When was the first time you remember empathizing?

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When I was 7 I saw a man in the hospital waiting room with a leg brace that looked like a cage with pins going into his leg. I almost cried after and thought about it for hours!

As long as I can remember I empathized with any living thing. I cried when my tricycle ran over an ant that was dragging some big piece of food along the sidewalk.

If I started that early with empathy as you two, things would be so much different for me. This is one reason I think I'm an aspie. I didn't actualy empathise till really I saw my mother crying about my emotional mess privatly. This was when I was about sixteenish. Before then I grew up thinking people naturaly don't care about anyone else. It was sort of like I had the mentality that people thought the same way I did. I seriously thought people had the same brain type as mine.

I have empathized with animals for as long as I can remember. I became very upset if I saw an animal get hurt or killed. If I saw a person hurt an animal, I became filled with rage and wanted to kill the person. I would feel no remorse for the death of a cruel person but significant remorse for the death of an animal. Some people thought this was wrong of me, though I never did see a problem with it.

I've always been confused by this idea that somehow AS people can lack empathy. I guess I shouldn't be, because my oldest son has certain times when he isn't very empathetic, but then again, my NT daughter is that way too! I guess any kid is.

But my youngest son (PDD-NOS) has ALWAYS been very empathetic. He's a very sweet, sensitive kid, who feels for other people.

Kris

The only time I've ever really empathized with anyone was when my grandma died a few years ago. I saw my mom crying and my sisters were hugging her. That made me feel like crying and that's about the only time I remember it.

Like some others, I'm more upset by animals being hurt or killed than people.

When I was 9 or 10, a friend of mine got turned on by the playground kids. They were all yelling at her, and I remember being at the side thinking, "that's not quite right."

When I was 3 or 4, me and my brother found a worm. We believed that the worm had lost it's mother, so then we went looking for the worm's mother.

I think I have yet to empathize with anyone.

I've always been empathetic. I think a better question would be, when was the first time I noticed someone outside of my family showing empathy? I guess my psychatrist. I was never empathized with in public school, just used.

i would always get upset when i saw other people get hurt and animals suffer.
this talk about empathy makes me think it means that since i have AS i am an uncaring unfeeling robot. but in reality i think i am a sensitive soul that has difficulty reading emotions of other people.

My daughter is about as far into the autistic spectrum as anyone can be. When she hears crying, it upsets her a lot. When a kid on the playground started crying she'd grab a teacher's hand and pull her to the crying,

I think it happened around the time I was 4. Me and few classmates in my preschool class were playing in the bushes on the school playground. Suddenly, we found a dead bird; I think it was a sparrow. So we used some plastic shovels to dig a hole, put the bird in there, and buried the bird. Then one of the boys laid out a cross in small stones on top, and said: "now the bird has the resting place it deserves". All of us in the group agreed. After sitting there for a few more minutes, we went back to our game.

The first time I felt empathy for a person was much later, around the age of 7. There was an ambulance stopped in front of my condo building. Red lights were flashing all over the place, but luckily, they didn't give me sensory issues. I saw someone being carried into the ambulance, although at my height at the time, I didn't get a good look at the person. Later that day, I kept asking my parents about who the person was (after all, he/she lived in the same building), and if he/she was going be OK.

Being 4 and feeding the *starving* ants on the pavement outside my house.