One that comes to mind for me: "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is not always true. Maybe even only half the time! Are there any phrases you tend to hear and shake your head at?
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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"Autistic people lack empathy"
Wierd how the fact that a group of people don't see the world as you do makes then somehow inferior and deficient, huh?
As someone who self identifies as on the spectrum ( I'm over 60, so I doubt I'm going to be tested, but I have many -- but not all -- typical autism traits), I would say that it's true for me. I have never been close to people, even my own family. I've never had a very good friend, and when I move away from people, I typically don't keep in touch.
Foe example, both my parents died in the past 2 years, and while I feel a sense of loss, no strong emotions. If I lost my wife or children, I think I would continue without feeling significant trauma. I know that I'm supposed to be devastated by those kinds of losses, but it just doesn't happen. I don't really have strong attachments to anything or anyone.
I don't think I'm a bad person, it's just the way I'm wired. I don't like to see people suffer, and I have a strong aversion to conflict, so I don't believe I'm a sociopath.
So count me In as one of the people who believes that autism can be related to a lack of empathy, based on personal experience.
I think this right here is empathy. The fact that you have a wife and kids who you presumably have emotional attachment to also suggests you can understand their feelings.
Just because you don't respond to feelings in the same way as a neurotypical person doesn't mean you don't feel them.
if they knew how many times a week they meet somebody autistic...
Autistic people do have significantly reduced cognitive empathy. That's literally part of being on the spectrum. Some will have better cognitive empathy than others. If a person is not capable of reading the emotion that an NT is projecting, then their reactions are going to appear to lack affective empathy as well.
Your closing sentence hints at the root of the misunderstanding here. It also fails to strengthen your initial claim at all. This study's Lay summary sets it out perfectly.
Autistic folks don't always exhibit the socially defined traits of autism. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, right? So while your [claim] [double-down] [pre-emptive concession] [claim] ends with a claim that's reasonable it is also fundamentally disconnected from the initial claim (which is, at best, half-true). Social and non-social traits are additional dimensions on a complex spectrum. Defining autism only by it's more visible / stigmatized traits perpetuates the false equivocations of abnormal with disordered and disordered with diseased.
Sent with love ❤️
Lol, no. Every autistic person I know, myself included, is engaged in anti-racism, consent culture, body-positivity, and other forms of harm reduction. You're understanding of autistic people is flawed. We don't lack cognitive empathy, and we don't have a difficult time reading other people's emotions. What we struggle with is when people mask their emotions, when they put up an emotional wall, rely heavily on sarcasm, or any other technique that shields them from authenticity. When people are open and vulnerable with us, we are capable of great empathy.
i am not. I just like fair rules.
Did you fail to read what I said? Or do you not know what cognitive empathy is? Because an inability to read emotion and social cues is one of the basic diagnostic criteria for being on the autism spectrum. And that, by the way, includes NT people "masking" their emotions, using sarcasm, etc. A failure to understand those things IS a lack of cognitive empathy.
Signed, Level 1 ASD.
Cognitive empathy is the ability to put oneself mentally in another person's situation and try to understand how they might be feeling (as opposed to emotional empathy in which one experiences those emotions with another person and truly understanding how they feel).
Where I (also ASD Level 1) have long struggled is with emotional empathy. At age 15, I told my mom that I didn't know if I loved her. I understand now that this was a symptom of my autism, that I didn't understand a variety of emotions, apart from excitement about hyperfixation and annoyance at most of the rest of the world for moving and think so slowly relative to me.
And, yes, cognitive empathy was also lacking when I was younger. I did have difficulty imagining what other people's life experiences were like, mainly because I was...well...young and inexperienced, not necessarily because I was autistic.
What I take issue with is the blanket statement that autistic people lack cognitive empathy because it is a sweeping generalization that doesn't allow for nuance. The implication in your statement is that we're born without it and never possess it, and that simply isn't true. It isn't difficult for autistic people can learn cognitive empathy and other sorts of emotional intelligence.
Untrue, some have more empathy.
As an autistic guy who used to anthropomorphize food and refuse to eat, can confirm.
Yes yes, I'm well aware that people can define "empathy" in many different ways to make their point. But honestly, "Autistic people don't feel empathy" is pretty much a dogwhistle for "They're broken and I'm better than them". Autistic communication and non-autistic communication are different and neither are "right" or "wrong".
Also, interestingly the criteria for autism doesn't actually mention empathy: https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/topics/diagnosis/assessment-and-diagnosis/criteria-and-tools-used-in-an-autism-assessment
I'm not the one making the distinction.
There's a reason that ASD is a disability.
Ehh... The autistic and academic communities have been butting heads for a while. Academia has a rich history of marginalising and dehumanising those that they consider "lesser", and I have no reason to beleive that we've moved past that.
Autistic and non-autistic brains work in different ways. And it's hard for one type to understand the other. Usually called the "double empathy problem" ( https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/professional-practice/double-empathy ). And because neurotypical people have problems reading autistic people, they assume that the person they're reading must lack "something".
In addition, all the tools that academics use to measure the worth of a person tend to be tailered to a specific type of person. You can see it with IQ tests; once racism went from being normal to being frowned upon, scientists had to scramble to figure out why Africans suddenly started seeming to be characterised as intellectually deficient.
Being gay also used to be a disability, but now it isn't. It's not unreasonable to assume that in 10 years autism will be the same.
Personally, my experiences have been that I have too much empathy. Other people's suffering hurts me so much more than my neurotypical friends. I think this is a common autistic trait ("hyper-empathy") other people have. I have theories on how this all relates to their reactions to emotional stimulus, but this post is already too long.
... Of course, there is a group of people who think that Academia is Law and that things aren't true unless they're in a journal. If you're that kind of person, I doubt my hearsay is convincing, but I figure it might interest people travelling this thread.