I'm so tired of people telling me I have no empathy...

Post Reply New Topic

This isn't a problem from you being autistic, this is just you being an as*hole.

How about it just being you being a dick about people who want what everyone else want in life and demanding some sort of justice in life? But hey, your point is brilliant! Everyone who has it worse than everyone else should regardless of how crap their life is care for people who has it better than them. Woohoo, that will solve the worlds problems. Lets take all the money from Africa and give it to the poor BP executives - they have lost SOOO much you know.

Maby you are ok with paying taxes to support families with more money than you, or paying taxes while you are being on minimum wage so that people who bought stock in a recently government owned company who went private, and the stocks dropped so the government intervened to the stock buyers with the reason "they were first time stock buyers"?

Sorry, but i cannot sympathise with your world view.

I don't see how your "world view" is related to problems with displaying empathy/sympathy in autistic individuals, which is the original topic at hand. The point is that most autistics do not lack the two, but that they can't express the two and/or lack the theory of mind to realize that other people have emotions at all times. Your problem isn't of autistic origin, it's just you being an as*hole in my opinion. Everyone has sadness or problems eventually, there is no rating system to see how your problems or feelings rate worse than anyone else's.

Thats ok, since it is now my official opinion that you are being a dick living in a fantasy world where everything is perfect and one persons foo-foo misery of starving to death is just as miserable as someone not being able to buy an iPod.

I know! I have a lot of empathy reserved for people (including little kids), but whenever I search something like that, I get, "Most autists have little to no empathy for their peers," and stuff like that. I am empathetic to people, unless they're deliberately cruel to others.

I have a different question, do the NT's really care about each other's every problem?

Or do they just fake it? (and we tend not to do that)

Not earth shattering problems, just every day crap. Ex: I'm afraid sometimes when listening to a colleague going on about a situation, and everyone else is being all so sympathetic, I am often thinking that they got themselves into that through sheer stupidity, and they'll most likely do it again next weekend. Then when the person walks away, I've seen all the "sympathetic" people laugh and shake their heads!

I just can't pull that fake sympathy stuff out immediately on cue like that.

Alright, most likely you just need to master the art of emotive expression/sympathy. So if someone trips and falls in front of you, not only is it proper to help them back up, you need to ask if they're alright. Act a little worried.

Also, if you're watching a sad movie with all your friends and they're all crying, look sad and after the movie when they're wiping their tears, join in the discussion about "how sad it was that Jonny died at the end", etc. It's all about matching the other person's mood.

If this isn't your problem, can you provide an example of a situation where someone commented about your lack of apparent empathy?

I can't speak for all NT's, but I am a feeler by nature and can't help but be filled with sympathy and empathy when something bad happens. I dated an ADD Aspie for almost a year and found that he had a very hard time expressing both. If I was sick, he wouldn't even bother to ask me how I was doing, seem concerned at all, or try to be helpful or resourceful. He cared about me a lot, but he couldn't show it in a way that was clear or direct and if I was having a hard time, he never seemed concerned or affected. If I was struggling under the weight of five bags from the airport, he'd put his arm around me and walk me to the car without even thinking about helping me carry one thing. It felt very empty, very fast. I think it was his unwillingness to actively show interest in my life that really made me feel uncared about often, among other things. He never asked how my day was, if I came back from a trip he wouldn't ask me a single thing about it or what I did, instead he'd talk about himself for hours. He had an odd reaction to displays of emotion, even in film. If he saw a character crying or a person being emotional, instead of feeling a sadness or relating to the story, he would get angry and say that 'people are so stupid' and grunt. He literally couldn't see something from another person's point of view and express a sense of understanding. I think it's that lack of reciprocity that makes someone feel aspies are not empathic or sympathetic. That's not to say that they all are or that Aspies aren't capable of feeling, they just express it in a manner so different from NT's that it can create problems.

What I've noticed from watching a certain NT's twitter (and by watching, I mean internet-stalking) is that she really does really care about other people's every problem... except for her attention span on each problem is really short. One minute she'd be feeling sorry for the children in Africa, and the next she'd be getting ready to watch Sex and the City. One minute she'd be feeling sorry for a friend who's having a crappy day, and the next she's giggling about how cute her dog is. And so on and so forth.

I find that irritating, personally. I'd rather she sympathize sparingly but thoughtfully. Although in most NT's defense, this certain NT is a complete airhead and probably doesn't represent the rest of them.

But allistic people have a lack of empathy for us. If an allistic person has problems using his or her sex offender style grooming techniques on us which is frankly weird and creepy but that is what most of allistic society is based on and if these techniques don't work it is not that we lack empathy it is that some of us has learned to see the wiring under the board and see right through allistic or other NT BS. Allistics really think that we are not worth empathising and that is a fact now but may not be in a few decades time. I can be deeply moved by someone's struggle but no I do not show sympathy for people with obvious problems that can be seen because that is so condescending.

Haha, I was really engrossed in this discussion here until I realized it's 5 years old and you basically brought back the dead

Good points



Wow, you took the words out of my mouth, I thought I was the only one who thought this.

There are two layers of problem -- the general public do tend to mix up "empathy" and "sympathy," and also, the general public seem to have latched onto this "autistic people/Asperger people lack empathy" thing as the only thing they seem to have heard about the autism spectrum. It's often the first "trait" Joe Public thinks of, for some reason, which is weird because there are plenty of others.

A long time ago when I was still in the investigation stage and had not yet pursued an assessment (I since have, and am diagnosed now), I mentioned to someone that I was looking into Asperger's because I was having suspicions that I may have Asperger's.

The very first thing she replied to me was "But you have empathy!" And I know that what she thought she meant by that was that I had showed "sympathy" to her when she's spoken about a difficult situation in her life. I had expressed normal things like "I'm so sorry to hear that, oh goodness," etc.

So the fact that I was able to show conventional social sympathy and trying to comfort someone about something bad they're going through stood out to her as an indicator that I couldn't be on the autism spectrum.

What she didn't even know was that, even that skill, I had to learn. When I was younger I would react with complete neutrality to someone being upset about something. It's not that I didn't care, I just didn't know what to do or say. Or even that my input would even "count" in any way. I always felt at one remove from people, not in the sense of not caring about other people -- I did -- but more in the sense of that I kind of didn't seem to make any difference to them or to the world. I wasn't like them and it made me feel I kind of didn't really exist.

I could also be forgetful, I mean literally forget that if someone's sick it's nice to show caring and interest. Again, it's not that I didn't feel those things, I just didn't know how to "remember" that it would be nice to actually show it. I still sometimes literally forget to ask someone how they are doing, even though I do actually care what's going on with them.

I learned some of these skill over the course of half a century, and as I had some tough breaks in life myself, I also genuinely began to feel more about other people's bad times, to where I now genuinely feel bad for them. But that didn't happen overnight, it took a lifetime of different things happening in my neuronets, if you will.