AS and experiencing emotions

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ok, not sure what the reaction will be to this, but i have seen this mentioned now in many posts here and i have to ask out of curiosity.....

when i first began to consider i may have AS, through all of my subsequent research to my eventual diagnosis, i found in many sources (including the DSM-IV) the mention of 'lack of empathy' as a symptom of AS. personally i don't know if i agree with this criterion as it is described in the textbooks, but let's take it as fact just for the purpose of this thread. i can understand the idea of not immediately feeling what another person is feeling due to proximity and intuition alone, and before conscious and logical reasoning as to what and why the other person is feeling.....but once i logically understand the other person's state of mind (which has become rather easy for me through years and years of intense study) i do find myself able to 'feel along with them'. that is my understanding of the 'lack of empathy' problem--that conscious, logical reasoning is necessary for us to understand the ToM of others, rather than instinct and intuition alone...and once we understand, then we empathise.

now that being said....i have read comment after comment indicating that there seems to be some misunderstanding/misinformation of what this 'lack of empathy' entails. more specifically, i have noticed many seem to equate a lack of empathy to a lack of experiencing emotions. period. this frightens me a little. a lack of empathy and the inability to feel emotions is NOT THE SAME THING AT ALL, but the idea that it is seems to get bandied around here on a regular basis. i am curious to see if anyone else has noticed this, and what their feelings/opinions on the matter are.

i hope i'm not offending anyone, i just feel that either a) there is a lot of misinformation out there on this subject, or b) i am completely misunderstanding the whole issue. either way, i would appreciate any feedback

empathy *is* inability to feel emotions. of others.

when i say the inability to feel emotion i am talking about the inability to feel any emotion at all, as in one's own feelings or anyone else's.

I don’t know if my opinion will help much but I do not have any empathy at all according to the typical tests we all have taken but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have emotions. It just means that I have no understanding of another person’s feelings or emotions. They mean nothing to me as cold as that sounds.
That isn’t to say that I can’t appreciate or intellectualize another person emotions and this is what makes this entire concept so complicated even for the thousands of professionals who have tried to study it.
Of course since these same professionals have no first hand experience with having no empathy they ‘imagine’ what it must be like and then try to describe it in books.

Not being able to have (or experience) your own emotions is another thing entirely. I have some well entrenched personal emotional capability in some areas but none in others. I think this is not untypical in many people on the spectrum. We seem to be fine tuned for certain things and lacking in other areas. I feel profound sadness at the lost of a pet but no emotion at the loss of a parent. I feel love for certain things as well as certain people but sometimes nothing for many who love me.
I cannot experience what it is like to feel hate or prejudice but I have experience what people call rage. Generally I am 'indifferent' to most things including situations and people. I actually think indifference is some kind of emotion but I don't know what kind yet.

i can relate to much of what you are saying here....i have been extremely upset at the loss of a pet and noticeably 'indifferent' to losing people (whether it be the death of a family member or the loss of a relationship with a friend), and at other times feel distant or indifferent when it is obvious that other people expect me to feel something....but i am unsure how much of this is my AS, and how much is dissociation, since i do tend to dissociate from my feelings when i am severely stressed (aspect of the PTSD, i think)...but i suppose psychologically distancing yourself from distressing emotions and not feeling them in the first place is a different phenomena. i have a tendency since childhood to be overly sensitive, and i think a lot of my dissociation in adulthood has become a protective thing for me. it is definitely a complex issue and can be very confusing....and your input is very much appreciated, so don't worry about "not helping". i want as many opinions and perspectives as i can get so i can understand this better, so what you have added is very helpful

Also consider than some of us are 'over-emotional' about everything. The professional institutions have done all of us a great diservice in trying to lump us all into a simple basket with a somewaht simple set of so-called symptoms. By and large even today they have no idea how diverse and complex we are and I think it is becoming an embarassment to the 'establishment' as to how far off the mark they have been.

Your opening post outlines the situation with aspergers & empathy in exactly the way I've been thinking about it. It's like I can predict how someone will feel in a given situation, but that's because I've been around for 3 decades & I've accepted as a rule of thumb the principle that people are probably going to feel much the same way I would in a situation, but there isn't anything intuitive about it - I don't 'feel' their emotion & I'm often way off or simply don't notice there's anything going on. But I think a person on the spectrum who was intelligent enough, experienced enough, & interested enough, could perform a convincing simulacrum of empathy.

I'd say it's more of an inability to relate to the circumstances of others. This intuitive relating is sometimes a prerequisite for feeling emotions of others.

In no way does it mean we lack the ability to feel emotions for others. That's what kind of p*sses me off about the empathy terminology. You talk about lack of empathy to the average person on the street and they assume you have no feelings. I think I'm more sensitive to other peoples emotions than most but I'm not always as aware because I get very self absorbed and don't always pay enough attention right in the moment.

Last edited by marshall on 22 Jan 2009, 3:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

i have to agree with you there as well, sadly we can always hope they might catch up i guess

I don't think we're talking about 'faking' it. We all learned how to do that when we were kids just to survive in society. I think the OP is taking about the core experiences.

i feel i should also add that i have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder (12 years ago) and it is definitely accurate (extensive family history). i'm sure this co-morbid disorder affects my experience of AS, so i expect my perspective on empathy and emotions will probably be different from others with different psych profiles. i have always been an overly-sensitive, highly emotional person, and my emotional spectrum is intense and quite broad, so this probably adds to my ability to empathise....but it is still initially a cognitive process for me, before it effects my emotions.

That is the 'intellectualization' I referred to and it can be sneaky.

yes, i mean to delineate between the difficulty we have with intuitive empathy, and a lack of experiencing emotions at all. not just for others and their situations either, but for one's own life and circumstances. basically i am wondering if there are those who don't experience any sort of real emotion at all and think this means that they 'lack empathy' in the same way that those with AS do. or like another poster said, that when people on the street hear 'lack of empathy', they equate that to not experiencing any sort of emotions at all.

yes. i believe a lot of people see this as 'cold and calculating', and that misunderstanding makes me quite sad. they think that just because we have to think about something first before we can feel about it, that makes us less human, or our response less 'genuine' somehow. BS, if you ask me. my feelings feel pretty genuine to me.

This might be slightly off topic but I was wondering something else. I'm wondering how one would go about testing whether they are relating intuitively or intellectually.

The reason this confuses me is because my intellectual reasoning is sometimes intuitive. When I view a particular situation I'm not exactly examining all the possible outcomes in my head before I come to a conclusion. I sometimes have an initial gut reaction about something and then go back and intellectualize it in more detail just to be sure. I don't know if I do this as well when I try to relate to someone else's circumstances. And if I do then what way is there to distinguish true empathetic relating from intuitive intellectual relating? I'm wondering how an NT would go about describing the difference so that I could be sure there is an actual difference.

All I know is that I have more trouble relating when I'm distracted by my own internal thoughts and emotions, especially things like anxiety or excitement. I get so enveloped that I can't possibly try to move outside myself.