heartlessaspergers.com

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There is a website I found that I really hate. Just wanted to get you guys' opinion on it because the website says people who have AS are heartless, no empathy. That makes me really mad. Consider this paragraph from the heartless NT's heartlessapergers.com.

Autism activists vehemently deny that people close to them suffer significant trauma from their lack of empathy, just as they deny that they lack empathy. The truth is that spouses, partners, children and siblings of individuals who have the social disorders Asperger’s Syndrome (AS)–now called autism spectrum disorder (ASD)–suffer significantly. They are subject to chronic, repetitive psychological trauma within the context of their relationships with persons with AS. This is a normal stress reaction to the ongoing abnormal interactions within these relationships.

F*** you lady. First off, I can not respond to your accusations on your website, so let me do it here. People with AS have differing degrees of empathy. Some have complete lack of empathy, but many, many do not. They feel bad. Explain your position correctly and they will sympathize to the point of feeling strongly for you. If empathy is not involved in that, what is? And to deny that is to deny a truth NT's don't want to face, NT's are groupy and they confuse groupathy for empathy. AS's do not have groupathy at all but they sure as s**t often enough have empathy, sometimes in high amount even.

Another thing, what about the trauma to the Aspie?? As if NT's are not ever traumatic to AS's, cuz according to that site it is ALWAYS the other way around. I have heard that two AS's in a couple will often never have a problem, it is the AS-NT relationships that are difficult. I should know, I am in such a relationship right now (gay). It is frustrating at times, but we work through it.

Speaking to the women who get into abusive relationships with AS men, guess what, your experience does not define me. I am sorry you had a bad go of it in an AS-NT relationship, but I can not help but think you are mental to have gotten in that kind of relationship with your false expectations in the first place.

And yes, many of the things on the website are true, as far as it goes. I would complain though that the website is not very "empathetic" of what is going on with Aspies, but then, NT's have that issue. If you do not relate it to a group experience for context, my experience with NT's has been that they then do not know how to introspectively imagine it. Hillarious and sad, but too true.

Oh well, venting complete. Your thoughts... (!?!)

There have been a number of threads posted about this particular website.


Reading WP makes me quite certain that the experiences of the people (mostly women) who talk of neglectful or abusive husbands are probably grounded in fact.

And also I am sure that the website cultivates an echo chamber of hatred.

Right now, I live with NTs. It's a mess but I like it & I like them. They act like dogs, and I feel like I am always having to take them for walks or something. So I can only imagine what kind of home life these people are making for themselves and their spouses.

Just ignore those suckers!

It's best to ignore those types of websites; there are hate sites for lots of different groups after all.

But I have to say I really don't get people who complain about their partner completely lacking empathy. If someone thinks that way about their partner, shouldn't they just leave that person instead of complaining? Having difficulty to emphatize is one thing, but why would anyone bother being in a relationship with someone who they think can't and/or don't want to work on it? Same goes for people's adult children and siblings; if they're such a pain they can just be cut off.

I get that those NTs obviously had problems with someone close to them but I wonder a couple things. The 1st I wonder is if the person the NT was close to actually was on the spectrum. From what I've seen in L&D "some" NTs who have no psych or medical background diagnose their partner as being on the spectrum when most all the problematic behaviors the NT has with em are common with a$$holes in general who just don''t give a damn about their partner. The 2nd thing I wonder is if the NT is the one who really lacks empathy. Did the NT really try to see things from the autistic's POV & try their best to make the relationship with their autistic work. Or was the NT expecting their ex to be normal when the autistic may of been trying their very best. There's two sides to every story & I wonder about the supposedly autistic's side.

I think NT women and AS men relationships can be terribly challenging. Many people lack the emotional versatility or stability to accept diversity at such a fundamental level and will label anything different to their own conception as defective.
Emotional intelligence on the NT's part is vital in "mixed" relationships between aspie men and NT women, as is a strong and secure sense of self. If an NT woman has the objective of changing or "fixing" her aspie, she is destined to fail. If she is emotionally damaged and needy at the onset she will feel rejected perhaps. If she seeks out his passion and feelings with an open mind she will find them, aspies speak a different emotional language, it's like tuning a radio for me to find the best reception in order to receive the aspie emotional cues . My aspie S/O is a volcano of emotions and feelings rumbling inside. His inability to connect in the conventional sense causes him deep distress.

