Asperger's Syndrome and emotions

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That's just the beginning. Once you enter the realm of sex and love, your emotional life will open up to a completely new world.

This came up in a ASD Group meeting I had some time ago: Empathy vs Sympathy.

Sympathy: Ability to understand the emotional nature of someone's situation (ie, loss of a loved one)

Empathy: Ability to understand an individual's emotional state based on non-verbal queues (ie, someone crying, but smiling at the same time could be reception of good news, or found something hilarious).

This is why we get confused since we cannot always interpret the latter condition, or interpret it correctly. Its worse when someone says, "no, everything is fine," when in fact something might not be . . . very frustrating. So it can be said that we in the spectrum can be sympathetic, but not likely empathetic.

You seem to be better at explaining it than I am

I might be wrong here, but I would disagree and say that's either not universal in AS or that it's better stated that people with AS lack the inherent hardware/software to properly process empathic information. I can go to places that are emotionally charged (e.g., funerals) and I can FEEL everyone's pain, and it can be overwhelming because I don't know what to do with the "information." It's alien to me, and it's not uncommon for me to have issues (anger, stress, illness) afterward from the experience.



Agreed. My experience is that people with AS are almost bipolar in that they either feel things intensely or not at all. For example, the emotion scale is 1 to 10. Normal people feel and emote at each level. People with AS might "feel" but not "emote" until a trigger level is reached (say level 6) and then they tend to react as if it's level 10. With time and experience, we may learn to control our reactions so there are more appropriate to the level on the scale we're experiencing, and with even more practice, we might cognitively figure out how to mimic appropriate "emoting" for the levels that don't trigger a natural response.



My best guess is that people with AS only truly understand ourselves or someone going through experiences IDENTICAL to our own. I'd think the same would be true of NTs, and I'm certain it is with the NT child, but somehow NTs "learn" to sense and respond to the needs of others in ways people with AS are not capable of doing naturally.

The difference between people with Asperger's and NT people is that NT people filter a lot of information subconsciously (which triggers all sorts of emotions and structures sensory impulses) before they process it consciously, whereas this does not occur among people with Asperger's. Empathy is one of the areas that's affected by the lack of this filter.

Nevertheless, we do have the ability to generate emotions by means of conscious thought processes. Some consider it a form of empathy as well when you picture yourself in someone else's position and this generates emotions, however real empathy is intuitive/instinctive and regulated subconsciously.



I'm still developing those skills but I've gotten pretty far already at the age of 28. Once you become aware of your negative tendencies, you can learn to counter them. It's simply difficult to become aware of them because most people will not understand how you function and it can take many decades before we understand ourselves in what way precisely we're different.



People with AS can truely understand anyone as long as they that sufficient insight in human psychology and sociology to rationally understand the triggers behind their behavior. This can be learnt from studying these sciences but most often its learnt from experience.



Neurotypical people develop their instincts/intuition during early childhood. Borderline Personality Disorder is a condition where this process is messed up due to neglect or abuse and such people have the exact oposite problem we have : they're over-emotional, over-empathic and ultra-irrational. Strangely enough, the exact oposite conditions lead to a great similarity in symptoms.

Over-emotional and over-rational are both under-social. So, two groups that both are either lacking in, or not using, social thinking skills. That lack will result in some of the same symptoms.

I don't, though, think they are really that opposite. I also think sometimes they can look opposite, rather than similar. People on the autistic spectrum, at least some of them, have times when they are emotional rather than rational. I'm especially thinking, kids throwing temper tamtrums. And while trouble dealing with emotions is not an innate part of autism spectrum disorders, it's often present because we just don't learn pick up on those skills, as they aren't usually explicitly taught and we may not learn them through observation.

This is not entirely true since people with BPD are often master manipulators because of their increased empathy.



They are opposites within the same (empathy/intuition) spectrum.

Frankly, I think that bit about people with BPD being manipulators is BS. They are accused of that because, like other people, they are trying to get what they want, but unlike other people (NTs without BPD, that is), they aren't good at it. If they were really master manipulators, they wouldn't get accused of being manipulative.

Also, people wrongly think people with BPD are manipulative because they don't believe that the displays of emotion by a person with BPD are genuine. They think the person is exaggerating, when they aren't. Yes, they are trying to get someone to do something for them, to help them, but in an honest way.

Also, it's not true that people with BPD have good empathy. Some of them do. But not all. It's not required. They have the same range as people who don't have BPD.

I don't usually feel much empathy towards humans. I hardly ever feel bad when bad things happen to other people, and I can rarely express much sympathy. If I see tragedies on the news, I almost always feel absolutely nothing, unless I really think about it and really try to put myself in their shoes, but that doesn't come naturally.

But with animals I feel massive amounts of empathy. With them I can relate. I remember an example recently, me and my mum were sledging, and she hit a rock and damaged her back, and she was in a lot of pain. And the dog was there and was quite distressed at this. I felt empathy for the dog's pain, but not for my mum's. I felt really bad about that I became a vegetarian recently, I watched the videos from inside the factory farms, and they were completely devastating, I cried for ages. But if say, I saw pictures or videos from the nazi death camps, there's very little emotional response.

