Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi all,
I'm new to this community and excited reading many stories in the community.Recently I've been reading several articles about 'double empathy problems' and I've learnt about 'emotional empathy' which autistic people tend to be good at, that we can feel the same as other people (highly empathetic). But autistic people are not good at 'cognitive empathy' (the famous 'theory of mind' thing), where we're bad at cognitively prospecting people's emotions or thoughts.
I feel that this describes me exactly. I think I'm very empathetic (or sympathetic). I cry when I watch films or even trailers. I think I can tell when people get angry or uncomfortable when I'm with them (but I don't know why, but I can't do that with text only or voice only communication. I think I need face and body language to feel it). But I don't know at all how to fix it or approach it for them.
Now I'm curious about other people's experiences with this. I read several community chats here about empathy and what I thought was there're both people (who think themselves highly empathetic or not at all). Do you have any thoughts or stories?
Thank you.
Hi Zoey.
This topic puzzles me too :-) Thanks for raising it as a discussion.
I am of the opinion that my observational skills "hard wire me" to enhanced sensitivity to identify another individuals emotional condition. Physical posture, tone of voice et al. Personally I am of the opinion that I am good at cognitively processing these matters because of a lifetime of working hard at doing consciously what others appear to do more automatically. I suspect that I am very used to explicitly regulating my emotions because my implicit (more subconscious) emotional regulation has it's problems.
Regretfully masking, by conscious emotional regulation, has increased difficulty in divining my own subconscious emotional situation to myself. So, personally I believe that my version of autism has a problem with cognitive empathy in as much as I struggle to cognitively empathise with myself than with others.
This sits in a framework of "fake it 'til you make it" versus "to thine own self be true".
The origin of subconscious emotional regulation problems can be analysed perhaps in traumatic events that are linked with autism. Both ones that have come about because I am autistic in a neurotypical society and perhaps ones which may have somehow triggered or enhanced my autism in the first place
I find that where a significant mismatch with (shall we say) neurotypical people occurs is when and how I react with what I am aware of about them. Both my unconscious emotional reactions and my conscious emotional reactions being perhaps weird by "normal" measurement and social behaviour. Being, as it where, more aware of when others are faking it or being true and not having "normal" subconscious regulation of how one acts upon this information. This can cause of distress in social interaction as the relative risk is increased for overstepping "normal" social convention with highly reactive or vulnerable people. On the other hand more "open minded" people are better at dealing with it and indeed can value the insights that come from it.
> I am of the opinion that my observational skills "hard wire me" to enhanced sensitivity to identify another individuals emotional condition.Ahh, this is also very interesting point of view and make sense a lot to me too! I'm highly sensitive with vision and I can recognize really tiny slight movement of the muscles on people's face or body attiduded. I also have strong interests to other people (how they think and feel - because it's different from me) so it's more like analytical perspective I can guess.Recently I was considering how more people can be open minded. I feel hard to communicate with fixed-mindset people because they have no interests to new perspectives.