The ironic thing is more of them on that site are likely to be antisocial,psychopathic or sociopathic than people here .

I don't doubt that woman had an abusive relationship with an aspie or that the person failed to tell her he had AS (he might have been diagnosed already or didn't know he had it until later, who knows) so she got hurt because she didn't know at the time he had it to explain his behavior. I also find it important we don't dismiss their feelings and their experience with an aspie. I don't like how they compare autism to sociopathy. Just because an NT gets traumatized by an aspie doesn't mean every NT out there will get traumatized. It really depends on the aspie and how they are affected by it and degree of it they have and it might depend on the non aspie too.

It can be very difficult to read something online that describes you and to find out how it can damage someone emotionally so it's easy to blame that person for their feelings and act like their own trauma is their fault. Anxiety can create trauma in another person, asexuality can too to be fair. An asexual person fails to tell their partner they are asexual so the sexual partner keeps trying and trying to make their sex better and they think there is something wrong with them because their asexual partner isn't getting any pleasure and not enjoying sex. Someone who is asexual can read this and get their feelings hurt. This is why you need to be open about yourself when dating and if you do know you have AS or even suspect it, disclose it.

Thanks for the replies everyone. Enjoyed reading each response above for different reasons.

It feels like sometimes when you think you have seen it all, there is an education coming. I can see why people hate labels too. You invest in the reality of some label for a while and then find that it was created by a researcher with obvious bias -- so what is the point?

I am staying away from those sites for sure Fireblossom... good advice to avoid that mentalness. Feel sorry for those ladies though (guess I have sympathy if that counts for anything against my lack of heart), but damn, something is really out of place in that site's total logic.

What do you guys think of the different AS theories? I don't like Simon Baron-Cohen's stuff. Any thoughts on say Intense World Theory? My NT partner has a theory that it is like Lions versus Tigers for NT's versus Aspies. For myself, I veer toward some combination of all the theories I have ever heard (minus Baron-Cohen's bunk) plus a lack of what I call groupathy.

I really don't care about or have feelings towards groups of people. You guys feel the same? I used to hate it when I hear people say about a sports team: "we won!" You are not on the team so how is it *you* won? Now I know from my own NT ambassador that NT's positively get off on being groupy together.

Enough questions. Each of you take care of yourself and your kin

While it's true we Aspies have problems showing empathy, and can definitely be pretty clueless when it comes to reading the pain of others, all one has to do is read the posts on WP to recognize that we do in fact have empathy.

So we have a hate group, eh? Well, we've been advocating for ourselves, so it seems that someone heard our voices. It's pretty much the way these things work. Ah, well maybe when people list marginalized minorities, we'll even get on there someday. We'd be officially documented as human beings who want to be treated as though we are! Then watch the websites pop up. "How dare another group of people claim to be marginalized! Preposterous. And after so many of us were willing to pity them, too.*"
*[sarcasm sign]


Ummm... I'm autistic all the time and deal with the associated trauma that other people inflict upon me in every single arena of my life. Whatever pain a family may have (I am very sorry for them, and I wish both they and their child had more support), they do get a break, even if it's a short one. The child never leaves himself. Never.

Your child is screaming. The measure of you is whether the concern is for yourself or your child, and it seems to me that if someone chose to have a child, and if someone chose not to leave the child at a hospital, then it's a pretty bad mark of character not to choose the child even after the meltdowns start. Turns out, she's not having fun right now. She's having the meltdown. You're watching it. And if you feel like banging your fists, but you control yourself, then you really don't know what it means feel like banging your fists so badly that no amount of self-control or willpower can prevent it. And nobody but ourselves understands how hard we try to prevent it and how much we wish it didn't happen.