Citation needed.

I've gotten better with empathy and sympathy. I don't always know what to say. If i don't know what to say then i just make the person laugh.

My emotions can be quite extreme at times. My stress level is easily raised by small things and i have a tendency to just explode with anger(especially when i'm stressed). I speak really rapidly and jump up and down when i'm excited about something.
When i'm not overexcited, exploding, etc then i feel...like i'm just floating.
It takes me awhile to get over something that stresses me. i think over it over and over again. no one can really calm me down when i'm angry or stressed. i just need to go in a corner and think over it. i feel isolated at times.

Well, it basically is my best friend (a lesbian with BPD) who told me about how succesful she is at manipulating people and knowing her for about 10 years, my own experiences with her seem to suit that. For example, when she was a teenager she dated some guy I knew (that's actually how I got to know her) just because he had a CD-writer and he liked to spend a lot of money on her. Even though she had already found out for herself she was a lesbian, he nevertheless was fooled to think she loved him.... and that's just one of the many examples from her somewhat darker past.

In fact, she's become a lot more "decent" now and is in a steady relationship with a young woman she loves (who also has BPD). The irony is that when she really loves a person, she loses her strength and allows herself to be manipulated by her partner. In fact, she is going through this process at this very moment and I have experienced something similar with my ex-girlfriend (very stereotypical BPD case, which I onfortunately didn't realise at the time) as well. So I think I can tell from experience as well as from the words of a woman with BPD that such individuals indeed tend to be manipulative.

The problem with people with BPD is that they become manipulative until the point they dominate another person and when they're unwilling to let that dominance go, they can go beserk because they feel uncomfortable when they're not in control.



Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. It really depends from case to case. People with BPD tend to be oversensitive to emotional input for some time in their life and how they learn to deal with that really defines who they become later in life. Some learn to accept conditions of intense emotional input as a normal part of daily life and learn to use their oversensitivity to their advantage and succeed in manipulating people but up to a point it doesn't harm anyone, whereas others will constantly go from heaven to hell and back all the time until it drives them crazy and they either commit suicide or end up in a sanatorium. Some people are mentally stronger than others or more intelligent than others and this really can alter the way people experience a certain condition. The same is true for people with Asperger's. Some may be more succesful in life than the average neurotypical person and learn to manage a marriage with children, a household and a job, whereas others are virgins who still live with their parents in the basement at age 35.



In my experience, they seem to be more sensitive than neurotypical women. The BPD women I know easily fluctuate from intense hatred to intense love and back based on fairly minor empathic input, which suggests an oversensitivity to such input. This fits with the neurological evidence that people with BPD have an overactive amygdala, which is responsible for subconscious empathic and intuitive processing.

In your experience based on one person?

Yes, people with BPD can fluctuate from hatred to love and back, like you say. That doesn't mean empathy has anything to do with it. I certainly don't need to know what someone else is feeling for my own feelings about them to change. My own thoughts, and my observations of their actions, are quite enough.

And, like I said, people with BPD are going to vary like anyone else. Many of them will have good empathy. But it's not required.

I do know plenty about BPD, so you don't have to educate me. And I know that generalizing about what people with BPD is like is as wrong as generalizing about what people on the autistic spectrum is like. And that judging what what people with BPD are like from the outside is like judging what people on the autistic spectrum are like from the outside. Looking from the outside, you're going to miss the mark and not get it.

And, really, even if they have innate empathy, people with BPD tend to be too stuck in their own problems to have much functional empathy.

3 people : my ex-girlfriend and my two best friends.



They're just more sensitive to any emotional input.



Some may become numbed by all the intense emotional input, whereas others go crazy because of it. There are indeed significant differences, but what they all have in common is increased sensitivity to any sort of emotional input.



People with Asperger's Syndrome lack the subconscious preprocessing of data, which leads to a lack of instinct/intuition and a lack of instinctive empathy for all Aspies. Aspies smart enough to rationally overcome their limitations and experienced enough to know how to nevertheless can appear almost neurotypical if they've trained themselves enough, whereas others may still live in their parents' basements as 35-year-old virgins. So while there are some major differences between individual Aspies, some things they all have in common. The same is true for people with BPD.



I'm judging it also by how my best friends (a lesbian couple) describe their emotional and intellectual lives. It's not just the way I judge them and my ex-girlfriend.



The problem is that their increased sensitivity also leads to increased levels of fear, abandonment, isolation, self-hatred and all sorts of other negative feelings. When they let those negative feelings dominate their lives, many engage in very self-destructive behavior.

Well, I guess you have your own view on the matter.

The above post is one of the most insightful I've seen with regards to AS and emotions. It clearly explains the huge gap between feeling emotions and knowing what to do with them. Unlike NTs, we don't have that instinctive understanding of how to manage emotions- how to express them or let them go.