Sensitive to Others Grieving

Post Reply New Topic

I'm not sure if this is a unique characteristic I have, but I seem to experience overwhelming distress whenever I hear another person grieving.

There was a really effective drunk driving ad I saw one night where a mother was cowering over her dead child, and there was a man that was breaking the fourth wall saying things such as, "I was only a little over, caused a little grief, but it's fine. No harm done." However, while he was making his speech, the mother was grieving in the background.

Usually people who look at this ad will not react explicitly, except for maybe feeling sympathetic in a subtle way. However, whenever I look at situations such as this, it distresses me incredibly. I've been telling my parents about this, and they only point out that 99.99% of the population are not reacting the same way as I am.

Is this a particular trait of my Aspergers that might be similar to others, or is this something completely different?

See eg. here http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt211028.html and other threads on the subject

I think that sometimes when we don't constantly feel each other's emotions, we are more sensitive to them when we do become aware of them.

It's like NTs are immunized to each other's feelings, getting a trickle of emotion from each other constantly, able to deal with it relatively easily (I do not want to trivialize the experiences of NTs grieving together, because those are often amplified; I am talking here about the everyday experiences).

But autistic people often times don't get those feelings constantly; I know I don't. Those of us who aren't hyperempathic (which is totally possible for a sub-set of autistics) will live most of our days with only our own emotions affecting us. But when something becomes obvious enough that it does reach us--because it's communicated in words, or because it's so obvious that you can't miss it, like the image of a mother grieving her child--we may be much more deeply affected than NTs are.

I don't know if that is the case for me. I don't really get overwhelmed by emotion the way the OP is describing. I do know that a concept like the one described would make me want to do something to stop this sort of thing from happening. Subconsciously while writing this post I've been going over and over whether I couldn't do something more to stop people from driving drunk, and I didn't need to see the ad to feel that way. What I feel isn't really emotion; more like desire. Like I'm seeing a pattern out of place and I have to fix it. As far as I'm concerned, that's close enough to compassion as to make no difference.

(By the way, if your friend is going to drive home sloshed, for god's sake buy them a cab. It's well worth the money and the trouble of retrieving the car in the morning.)

The only situations that trigger such an intense response in me are about animals. Just a picture in a magazine of a suffering animal, regardless of the species, makes me sad, angry, distressed, and upset. I experience deep and comprehensive compassion for animals, their pain and helplessness, for instance if they are being abused and tortured in a laboratory. However, i don't feel anything comparable when it comes to humans. Documentaries about concentration camps, executions, starving children in Africa and suchlike don't touch me at all and i can enjoy a meal while watching the images.