Autism and empathy

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They say that autistic people lack empathy.

So someone I know got arrested for major theft. They deserved it. My friends are celebrating their arrest, making jokes, cutting up.
I'm actually quite sad about it. I imagine being in their shoes, being arrested seems horrible. Even if they had it coming. All I can think is I would never want to be in that situation and how sad, scared, afraid, and alone I'd feel.

I can't be happy about the arrest. It was necessary, for certain. Justice was served. But I just feel it's sad that it had to come to that.

My friends who are celebrating are presumably NT.

That's an out-of-date stereotype. I am an empath - I do think it's difficult to act on my empathy for various reasons. Most of the ASD folks I know are empaths or nearly so. Of course there are variances in the community.

Its a stereotype and based on a misconception based on the fact that neurodiverse folks often show empathy in ways that are different than the usual.

There isn't much consensus on the definition of empathy. Lay opinion tends to equate it with compassion. Technical "experts" tend to equate it with being able to divine other people's feelings. Simon Baron-Cohen kept saying Aspies have no empathy, which might have been justifiable in the academic world if they had an agreed and suitable specialist definition, but then went on to write "popular science" books such as The Science Of Evil where he continued to tell the lay person that we have no empathy.

I've said before that I think we might be better off dropping the term "empathy," as it causes confusion that could be dangerous. Knowing how somebody feels is very different from caring how they feel.

Have a read of this CG it explains empathy a lot better than I can, which list 3 types of empathy

Cognitive empathy — knowing how the other person feels and what they might be thinking.

Emotional/affective empathy — when you feel what the other person is experiencing, as though their emotions are contagious.

https://embrace-autism.com/the-differen ... f-empathy/

I didn't know there was a third type called Compassionate Empathy

Compassionate - With this kind of empathy we not only understand a person’s predicament and feel with them, but are spontaneously moved to help, if needed.”

People who do not receive a lot of empathy will struggle with empathy.
This applies to NT parents towards NT children.

Usually, NT parents do not have a lot of empathy towards their autistic child. Why is this a surprise?

While I'm still irked at the point that autism alone is being blamed for it, I had to accept the very fact that people won't be empathic nor sympathetic towards me as an autistic.
They would just try to do that as if I'm an NT stuck in an autistic body or something.

And while at it, I refuse to be 'more empathic' for 'others' because they're not trying nor carrying their weight. I'm not seeing the point.

I want cognitive empathy, not dysregulated affective empathy that every opportunistic bastards would exploit.

Whenever I think of empathy, hypocrisy always comes to my mind.

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^ I understand now

I wish I could switch off my mind when it goes through the 'manual labor of understanding and predicting'

I can't understand when people say this about autists. I mean that I have oodles of empathy, it just seems to show in ways that are incomprehensible to NTs. They think I'm interfering or sympathising with the wrong person or causing trouble.

The 'sympathising with the wrong person' is a very common attitude of NTs. I generally sympathise with the victim of bad treatment, but apparently that's wrong. I'm supposed to sympathise with their persecutor.

WTAF.

I have way too much empathy. I'm always told that I'm too sensitive as many autistic people are. You can't be too sensitive and have no empathy.

Autism is only now beginning to be understood and many of the stereotypes challenged.

If I've learnt anything here about empathy, it's apparently not about being nice or understanding, but is merely about how aware of what you are saying or doing will affect other people's feelings.

So might as well replace the word empathy with "awareness" and leave it at that.

I suppose empathy has been discussed to death here, and everybody has their own definition of it. It seems that some Aspies are way too logical when it comes to empathy. Looking way into a situation by only putting oneself into one's shoes and sympathising too deeply seems more like a learned behaviour to me, like you're conditioned to think that way.
Sometimes the NT way is to just think of yourself. That's what I've learnt.

Empathy is an ability to understand a situation from the other person's perspective.