So actually, maybe it's just that neurotypicals need to "toughen up." You know... they're too sensitive. (Any aspies not been told to toughen up?) I can put up with me. If you can't, well it seems to me that (while you spent 37 years tricking me into believing the opposite) you're the one who's a whole h3ll of a lot weaker. Because in the end, that's what all hate groups are: weak, whiny people who don't like that someone they dominate is trying to become equal, because that's a threat to their way of life, and it might require them to move over and let someone else in.

They then find all the millions of ways in which the minority group has hurt them in order to delegitimize the self-advocacy. Well, we're in for a real treat.

Also, most people tell me that I'm a very empathetic person, and when I went to my therapist and told her all the reasons I believed I had autism, she told me that I was wrong, because I had too much empathy to be autistic. Well, someone who actually knew something about autism happened to disagree. I didn't stay with the therapist long after the diagnosis, though, because whatever I said, she would tell me "well everybody feels that way." I hate the empathy myth, but I can safely promise everybody that it's a myth, because I'm really, really empathetic... like... to my detriment at times. So you can't know me, and know autism, and know empathy, and still believe that autism and empathy are mutually exclusive. If anybody disagrees, you just send 'em to me.

Thank you for that, I am not autistic but I have many close and intimate friends who are. They all have more depth of feeling and caring than most NT's I know, it's the inability to communicate their feelings to others that isolates them.

Maybe the creator of that site was abused by her “aspie” partner, maybe she was not. We have no way of knowing what the hell is going on in their dysfunctional relationship. It is important to remember that relationship failures are often the fault of both partners.

If a person claimed he was mugged and hurt by a black person and started a site criminalblacks.com how many of you would be sympathetic? If a person claimed to have been raped by a gay person as a child started a site pedohomosexuals.com how many of you would be sympathetic to that person?

As disturbing as the material on that site is what I find disturbing is both the sympathy for her based on the assumption she was abused, that assumption seemingly based on the partner being aspie and sympathy for someone who if they used a bad experience with one person of a group, to spread hate of the entire group, to any other group but us would not get that sympathy and understanding. This is what internalized ableism looks like.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 02 Sep 2019, 9:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

The website is almost as f****d up as one of my work colleagues who makes tin foil hat wearers same by comparison.

I remember last year he normally talks about things like how moon landings are fake or the world is controlled by the new world order behind the scenes.

Normally I laugh it off but I remember this one time he was talking me about how the MMR injection was a military experiment to create people with smarter brains and no emotions failed and that was what caused a upsurge in autism.

He also mentioned how the Nazis also tried to create soldiers with no emotions which was done by the man who discovered aspagers syndrome.

I now refuse to talk to the wacko

Sorry to take a semi-contrarian view, but I can think of one or two situations in which people I dated deserved better treatment from me than they got, specifically with regards to how I chose to dump both of them (twice in the case of one). TBH there was blame to be shared on both sides, furthermore both ladies might have had some degree of BPD (I just checked the list of symptoms and yeah) but had I understood the situation back then as well as I do now, I think I could have have been less "heartless" in my actions. I think both would have agreed that "heartless" would be a good adjective to describe my actions at the time.

Wow! Hit a nerve and stirred up a s**t cloud! Well, bringing up relationships will do that by itself, let alone bringing up the 'haterz'. Maybe I do have "internalized ableism", not sure. Really though, what I am is, not sure. Not sure of alot of things.

Not sure I am an Aspie. Self-diagnosed, never seen an MD or anything like that. I probably am, but I am not completely sure. Not sure about this whole ToM or "Theory of Mind" thing, but, not sure about "Intense World Theory" either, although it does feel closer to the truth (I am sound sensitive, e.g. my partner blowing his nose next to me drives me crazy, which sucks because he has alergies and has to blow his nose often). Not sure what is the best science and ethics relative to Autism issues. Really not certain on that one at all.

Not sure if this lady, pretty sure it is a lady, ever even got into any relationship, but pretty sure she doesn't want to come across as vindictive and underhanded, but is. Not sure I want to talk about her for much longer.

Not completely sure about quite a lot.
Pretty sure you guys have empathy, so there!