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4:20am August 30, 2014
Anonymous asked: okie then here's another!! i also asked him what affective empathy is (apparently a lot of autistics dont have that either; me included) and i told him what it is but again he couldn't explain why it happens and again i asked why its necessary if there's no immediate explanation why it happens and wowie making fun of allistics is so fun omg

jong-daethmetal-deactivated2015:

yea omg…i have a similar confusion surrounding empathy in that i understand what it essentially is and what its function is SUPPOSED to be

i just dont understand why its supposed to be required ???? its literally unneeded. it can be replaced with the person explaining what they feel and why they feel it tbh

bless u fellow autistic person bless all of our bretheren„„

[This post has a tl;dr summary down at the end in bold letters.]

The thing is that the way people’s brains function aren’t that way because there’s a logical reason behind it, or because it couldn’t be done another way.  It’s there because it could be done that way, and that’s apparently the first solution evolution came up with.  Often there are redundancies in evolution because that’s just how it works:  There’s multiple ways to do the same thing, and nothing particularly better about one way over any other way.

I’m an autistic person who experiences extreme empathy, rather than a lack of empathy.   And while I’ve found that to be both a good thing and a bad thing (I get overload from people’s emotions the same way I get sensory overload), at its best the advantage is that you don’t have to ask.  

You don’t have to go to all the trouble to ask someone what they’re feeling.  Which is a difficult thing for me to ask people.

The person doesn’t, themselves, have to know what they’re feeling or why.  You just pick up on it.  Which saves them the trouble of having to figure out what they’re feeling, and why they’re feeling it, both of which can be hard for people.

And then they don’t have to explain themselves in words, which can also be hard for people.

And then I don’t have to understand their words about feelings, which can also be hard for people.

So I’m glad there’s multiple ways to handle these things.  I far prefer being able to sense people’s emotions, rather than having to go through all the language song-and-dance, especially because I have a lot of language processing problems.

Definitely different strokes for different folks.  I’m glad there are people who can just have a language-based conversation about it if it’s easier for them to just talk about it.  I’m glad there are people where we don’t need to talk because we can read each other just fine without it, because that’s much easier for me than having to do all the language back-and-forth.

I once read an interesting study about autism that I wish I could point people to, because it was fascinating.  They were trying to find out which traits were autistic traits and which traits were nonautistic traits.  So they had a bunch of people come in who knew a child (or observed a child, I forget which), sometimes an autistic child and sometimes a nonautistic child.  And they had them fill out a questionnaire about the traits that child had.

On the questionnaire, the trait would be rated between 1 (not at all like the child) and 3 (very much like the child).  

What they expected to find, was that on any given trait, if the nonautistic children scored 1, the autistic children would score 3, and if the autistic children scored 1, the nonautistic children would score 3.  Because that would mean that the trait in question was either an autistic trait or a nonautistic trait.

They were very surprised to find that wasn’t the result they got at all.

Instead, what they found was that nonautistic children tended to be rated 2 more often, across the board.  Autistic children tended to be rated either 1 or 3, on the same question.

Meaning, it wasn’t that a trait was an “autistic trait” or a “nonautistic trait”.  It was that for any given trait, autistic children tended towards the extremes:  Either not having it at all, or having it very much.  Whereas nonautistic children tended to be somewhere in the middle, less extreme.

So, for instance, with empathy, this makes total sense to me:  Nonautistic people tend to have sort of an average level of empathy.  Autistic people tend to have either so much empathy that it overwhelms us and causes us emotional overload, or so little that we don’t notice other people’s emotions much at all.

I was so happy to find that study because it verified something I’d noticed between me and my brother for my whole life:  My brother, like me, is autistic.  but we are absolutely nothing alike.  If you take any given autistic trait, he will have one extreme, and I will have the other extreme.  And even when we have something in common, if you scratch the surface you’ll still often see it turning out to be us polarizing to different extremes than each other.

Like we are both hyperlexic.  But it turns out there’s two major types of hyperlexia.  One comes with severe language comprehension impairments growing up, and the other comes with severe visual-spatial-motor impairments growing up.  I got the kind with the language comprehension impairments, he got the kind with the visual-spatial-motor impairments.

Similarly, he relies heavily on language and idea-based symbols to understand the world.  I have a really hard time with understanding language and idea-based symbols, and rely much more heavily on sensory and pre-sensory modes of understanding things.

And he and I are definitely different on the empathy front.  Like most autistic people, we both care about people, we aren’t unfeeling.  But I am so hypersensitive to other people’s emotions that I feel like I have to shield myself around other people to avoid drowning in them.  And he tends to be more oblivious to other people’s emotions.  The only reason that he’s capable of comprehending anything about people’s emotions without asking them first, is that my parents drilled him with flashcards showing people with different emotions on their faces and body language, and he also read a lot of books on how to read body language.  Meanwhile, I have found such training useless (not because I read body language perfectly, but because the body language I read is not the same body language nonautistic people read).

So… yeah.  It’s not just nonautistic people who need empathy to exist because it’s easier for them, it’s also those of us autistic people who are your polar opposites.  Having to verbally discuss everyone’s feelings sounds like the stuff of nightmares to me, but clearly it’s perfect for you, and that’s an exact example of how autistic people tend to polarize one way or the other on any given trait.

tl;dr:  Things like empathy don’t exist because they’re the only way to do something, they exist because they’re one way we’ve evolved to do something.  Evolution gets redundant like that.  Also, autistic people tend to polarize to extremes of each trait, so there are as many autistic people who experience intense empathy as there are autistic people who experience less intense empathy than usual.  And for many of us, just knowing how someone is feeling is easier than trying to throw language back and forth about the topic.