Do most aspies lack self-empathy?

Post Reply New Topic

I'm not even sure what exactly it is. Is it like when you love your body and looks or some other features? Is it really a good thing? I think people who got too much self-empathy start to promote themselves too much.

There is no such thing as self-empathy. Empathy means feeling with, which means there needs to be something else to feel with them. Feeling the same thing as you are feeling is redundant.

I believe many aspies have something called alexithymia as a trait. I believe I have this myself. It can be thought of as emotional blindness and, in myself, I would describe it as being disconnected (to a degree) from the emotions you experience. I can be made to be angry just like anyone else but, I may not realise I am angry until I notice my behaviour has changed or maybe because I can feel tension (hormone release) in my chest but then have to logically work out what exactly that feeling is. I have been this was all my life and, given how confusing and hard to understand or explain this has always been, it is great to finally have a name for it.

I know exactly how I'm feeling all the time, and can easily express it to other people, verbally or non-verbally.

But I do hate myself. I am not satisfied with the way I look, the way I am, even things like my name. But I think that's due to low self-esteem.

This is interesting. I would say quite possibly, yes.

I definitely feel that the capacity for self-compassion would be different than that of a neurotypical person. The autistic self is not the same.
In my experience, I am very thin-skinned to the world around me. This just makes it harder to have any groundedness in myself, so my relationship with myself is altered in that way anyway.

It's harder for an autistic person to self-protect I would say.

I do not know how NTs experience their sense of self, so I am unable to say whether I experience it differently than them. I am very analytical and understand my emotions very well. I can also express them verbally very easily, maybe too easily - nobody really wants to listen to me explaining the way I feel. Perhaps having a special interest in psychology, which led to years and years of studying psychology and of undergoing psychotherapy, has helped me achieve this. I don't know whether I was aware of my emotions before 14 years of age, but after my mom died at this age, I started keeping a diary and analyzing my feelings...

I had low self-esteem for years. Well, I have spent all my kindergarten, school and highschool years in isolation from my peers, because I was unable to crack the social code and my classmates thought I didn't want to approach them, when in reality I didn't know how to do it and expected them to approach me. That made me feel unwanted for no reason. For years, I believed that something must have been wrong with me. That led to low self-esteem... After being in therapy, I am more at peace with myself and have had people in my life who loved me for what I was. My self-esteem is higher now and, while I don't know if I love myself, I do think that I am a good person.

I think it depends on the person aswell.

What you're describing sounds more like self-esteem.

I feel disassociated from myself. For example, if something makes me feel uncomfortable (like my leg falls asleep) I'm aware of it, but I don't do anything about it. It's like I'm forget that I have to take care of myself. So I think I get what you are getting at.

Yeah, this makes a lot of sense to me as well.

I'm the same.

It's like I tolerate things others would find intolerable, and I suffer in silence more.

I remember when I was small my teacher said to me ''You're limping''. I had some kind of problem with my leg I had simply failed to let anyone know about because I somehow wasn't able to take that step to make my pain known.
Another example; my mum said when I was small she discovered I had a plaster stuck to the inside of my trousers and leg, pinching my skin that had been there for a while. And that I had said nothing about it.

I am still the same. I have always just suffered pain without making a big deal out of it.

You're talking about self-esteem. It's your opinion of yourself. High self-esteem means you think you're a pretty great person (if it's too high, you might be a narcissist) while low self-esteem means you think you're worthless.

When I heard the term 'self-empathy', at first I thought you were referring to cognitive empathy - which is understanding rather than caring. Poor cognitive empathy towards the self would mean you don't understand yourself very well. This is known as alexithymia.

Yes I might not have self empathy
but I do have empathy for others suffering from physical pain just not mental pain.

It may seem like an odd concept, but it's for real.

Google is your friend, click it