deranged empathy instead of "no" empathy?

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Hi,
they say aspies have no empathy, which is probably BS and they have empathy but a different kind of it.

But let me explaing what i mean. Until today, I believed I can tell people's emotions and intentions. like the cashiers, my mother's. I thought I could tell whether the cashier is being unfriendly or mean, or my mother or sister are feeling good or bad (they often feel exhausted and have bad mood according to themselves)

Ok so here is the deal. I was WONG WRONG WRONG. I don't get SH*T about peoples mood. I just can distinguish between normal and weird, and not even that all the time. What I do is I invent and make up emotions and project them at people I meet to feel the lack of my emotion detecting problems. Kind of like confabulation. ( confabulation is a memory disturbance, defined as the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive.)

Most of the time, if I sense "weirdness" I conclude that the person is being unfriendly. But many times I have confused blatant unfriendliness with perfectly normal. I was once standing in front of a very very angry and agitated person. I talked to her. I shook hands with her. my mother said her hands were shaking as she shook hands wih me. I didn't realize sh*t.
I asked my mother about this "habit" of mine. She agrees 100%.

Is this "aspie-normal"?

cheerz
Omid.

Having alexithymia (sp?) myself... I do the same thing except I don't know what I'm projecting. Sometimes I'm taken completely by surprised by people's emotions to the point that I can become totally unhinged, unable to sustain "being someone"... my "armor" of self is gone when emotional overload occurs. For example, someone at work today was pissed off and was letting me have it for no reason I could tell. My mood was the exact opposite, bordering on elation, I had a delicious iced coffee from Dunkin Donuts, I had just given a co-worker I've known and who is a friend at work too a ride in, I had pulled a double the day before really helping out the restaurant in multiple roles, so I was seriously like on cloud 9 about coming in to work... also, I was working on my favorite station, broiler.

Instead of that happening, I walk in to someone had come in to work broiler instead of me and I had to help this grumpy as*hole in the back room with prep, the guy I worked for yesterday. So this huge emotional overload happened in me because of the polar opposite energy at play. So I think I'm not sure I can be empathic with people that I don't like. I'm very empathic with my hubby, and people I know well I can genuinely respond to their emotional needs without getting overloaded myself, but with people that I don't like or who mistreat me, I can just turn on that cold, Aspie trait that people say we have... and be completely and dispassionately not empathic. I don't know for sure if it's an Aspie trait, I think turning off our emotions is a feature of autism in general? IT seems I can keep a calm, cool collected self at times others are very stressed, then other times I do get overloaded and this is simply not possible. SO I start to go real, real slow to gather my self, thoughts, etc.

DOes any of this sound like you as well?