been talking about nothing but AS-related problems for over three hours. I'm just scared that I won't get the diagnosis, and then I will have no idea what to do with myself - no idea why I have always felt distant, why my social life has very rarely been fulfilling, and why I completely descended into madness upon living on my own at college. I'm starting to think that seeking the diagnosis was a mistake, because if I don't get it, I think I will be more confused and lost than ever. At least I can take comfort in the fact that she says I clearly have AS strengths and weaknesses, so it's not like I was misguided in seeking an AS DX. What does the label matter anyway... but I'm just so lost right now and I am really hoping for some understanding...

I know what you mean about feeling like you will be kinda lost if the AS diagnosing process ends without giving you any clear answers. I haven't decided whether or not to ever persue a formal dx, because I'm still unsure if I have it myself, and I'm afraid of feeling worse about the whole situation if I felt as if I wasted a lot of time, and money for more confusion. I hope that whatever your diagnosis outcome is, that it's one that gives you a direction.

Is there anyone that you can ask about whether or not you properly express empathy? Usually moms are a good place to start, if you don't have a significant other.

I have a brother that I'm 99.9% sure has AS. He has empathy, but he expresses it very poorly , at least most people think so. He can listen, and give advice, and generally has a very good heart. I personally am not offended by him, but I know that most people are when it comes to empathy. He has it, but he has a really, really hard time expressing it in a way that other people can feel. He can verbalize his feelings, but not when he's in a situation where he needs to, it's usually more after the fact, and usually to someone else that wasn't in the initial situation that caused the problem. I've never seen him hurt another person purposely, but I have seen him inadvertently hurt people's feelings by appearing to not care, or by being "cold". I guess what I'm trying to say is that he can verbalize his feelings, but he doesn't seem to be able to act on them in a way that others do, even though he thinks he's doing a great job relating, and empathizing.

Empathy occurs when you can relate to a situation you yourself have been in, hence your ability and compassion for people who experience mental pain. Your "logic" would also enable you to constructively think of ways to help that person reach help or reach goals.

You sound very much like me. I also have an innate understanding of mental pain, and it matters little where the pain comes from, it all has similar manifestations. It is not that I lack empathy in certain situations, it is more to do with my lack of UNDERSTANDING or the absence of logic. Overly emotional people(very angry, very loving, very sad) often make my scalp prickle in terror, yet if a person is in trouble mentally(as in their behaviour has some scientific or pathological manifestations) or physically, I know exactly what to do, because I understand it.

The word "empathy" can mean many things I think. The pit I have fallen in to over time and seems to be the general consensus, "if you do not show empathy, then that means you DON"T feel empathy, ergo you are a psychopath". What a leap!! ! I lived with that label for years until my AS dx, and then someone asked me about suffering. And I identified with mental illness. I had seen enough of it and over time with my very patient psychologist, I started being able to write down short passages of how their suffering made me "feel". It had always been there, but no-one had ever given me the long-term opportunity to gather my thoughts and express them.......until now.

I have lots of empathy for certain things, and I feel great compassion. It was nice to be listened to for once in my life.

Sorry, probably gone off topic........but that is just my 2 cents. You sound like a very good man who is trying to make a difference. Keep going.

Mics

I have said that I feel the sun as it rises and falls, and when I was 13, I actually used this to gauge the time so I could precisely watch my TV shows at the right time, since I couldn't always see the sun or the time. This same feeling is almost akin to how I feel feelings from others. Whereas most of the time looking at people in the eyes tends to disconnect me, I feel absolutely overwhelmed by a group of people and their feelings especially if I've been around them for a long time. The feeling of people's feelings is generally the same kind of pull I get from the sun as it rises and falls (mostly easy to feel during night time). Trying to figure out what these are have been hard, and not knowing what these are is disastrous, as I am really, sincerely bad about mimicking the behavior of people around me, and did not even started noticing until the pattern sort of jumped from parent to parent to boyfriend. I'm almost like a mental disorder detector for others as well, because of my mimicking, but now I realize that all this is even my own problem and that I'm certainly autistic. But since this is like a sense to me, since I have to "sense" people's emotions, just like the rest of my senses, especially fragile this one, it can shut down easily, so I merely feel exhausted instead amongst this sort of fog vision, hearing, taste, touch, and smells. My aunt is a psychic and has said that my boyfriend grounds me, and I'm very spiritual and need to learn to ground myself. This rings so true for those who are autistic. Grounding is reality, but most of us are on the wrong planet. But I still feel disconnected with the world around me, and have troubles with empathy in the way people normally do it. It just doesn't come to me naturally. It comes to me in the same wavelength that I feel the sun.

I'm wondering what people think about this.

P.s. none of this started happening until I was later into my teens, almost an adult. I could just feel the sun as a pre-teen and that was it. Probably because I was outside all the time as a kid. But emotions never struck me at all as a child, and as a teen, it only started to, because I wanted to.


Edit: Editing this mainly for myself, trying to make sense of what empathy is to me. I have been considered selfish, so I can see that I have mindblindness along with theory of mind blindness. I have studied psychology a lot and I find that while I hold the manual and knowing a lot of things about people and how their perspectives are, I still would have many difficulties with making the right connections and saying the right things without hurting people are being considered selfish. My empathy is expressed in a feeling rather than judgement. It seems I can feel the emotion of someone without necessarily even hearing their voice or seeing them, they just have to be near me in a way. I've felt the terror and rage of my step mother going to approach my room because of this. I knew that this feeling meant I was in trouble for -something-. She was 50 feet away, 3 rooms away. I don't necessarily get the convenience of feeling people's feelings like this however, but expecting her made it easier than if she were to approach my room, mad at me for something I do not expect. I would have probably flipped out. It is this weirdness of being empathic that makes it difficult since not everyone is an open book like this. It's hard to explain, since it's practically theory that I would feel someone's presence the same way I would feel their feelings, just the same as I would the sun.

But most of the time, I have no energy for this. It's exhausting to "feel" someone else's feelings. It hurts me too, because I can usually relate to a lot of what someone is feeling. So most of the time, maybe my brain doesn't always use this to make up for what I can't do otherwise.

I feel that I have more empathy, than some people that I know, offline.