autism and empathy in the form of ESP instead of logic?

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(Hopefully I'm not too tired to make this understandable)
When I was diagnosed with AS my psychotherapist claimed that I have compassion but lack empathy. How is that possible when the 2 are so interlinked? My friends and family members don't say that I lack empathy. My mom says that I have a lot of empathy. As a matter of fact, I sometimes feel like a sponge for unconscious, subtle energy. When I was a kid, even though I barely had any knowledge of social norms, I would laugh along with jokes that I didn't get, and I'd be laughing if people next to me were laughing.
Though, what I do get told by other people is that I lack common sense. It almost seems that maybe I have empathy in the form of intuition rather than logic, because when I have been around some shady people I have had a sense of being uncomfortable around them without explicitly knowing why. Later on, after finding out more information about these people I found out that my gut instinct was right. Also, at night I have had some dreams about people that sometimes had information which I later on found to be true.
Can any of you relate to this?

I experience this all the time, and read on another thread the other day that it's very common. I've always known how people were feeling even when they're putting on a brave face. I often answer questions I wasn't asked out loud, and can tell someone motivations for doing a thing without any visual clues.

I have almost telepathic like experiences often, I do not really like to talk about it with people as they think i am crazy as it is but i have accepted that it happens and just deal with it. I did an experiment once my friend (i think we are still friends though it has been a while since we spoke) he had got a new guitar and he was referring to it as his new woman. He was sat jamming on it and although i am bassist and cant play a proper chord to save my life i wanted a go so as he played in my head i was saying, i want to molest your new woman, let me molest your new woman, can i molest you new woman over and over again. After he had finished playing he handed me his guitar and said yes Paul, you can molest my new woman now. I never actually said anything out load to him so i think there is definitely something in it. I have had more bizarre experiences that but i do not wish to talk about them but i do not think that it is something that is in the realms of science fiction, maybe it has something to do with mirror neurons or quantum entanglement. I do not let it bother me, if it is a real phenomenon then i can see how it could have it’s advantages (and disadvantages), if not and it turns out that i am clinically insane then so what, that’s life.

not that i'm denying your claim to ESP at all, but i read this article that was posted elsewhere on WP and it really helped me to understand how i felt about empathy.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and- ... eory/full/

ah.... I have a name for this.. auras.. I can sense what other people are feeling but my mind translates it to a visual image so I "see" emotions.

and thanks for the link.. my sickness at parties is explained by this.

I know what you're saying. It's not ESP but a subconscious form of pattern storage/retrieval. I'm pretty sure my brain is wired to have faster access to subconscious information than conscious information. I think the reason I'm that way has to do with my sensory sensitivity. The conscious part of my brain, the part that involves primary working memory, gets interrupted easily and I become overwhelmed when too much information is given at once. I can't do mental arithmetic in a distractable environment for instance. But my unconscious processing must be very efficient. I'm extremely good at making educated guesses and having strong intuitions that turn out to be correct.

Also, on the empathy thing. As a kid my parents told me I acted like the world revolved around me. That didn't make a lot of sense to me because at that age I didn't even think about my self in a relational sense to other people, at least not often. I busied myself by exploring the world around me and seeking out experiences. I think it's this tendency of not viewing the self in a relational sense often enough that's perceived as lacking empathy.

I relate strongly to this thread.

It can certainly feel like ESP at times....

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Marshall, this is such an eloquent post and makes so much sense to me. thanks.

I can't remember who here on WP I worked this out with. We figured out how we do this. It turns out for some of us anyway, we are unconsiously proccessing subtle sounds from a person or groups of people. We read tiny sounds of movements like NTs proccess non-verbal language. The confusion sets in because an NT usually learns to mask their bodylanguage but not the sounds they make.

I would encourage you to try your ESP or aura reading ability with some kind of earplugs in. I've done this and my ability to read people almost completely went away.

I don't have a explination for implanting thoughts though. I would suggest trying it with a stranger. Your friend may have been able to read something from you and your language patterns might be simmiler. If this is an aspie ability I would love for you to figure out how it works because I want to know how to do it!

I actually do seem to have esp. This comes out mostly in the form of dreams; sometimes, at night, I have very perceptive and informative dreams about people that I know; these can enable me to understand what is really going on. Sometimes they have been warning dreams of someone I should be wary of; sometimes, they are dreams of people who need my help. I wonder if these are examples of things that I "picked up" in real life, but wasn´t able to process?

But then again, I´ve also had strange dreams of information that I couldn´t have known. Once, I dreamed that 2 dancers I knew got a job in a company in France, with a specific director. After I awoke, I realized it seemed unlikely, as we were all in America at the time and they seemed settled there. But 2 years later, I heard they were dancing in the exact same company I had dreamed about, and that director. Funny thing is, they were 2 people who "bullied" me, and I didn´t even care about them at all, but I still tapped into this. And I´ve had experiences like this all my life. But I don´t tell people about this usually...

I´ve also had several mystical type experiences. I´ve even been thinking about e-mailing William Stillman, he writes books about autistic people and spiritual experiences, including esp. I find this really interesting. I am not a savant- - at all- but I do seem to have some kind of "different brain" in terms of picking up these different bits of information.

I also found that link really fascinating. I get very upset by extreme emotional environments; this was even more acute when I was younger. (They were also spot on about what they wrote in regard to monologueing about special interests). What I also notice about myself, which the article didn´t mention, is sometimes I can experience empathic physical symptoms of other people. Once, my (ex) roommate´s sister came to visit, and she had some problem with her heart while visiting us, that her heart rate became elevated. Not only had I dreamed a few nights before that someone was going to have heart problems, but when she was visiting us and had these problems, my own heart rate became elevated, in sympathy! I couldn´t sleep at all that night, due to my beating heart. I never told my room mate about that, because I thought it would sound too weird, or that she wouldn´t believe me.

I don't like to say that I have ESP, I preffer to call it intuition or "calculated guessing".

I've also talked to a therapist about this so-called lack of empathy (apathy?) and he basically told me what Marshall said, though not quite as eloquently (I suspect he made it sound difficult on purpose because it took him 2 sessions to explain).