Logical understanding vs 'getting' it

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I've made this distinction in my life quite a bit, with the assumption that other people understand what I mean, but, well, recently with how my life has been going, I've had a lot of...newfound ways of viewing things. Anyways...

I should explain what I mean.
Firstly, I think this separation only exists when talking about someone's emotional reactions and how they react. Understanding something means to logically know what the person is talking about in regards to their situation, and to then be able to say, 'Yeah, I can see why you're angry', while not sympathizing at all with them (even if you're acting sympathetic). 'Getting' at what they're saying, to me, is a wholly different experience. It's like being able to place yourself in their shoes and actually feel what they're feeling, you fully comprehend what they're talking about because they're eliciting in you, similar emotions to what they feel. It's a more full, complete understanding that doesn't rely on thoughts like 'this is the sort of activity that elicits x emotion so they are feeling emotion x'.

I am good at understanding things. I'm not very good at 'getting' things. Especially not in the moment they are being discussed. I seem to have very little empathy/sympathy that way, and I was wondering if this is something that the autistic community experiences.

Is this a distinction you've made for yourself? Do you have the opposite of me maybe, that you only ever get emotionally drawn in before you can understand? How do you think non-autistics are like in regards to this? Does this distinction even make sense to you?

bump

Bump, I cannot 'grok' things either, which makes people very mad at me.

I think I understand what you're saying.

The whole "understanding" versus "getting it" thing is a key aspect of autism. It's called 'mind blindness'. From Wikipedia:

<< Mind-blindness can be described as a cognitive disorder where an individual is unable to attribute mental states to the self and other. As a result of this disorder the individual is unaware of others' mental states. The individual is also not capable of attributing beliefs and desires to others. This ability to develop a mental awareness of what is in the mind of an individual is known as the Theory of Mind (ToM). This allows one to attribute our behaviour and actions to various mental states such as emotions and intentions. Mind-blindness is associated with autism and Asperger's syndrome (AS) patients who tend to show deficits in social insight. >>

Thus, using your terminology those of us on the autism spectrum understand but do not get it.

I don't think what I've discussed is the same thing though. Like, if I had mind blindness, I don't think I would even 'understand', much less 'get it', unless I'm reading this wrong. I am definitely considering that what I experience is perhaps a part of a type of mind-blindness, but it'd be a subset or a lesser degree of it perhaps?

You might be correct - from my own expereince I don't see mind blindness as a cut and dry thing but rather a scale of increasing degree. The obvious stuff I get, but farther up the scale of understanding / comprehension I don't get.

Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't and sometimes I get it partially.

A secondary problem is that sometimes I am aware of not getting it and can work to clarify my understanding, but, more often than I am aware of, I don't get it and don't know that I am not getting it.

I only know this because of conversations I have had with people around the diagnosis and some major moments when it was made very clear that I had things wrong.

Most of the time, people don't say anything--they feel awkward about it and don't want to be rude or they don't care and they let you go ahead with a misunderstanding.

I have a tendency to "get things" intellectually only.

As far as truly "understanding" things implicitly: I have to have had actually EXPERIENCED something before I "understand" something implicitly.

This is me, too. I tend to only "get" things if I can relate it to something I have been through myself. At this point, I have a sizable base of life experience and an almost sort-of normal-ish capacity to relate, but I can still only "get" things if I can relate it to something I've been through.

I guess that's OK, and maybe everyone's experience. How many times do you read, on pages about "How To Support Someone With Depression" or "How To Support a Grieving Person" or "How to Support Someone With a Degenerative Disease" or whatever that one thing you ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO SAY, EVER, is "I understand." Because if you haven't been there, you DON'T understand. You're supposed to say, "I can see how that would be painful" or "I believe that would really make you mad" or something like that. Things that imply logical understanding and compassion.

Makes me wonder if, actually, mind-blindness isn't a HUMAN trait, and it just stands out more in autistics because our experience of the world is different enough that the things we can and do "get" remain observably different from the mainstream experience.

I believe many things in autism are a matter of degrees, rather than absolutes.

I agree "implicitly" with what BuyerBeware stated.

"Mind-blindness" is probably one of them. I believe we stand out in this area because we might exhibit more "extreme" symptoms of it.