Have any of you noticed that...

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...they say we can't understand others' feelings, when we can understand other Aspies' feelings tho? But I guess that doesn't matter for them or us to understand us, because OUR feelings are not feelings, and we're not people.

Until researchers on the spectrum tackle these issues; everything will continue to be interpreted through a non-autistic lens. It wouldn't be enough to observe Autists communicating in different social situations together; there would have to be people who had understanding of the social inter-action between Autists observing and recording the behavior.

IF Autists can understand each other socially with their own way of communicating.....sounds like something else going on to me.

Neanderthal theory,(Genetic throwbacks<---my own terminology),aut-homoerectus.....


TheSunAlsoRises

Why should I understand others feelings when they are wrong?

Interesting.

TheSunAlsoRises

remember some with AS/autism cant read others emotions and sometimes do not give off proper body language to be read-hard for an NT but a real hard time for another person on the spectrum.

I've give a lot of thought to this issue. Here on WP I've met people who can't feel or relate to people's sadness or grief, and some that can. If we're all aspies, then I wonder, is empathy really a definitive condition in determining Asperger's, or is it more or less related to a comorbid like Schizophrenia, psychopathic disorder, or something else along those lines? Autistic children definitely don't empathize with others. They're just unable to. Asperger's, though, is different. I'm of the camp that doesn't relate to other folk's grief, but I'm not autistic.

I vehemently disagree with this statement. I have held too many Autistic children in my arms to know otherwise.

No, it's a spectrum based on a fundamental ideal..........Autistics represent the full range of humanity on a bell curve quite a bit different than non-Autists.

Freudian slip : )

TheSunAlsoRises

Last edited by TheSunAlsoRises on 01 Jul 2012, 9:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I suspect.....I wonder have any studies been done on social interaction strictly amongst Autistic children, teens, or adults .

TheSunAlsoRises

Okay. Fine. Then I guess I should only speak for myself. When people grieve I don't feel it. When they cry I think it's annoying. When they pray I find it consequential and superfluous as it solves nothing.

Has anything wrong ever happened in your life which made you similarly emotional? (We can easily not relate to those we are experientially different to - I have never held an interest in football, for example, and can't possibly understand why they'd become so angry sometimes they resort to violence, over something they have no control over.)

I relate to some emotions NTs experience but not to all. I can relate to grief because I know how I felt when I had to have my cat euthanized (I hate that people say "put to sleep" - be honest about what it is). That is still a raw memory for me, for a lot of reasons.

On the other hand, I've never expressed much grief at all when people die. I don't really know why. I don't believe I feel nothing. I think it's more that it's too complex for me to understand what I'm feeling. When my grandmother died in early 2008, I was barely able to function, although I didn't feel any grief. I didn't cry, I didn't feel sad, I couldn't express anything about her death. But I was far more prone to shutdown and meltdown, and I recall one happened because I had concluded I was on the autistic spectrum and I had no idea what I could do about it. Another happened when I left my bedroom and was told without warning that one of my uncles was present. I could not interact with him, and I shut down and stayed in my room.

If you don't understand them, how do you know they are wrong?

I don't think one size fits. There's the whole complexity of shared and dissimilar histories in the empathy connect. Sometimes just the language employed will factor, too.

NTs lack empathy. It's as simple as that. Not all do, but not all Aspies don't. I've met some extremely selfish NTs who really couldn't give a s**t about how you feel as long as they're all right, and they can't seem to help it either. And I've got an Autistic friend, who is male aswell, and hates upsetting other people and is always thinking more about how someone else would feel in a situation than what he would feel.

I think what it is, is NTs have selective empathy. They only use this for situations they want to use it for. But that's like me, I have selective empathy. I only use it for situations when it's needed. Otherwise, I don't always think of others 24/7. Like they say, you've got to be a little bit selfish sometimes. I know someone who constantly thinks of other people all the time and never for herself, ever, and now she's found that people are using her because of it.

Anyway, my mum and her sister were talking about this sort of thing the other day. We have an elderly relative with Alzheimer's, who has noticeably gotten worse over the last few months, and my mum and her sister are very worried (who wouldn't be? It worries me too.) But my mum said that when she spoke to her friends about it, one of them just asked, ''is your mum better now?'' And you don't get better with Alzheimer's. My mum's friends were not intending to be like that, it's just they don't know much about people with Alzheimer's because they don't know anyone with it and so don't have to deal with it. Then my mum and her sister both admitted that before their mum got Alzheimer's, they couldn't really feel for people who had to deal with it because they hadn't heard of it before, they just thought, ''oh, it's just a bit of forgetting, [name of person with Alzheimer's] will get over it'', and just went on about their daily life only discussing things with people who have other problems in common with them.

So this is why I get so mad when they just blame Autistics on being unempathetic and NTs being these superior humans who are perfectly adjusted in every way.

It is rather irksome when the "experts" claim that those on the Spectrum have no emotions or ability to show empathy, when they fail to do the most fundamental aspect of research: ask the subject themselves (if the subject is able to communicate). I know many on the spectrum who are more emotionally/empathatically advanced than some of the NTs I know. There are people who actually believe that a person on the Spectrum will fly off the handle at every little thing and will end up murdering their family members and eat cake next to their corpses then act like it's no big deal.

On second thought, cake sounds good...

I'm neurotypical and even I can say that not all neurotypicals have empathy. I have an autistic brother so I know and understand more about autism than one of my friends does, who doesn't know anybody with autism in any forms. I haven't got autism so even I can't completely put myself into my brother's shoes and see the world from his point of view, but if I see an autistic person in the street who had noticeable actions, I wouldn't judge them negatively. I would guess that they're autistic and just leave them alone. Other people would judge them and clasify them as a weirdo and become freaked out, and probably laugh at the carer too all because he/she's dealing with the autistic person, instead of trying to put themselves into the carer and the autistic person's shoes and trying to understand how they both might be feeling at this moment.